Modern applications require a large number of emails to be sent automatically. As users, we notice this every day: password change notifications, suspicious login attempts, purchase confirmations, and shipping updates are all sent via emails just moments after any action. From the company’s perspective, managing this volume of transactional emails is not easy, especially when there can be multiple applications and providers handling the process. Let’s examine what issues can arise and how to overcome these challenges
Transactional Emails: How It Works and the 3 Major Challenges
Transactional emails are a particular type of email sent by an application in response to a specific interaction or action taken by the user. As mentioned, an order confirmation or the activation of a service is a typical transactional email, which differs from marketing emails as they do not promote anything. To send transactional emails, companies rely on service providers specializing in mass email delivery, such as Mandrill (Mailchimp), Amazon AWS, and Brevo (formerly SendinBlue), just to name a few well-known ones.
Although the process seems simple and straightforward, experience shows us that there are several common cases where the sending of transactional emails becomes a significant challenge for a company.
Many Applications and One Service for Transactional Emails
The first case occurs when a company has multiple applications (sometimes dozens), each requiring its own separate integration for the transactional email service. Such requirements introduce inherent inefficiencies. Every time there is a change with the service, the integration logic will need an update for every application.
This repeated integration process increases development and maintenance costs, complicating the application landscape, and leaving less resources for application development. This exposes the company to potential negative impacts on the quality of services offered to users.
Multiple Providers for Transactional Emails
Another level of complexity arises when different providers are used for each application. Often motivated by cost, performance, and features, this choice also introduces substantial integration challenges. The variety of APIs, protocols, and authentication mechanisms used by the various providers makes managing communications an elaborate task, requiring custom solutions for every provider.
Switching Providers in a Short Time
The third case occurs when a company decides to switch providers. It may be due to a variety of reasons, including regulatory compliance. But again, the level of complexity can grow exponentially, depending on the number of applications and providers involved. Significant effort must be committed to make the changes, and the speed and quality of services may suffer, especially in the early stages.
The Intesys Solution: How PBC EMAIL Works and Its Integration with Entando
Entando is proud to have collaborated with Intesys, a partner who developed the innovative solution PBC EMAIL to address these challenges. PBC EMAIL is a packaged business capability (PBC) module that serves as a single integration point between all company applications and supported email providers. It works with the Entando Application Composition Platform and can be dropped into an application with a few clicks of a button.
PBC EMAIL perfectly embodies the philosophy of the Composable Enterprise, a vision shared by Entando. The modular flexibility of the Entando Platform simplifies the integration of transactional email providers and centralizes communication by turning it into a pluggable component. Thanks to PBC EMAIL, companies can avoid the complexity of separate integrations for individual providers and multiple applications, and benefit from a drag and drop component with a standardized interface and a uniform set of APIs.
Why Adopt Intesys’ PBC EMAIL and Integrate It with Entando: 4 Reasons
The adoption of PBC EMAIL offers several strategic and operational benefits:
- Simplification and Flexibility: PBC EMAIL simplifies the management of transactional emails, allowing for a quick switch between providers, while supporting any number of them at the same time. This reduces the impact of changes from providers’ APIs, which are managed directly by Intesys with updates applied automatically.
- Increased Security: Routing all email communications through a single point reduces vulnerabilities and simplifies the control of credentials and provider configurations.
- Customizable Templates: PBC EMAIL allows companies to use templates from different providers, making standardization easier, delivering a uniform user experience, and ensuring consistency in the company’s visual identity and branding.
- Reduction in Effort and Costs:The IT resources required to implement and maintain transactional email flows is significantly reduced in terms of time and energy. This leads to operational cost savings and faster implementation of innovation and new marketing strategies.
Thanks to the collaboration between Entando and Intesys, organizations can significantly improve the management of their transactional email communications, gaining flexibility and control without sacrificing security or operational efficiency.