Mailerlite vs Mailersend: How To Use Marketing vs Transactional Emails

Transcript (by Descript):

In today's video, I'm going to be going over why I use two different email marketing tools, and I'm going to be specifically diving into the differences between transactional emails and marketing emails. So without further ado, Let's get into it.

Hey friends, welcome back to the channel. If youare new here, my name's Connor on this channel, I help people who cannot code build online businesses with no code tools like Webflow, Airtable and Zapier. Now, if you've been on this channel before, you'll know that I use a lot more tools than just Webflow, Airtable and Zapier. I, for example, use two different email marketing tools to power my online businesses.

One of them being Mailerlite and the other one being Mailersend. No at first glance, it can seem a little bit overkill to have two different email marketing tools, but I do have two different ones for a very specific reason. Mailerlite is the emailtool that I use for all my marketing emails and Mailersend is the tool that I use for all of my transactional emails.

So in today's video, I'm going to start off by going over the main difference between transactional emails and marketing emails. And then I'm going to take you behind the scenes of my Mailerlite and Mailersend account to show you how specifically I use those two different email marketing tool, the power of my online business.

But before we get into it, if you haven't already, please do me a quick little favour, subscribe to the channel, if you want to learn more about no code and how to build online businesses, even if you cannot code. I would also very much appreciate a quick, like on this video, if you find this type of content interesting, but without further ado, let's get into it.

Transactional Emails vs Marketing Emails - What's the difference?

So first things first, what is the difference between a marketing email and a transactional email. Now in its simplest form, transactional emails are designed for one-off emails to one specific person and marketing emails are usually sent in bulk to a group of people.

So whenever you subscribe to say a newsletter and you get an email from that particular newsletter, that is usually an email that goes out to a group of people and the content inside of that email is oftentimes not unique to you. On the other hand, if you buy something on say an e-commerce store and you get in confirmation email, that email is only sent to only you and all of the information inside of that email is also unique to the transaction that you made.

Another big difference between marketing emails and transactional emails is what determines when the emails sent. With marketing emails, for example, the person who's in charge of the newsletter will oftentimes the determine a time and a date when a particular email campaign is sent.

Whereas with transactional emails, you oftentimes see certain actions or behavior triggering the actual sending of the email. An example of a transactional email that is triggered by a certain event is when you get a confirmation email after you have made a purchase in an online store. So, if you've ever bought something often online store you'll know that you'll pretty much get the confirmation email as soon as the purchase has gone through, or at least very shortly after. That is an example of an event based email trigger, where the email gets sent as soon as you make the purchase.

Now there's definitely a bit of overlap, specifically marketing email tools nowadays also have event based email triggers. For example, if someone signs up to your newsletter, you can use that particular event to trigger a welcome email being sent. Right. But overall, you'll see commonly that transactional emails are usually when a certain event happens, whereas marketing emails are usually sent at a certain time and date.

Okay, so now that we have cleared up the differences between transactional emails and marketing emails, I'm going to take you behind the scenes of my email marketing tools and show you the kind of setup that I have for the Unicorn Factory, which is my freelance marketplace in New Zealand.

So, let's start off in my email marketing tool is mailer Lite. So we never want to send out an email. If everyone in my freelancer community, I just go ahead and populate it all with the same information. And then at a given time, this email gets sent out to everyone. Oftentimes I add things like little video updates that I have in there.

Maybe a report that I put in there or anything interesting that are relevant to everyone in the community. I also use the mailer. For email sequences. So for example, when someone signs up or when someone's trial expires, um, what happens is a series of emails is sent out over a course of a few days that then basically prompt them to take a certain type of action.

Now, again, here, it's important to stress that every single one of the freelancers receives the same type of email, meaning that I don't need to change it up every single time. I seen that to some different. Mailer cinder on the other hand is the email marketing tool that I use to send one-off emails to very specific freelancers.

So in my Mailersend templates, I have a whole bunch of emails that dynamically populate with data that I populate through Zapier. And I'll show you that in a second, but it is very specific to an event happening inside of the UNICOM factory. An example of that is when. Client reaches out to a freelancer through their page.

What I do is identically populate all of the information that was submitted inside of the whip flow form to this email, and then send it to the freelancer. So when businesses decide to get into using emails for their business, they typically start off with email marketing tools like MailChimp MailerLite.

Or convert kit, but as soon as you start wanting to send out transactional emails, you're going to run into issues because oftentimes those email marketing platforms don't solve for that particular use case, meaning that you'll have to pick something else in order to seem transactional. So before I discovered mailer Sienna, what I used to do is actually just send transactional emails through the g-mail by Zapier app, where I would draft up an email inside of Zapier and then populate that information with dynamic data.

Now, if you're just getting started, that will absolutely do the trick. The problem. However, with the GMO by Zapier app is that I found that I oftentimes. Too often and other people's spam or promotion folders, meaning that your have significantly lower open rates. And that just leads to people not taking the actions that you need them to take when you send them those emails.

So, as I have mentioned multiple times so far in this video, the marketing tool that I use is mailer light. And the transactional email to the users may seen, they are happy, but whole bunch of other ones out there that you can go and use. For example, MailChimp convert. Seeing them blow and so on, but I wanted to tell you what the key criteria for me is to choose those particular platforms.

So the first thing that I was looking for is to make sure that it was easy for me to design nice emails that would just look professional when I sent them to my customers. And the other key criteria that I had was that the email tool that I used also had to have a very good Zapier integration.

Because I oftentimes use air table to store all of my information. And in order for me to send that information from ear table to the email, to the us using, I just needed a good Zapier integration. So in terms of the email marketing tools, pretty much all of the details. Tick those boxes. And the reason I ended up going with mailer light was because it had a very generous, free plan.

And also the, a pricing tiers are also quite affordable when it came to mailer, seeing that there are just not that many good transactional email tools out there that are friendly towards people who cannot code. And so when mailers sent, who are also the creators of my light, Platform and the Zapier integration.

It was a no brainer for me to jump on. So to wrap things up, I want to quickly take you behind the scenes of my Zapier counters, show you how I dynamically populate data inside of mailer Sims. So if you end up wanting to use that particular tool, you'll know exactly what to do. So as you can see, when you jumped into the mailers scene designer, you can actually just drag and drop in together, different types of content into your email.

But if you want to add dynamic variables, you can actually just go and write it like this way. Open curly bracket, dollar sign, and then the name of the variable. Now, as soon as you jump into Zapier and you select your account, you can actually jump in here and then map variables that you might have in a previous step.

So in my case, in IR table to those particular variables inside of my loss scene, so what I'm doing right here is I am populating the information that a client submitted when they filled out the freelancer. Contact form. And basically what happens now, when, if this information is sent for Zapier, it will automatically send this stuff.

Right into here, populate this information. And then when I go to my mailbox, you can see that I have received the info and all of the information about their particular client is submitted right in here. And that is how you can use that peer to seen transactional emails from my loss. So I just want to wrap things up by saying that using professional looking emails really does make a big difference when it comes to delivering a good client experience.

That was something that people actually pointed out about an improvement that I made on the uniform factory. So if you have a few spare bucks to spare every single month thing, you just want to take things to the next level. Then looking into adopting an email marketing tool. Like this is a really good one.

Other than that, that was it for this video. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, please leave a quick, like also leave a comment for the algorithm. Other than that. Thank you so much for sticking around until the end. And I'll see you back here next time.

🔗 AFFILIATE LINKS & SOCIALS:

https://www.connorfinlayson.com/a/mailersend

https://www.connorfinlayson.com/a/mailerlite

https://twitter.com/FinlaysonConnor

🕛 TIMESTAMPS:

00:00 Intro

01:30 Transactional Emails vs Marketing Emails - What's the difference?

03:36 How I use Mailerlite for marketing emails

04:31 How I use Mailersend to send transactional emails

06:03 Why I chose Mailerlite and Mailersend

07:35 Mini Tutorial: How to setup transactional emails via Zapier