How to Email Your Users at Critical Moments

Brad Van Vugt and Matt Harris talk about transactional emails – how to send your users emails they'll act on at critical moments in your application's lifecycle.

Here's what to listen for:

• 00:49 What is a transactional email and how is this different from a regular email?

• 01:26 Can you give me some examples of transactions?

• 01:56 How does a transactional email work?

• 02:49 Do you have some examples of what times transactional emails get sent?

• 03:53 Are transactional emails more personal than marketing emails?

• 04:43 In a lot of web apps emails are tucked away in code; what’s wrong with this?

• 05:47 What’s the difference between emails being owned by developers and the rest of the code?

• 08:35 What’s the difference between plain text and HTML emails?

• 09:55 How can you tell what emails perform better or worse?

• 11:00 How are you able to declare the winner of an A/B test?

• 15:25 If you were to open an email and you don’t have images turned on but they do click a link, do you go back and retroactively tag that email?

• 16:27 What separates great transactional emails?

• 19:18 What should you be using as the from address for your emails?

• 20:32 What’s the experience if I have a noreply transactional email in my inbox and I reply?

• 23:32 How do we maintain the ability to have emails get personal data from the application into email?

• 28:41 What is the nontechnical person able to customize?

• 29:51 Is your templating language pretty accessible to someone who’s nontechnical?