PRD Template for Email

Example: "Our transactional email delivery rate has dropped to 89% (industry standard: 95%+) because our marketing emails share the same sending domain and IP. We are seeing 340+ undelivered password reset emails per month, generating 120 support tickets from users who cannot log in. Our marketing email open rate is 11% (industry average: 21%), suggesting many marketing emails land in spam. We have no email template system — engineers hardcode HTML in the application code for each email type."

Example: "Primary: Achieve 99%+ delivery rate for transactional emails by separating transactional and marketing sending infrastructure. Deliverability: Maintain inbox placement rate above 95% (measured via seed list testing). Engagement: Increase marketing email open rate from 11% to 20%+. Operational: Non-engineers can create, edit, and send email templates without code changes. Compliance: 100% compliance with CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CASL requirements."

Example: "As a product user, I want to receive a clear, actionable email when someone invites me to a project so that I can join with a single click. Acceptance criteria: email arrives within 60 seconds of the invite; subject line clearly states who invited me to what; a prominent CTA button links directly to the project; the email displays correctly on mobile devices; the email includes a text-only fallback."

Example: "FR-1: Transactional and marketing emails must use separate sending domains and IP addresses. FR-2: All email templates must be managed via a template system with variables, conditionals, and layout blocks. FR-3: Every marketing email must include a one-click unsubscribe link and physical mailing address per CAN-SPAM. FR-4: Users must be able to manage email preferences on a per-category basis (product updates, marketing, digest). FR-5: The system must track delivery, open, click, bounce, and unsubscribe for every email sent."

Example: "NFR-1: Transactional emails must be sent within 30 seconds of the triggering event. NFR-2: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records must be configured correctly for all sending domains. NFR-3: Bounce handling must process hard bounces immediately (remove from list) and soft bounces after 3 attempts. NFR-4: The system must support sending 10,000 emails per hour for campaign blasts. NFR-5: All emails must render correctly across the top 10 email clients (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, etc.) on both desktop and mobile."

Example: "Metric 1: Transactional email delivery rate. Baseline: 89%. Target: 99%+. Metric 2: Marketing email open rate. Baseline: 11%. Target: 20%+. Metric 3: Spam complaint rate. Baseline: 0.3%. Target: under 0.08% (Gmail threshold). Metric 4: Email-related support tickets (undelivered emails). Baseline: 120/month. Target: under 10/month. Metric 5: Template update cycle time. Baseline: 2 days (requires engineering). Target: under 1 hour (self-service)."

Example: "Transactional emails will use Postmark (optimized for transactional deliverability) via a dedicated subdomain (mail.product.com). Marketing emails will use SendGrid via a separate subdomain (marketing.product.com). Templates use MJML for responsive email rendering, compiled to HTML at build time. Sending is asynchronous via a job queue — the application enqueues email jobs, a worker sends them and records delivery events. Webhook-based delivery tracking updates email status in real time."

Example: "Risk: Marketing emails degrade the sender reputation, causing transactional emails (password resets) to land in spam. Likelihood: High. Impact: Critical. Mitigation: Completely separate sending infrastructure (different domains, different IPs) for transactional and marketing email. Risk: A code bug sends the same email multiple times to the same user. Likelihood: Medium. Impact: Medium. Mitigation: Idempotent email sending — each email job has a unique ID, and duplicate IDs are rejected."