Transactional rate, and why the split matters more than the ratio
How much of your sending is order and account mail, against marketing. You won't find it on a dashboard. The idea underneath it still protects your receipts.
- 137Transactional Rate
- The percentage of transactional emails compared to marketing emails, important for maintaining deliverability.
- Transactional mail
- Order confirmations, shipping updates and password resets, sent because a customer did something
- Reported as
- Rarely a ready-made figure. You'd usually count each stream yourself
- What matters
- Separate addresses for receipts and marketing, and no promotions inside the receipts
Why no dashboard shows a transactional rate
Look, you could work it out. Count the order and account emails, count the marketing ones, divide one by the other. Hardly anyone does, because the ratio on its own changes nothing. The idea underneath is sound though. Receipts are expected, so people open them and rarely report them. Campaigns are where the complaints come from.
So the useful question isn't what the ratio is. It's whether a bad month for your campaigns could ever drag an order confirmation into spam.
Keep receipts and campaigns on separate sending addresses
Google's email sender guidelines ask for messages of the same type to share a from address, with receipts, promotions and account alerts each on their own. We'd go a step further and give marketing its own sending subdomain, so its reputation stays apart from the mail that has to arrive.
- List every system that sends as your domain: Shopify's notifications, Klaviyo, the helpdesk, the review app
- Check which address and domain each one actually sends from
- Authenticate every one of them, so none fails on a busy day
- Keep the order address for orders, and never borrow it for a promotion
By default Shopify sends the order confirmation and shipping updates itself, not Klaviyo. That's fine, as long as somebody knows it and it's authenticated on your domain.
No promotions in the receipt, however tempting
An order confirmation gets read, so everyone wants to put a discount code in it. Don't. Google's guidelines say not to mix promotions into sales receipts, and the ICO's direct marketing guidance says a service message with marketing in it counts as direct marketing, consent rules and all.
Klaviyo is strict about it too. Its help centre explains that it only treats an email as transactional once it has reviewed and approved it, only in flows triggered by a metric, and that editing the email removes the status. The cross-sell belongs in a post-purchase flow, sent to people you're allowed to market to.
Related terms
FAQs
Are order confirmations marketing emails?
No, as long as they stay confirmations. A message that only gives information somebody needs about their order is a service message. Add a discount code or a product push and the ICO treats it as direct marketing, so it needs the same consent as a campaign. None of this is legal advice.
How do I find every system sending email as my domain?
Publish a DMARC record with reporting switched on, then read what comes back. The reports show the sources sending mail as your domain, including the helpdesk and the review app somebody connected years ago. Authenticate the ones you want and switch off the ones you don't.
Will more transactional email improve my marketing deliverability?
Not in any way worth planning around. Mailbox providers judge how people treat your mail, and more receipts don't make your campaigns more wanted. Keep the two streams apart so marketing can't hurt the receipts, and fix campaign reputation with better audiences and steadier sending.
Rather we explained it on your own account?
Bring your Klaviyo account to a growth consultation. We'll walk through what this means for your numbers, in plain English, and what we'd fix first.
Half an hour with Theo, our founder.
We're all about relationships built on trust, mutual respect and a shared vision for success. If that sounds like your vibe, let's make some waves together 🌊
