A New Way to Manage Transactional Emails

What is a transactional email?

A transactional email is an automated message sent to a user in direct response to an action they've taken. Common examples include account sign-up confirmations, password reset emails, and purchase receipts. These emails are essential for user experience and trust.

How are transactional emails different from marketing emails?

Marketing emails are typically sent to users who haven't taken a specific action—they're designed to promote products or services and often target a broad audience. In contrast, transactional emails are triggered by user activity and provide information relevant to that specific action. Unlike marketing emails, transactional emails usually don't require an unsubscribe link.

Who are the major players in the transactional email space?

There are many transactional email service providers. Some of the most popular include:

• SendGrid – The industry standard
• AWS SES – The big cloud provider
• Resend – The new kid on the block
• Loops – Visual workflow editor
• Mailgun – Reliable and developer-friendly

How are transactional emails typically sent?

Most providers use similar methods for sending transactional emails, which generally fall into two main categories:

1. Real-time emails (triggered by user actions)

• A user takes an action.
• Your backend receives an API request reflecting that action.
• The backend processes the logic, then calls the transactional email provider's API.
• The provider sends the email and returns a response.
• Your backend confirms success to the user.

2. Scheduled or batch emails

• A script fetches a list of users from your database.
• The script filters users based on specific criteria.
• For each user, the script calls the transactional email provider's API.
• The provider sends the emails and returns responses.
• The script logs the results and exits.
• You schedule this script to run at set times (e.g., via a cron job).

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At first glance, these approaches seem straightforward. But as your product grows, even a simple notification system can quickly become a source of complexity. Common questions and challenges include:

• "Are my emails actually being sent?"
• "How do I safely test emails without reaching real users?"
• "Can we easily update or tweak the email template?"
• "Why was a particular email sent to this user?"
• "Can we retry sending if delivery fails?"
• "How do we prevent duplicate emails from being sent?"

And the list keeps growing.

A better way with Notika

Let's be honest: notifications are often the last thing engineers want to work on. Developers want to build product, not spend time formatting emails and tweaking content.

Notika offers a new approach to sending transactional emails, with several key advantages:

1. Database-driven: Notika is database-driven. Your database remains the single source of truth. There's no need to write glue code or one-off scripts to send emails.
2. Visual workflow editor: Notika provides a visual workflow editor that empowers anyone—technical or not—to manage notification flows intuitively.
3. Zero API calls: You can remove all notification code from your application. This separation of concerns means your app focuses on product, not email delivery.

No more cron jobs, no more webhooks, no more API calls! Let Notika handle the plumbing and scaling so you can focus on building what matters.

Empower your entire team to manage notifications. Whether you're sending to internal or external users, Notika has you covered.