Transactional Email Automation

Case Study by Aman Mehta

Challenge

To create an automated transactional email flow for to send trigger-based booking confirmation, pre-trip, and post-trip emails to customers and vendors.

Example scenario: a customer books a tour

> A booking confirmation email sent to the customer and to the respective vendor 

> A day before the trip: reminder email sent to the customer and vendor 

> An hour after the trip: a generic post-trip email sent to the customer 

> A post-trip email sent to the vendor with a Typeform asking tour photos, custom trip route, and a personalized message 

> The form submission initiates a trigger to send a customized email to the customer with the information provided by the vendor

Solution

Step 1: Designing and writing email templates

Step 2

  • Setting up an account on Mailgun, adding the HTML templates, and putting placeholders
  • Creating a TypeForm for the vendors to fill post-run information

Step 3

Integrating Integromat with MailGun (client’s email service provider), WooCommerce Bookings, and TypeForm. Setting up flows and triggers on integromat.

Created 4 scenarios on Integromat:

  • Booking confirmation: The app integration checked for new bookings through WooCommerce Bookings plugin and sent emails through MailGun for every new booking
  • Pre-tour reminder (customer and vendor)
  • Post-tour generic email (customer and vendor)
  • Post-tour custom email (customer): TypeForm integration checked for the new forms submitted, and sent a custom email through MailGun to the customer with entered TypeForm values using Booking ID as a reference

Step 4: Testing and implementation on the staging site, and eventually on the main site. Some issues that were detected and fixed during the testing phase:

  • Added a condition to not send reminder and post-tour emails for cancelled tours
  • In case of modified bookings, added a condition to stop the scheduled reminder and post-tour emails on the old dates and scheduled them on new dates

Conclusion

  • Better Design: Earlier, transactional emails were sent through the Woocommerce Bookings plugin itself, which allowed fewer design optimizations. By designing our own HTML templates, we could add new design elements and crafted the emails based on the brand theme

  • Better Content and Call to Actions: Added buttons like “Share Your Photos”, “Leave Review”, and discount codes on reminder and post-run emails that encouraged more email engagement, virality, and website reviews.

  • Saved Time: Before this email automation, each vendor had to send individual emails to each customer with the tour photos, tour route, and a personalized message. Now they can just fill a form and an email will be automatically sent to the respective customer.

  • Better Vendor-Customer Interaction: If a vendor doesn’t fill a form within 24 hours from the completion of the tour, a follow-up email is sent reminding them to fill the form. This led to the increase in vendor-customer interaction.