Transactional emails

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Transactional emails are used to deliver messages that are sent in direct response to a specific customer action. Unlike marketing emails, their purpose is not to promote products or services, but to provide important information related to the customer’s activity on an online store.

What Are Transactional Emails Used For?

Transactional emails are most commonly used in situations where a customer’s action triggers the need to send an email. Typical examples include:

• registration confirmation,
• order confirmation,
• loyalty program enrollment confirmation,
• password reset,
• email address change confirmation,
• payment confirmation,
• sending an electronic receipt or invoice.

What all of these emails have in common is that they contain information necessary to complete or confirm a specific customer action.

The Difference Between Transactional and Marketing Emails

Marketing Email

• A marketing email is designed to promote products, services, or a brand. Its goal is to encourage customers to make another purchase or take another business-related action.

• It can only be sent to recipients who have opted in to receive marketing communications.

Transactional Email

• A transactional email is sent as a direct response to a customer’s action. Its sole purpose is to inform the customer about the outcome or progress of that action. It should only contain information that is directly related to the specific event.

• It can be sent to all customers, including those who have unsubscribed from marketing communications.

Because of these differences, we strongly recommend using dedicated sending IP addresses. This helps protect the reputation of your marketing email campaigns while ensuring the highest possible deliverability for both transactional and marketing emails.

What a Transactional Email Should Not Contain

To maintain its transactional nature, a transactional email should not include marketing content, such as:

• product recommendations,

• upsell or cross-sell offers,

• discounts or limited-time promotions,

• promotional banners,

• any other promotional content unrelated to the customer’s original action.

We also recommend avoiding the excessive use of images. A transactional email should be clear, concise, and primarily focused on delivering the information the customer needs.

What a Transactional Email Does Not Need to Include

Because a transactional email is not a marketing communication, it does not need to include an unsubscribe link.

How to Send a Transactional Email

Transactional emails are sent using the API Trigger, which allows an email to be triggered directly from an external application or information system.

For detailed implementation instructions, see the API Trigger documentation. Below are the most important points related to configuring transactional emails:

• When configuring an API Trigger campaign, you can mark the campaign as a Transactional Email using the corresponding checkbox.

  • When the unsubscribe link is disabled, the email will also omit the One-Click Unsubscribe header. You can learn more about this mechanism in our documentation.

• Individual campaigns can use dedicated sending domains, for which you can also set up dedicated sending IP addresses. This helps protect the reputation of your marketing email campaigns while ensuring the highest possible deliverability for both transactional and marketing emails.

• The API Trigger request can also include attachments, such as a PDF invoice.

Statistics

Transactional email sending results are available in two sections of the application.

Dashboard

The Dashboard provides summary sending statistics for API Trigger campaigns, such as:

• number of sent emails,

• number of opens,

• number of clicks.

Deliverability Insights

If you have our Business Insights add-on enabled, the Deliverability Insights section contains a detailed log of individual sends from the last 30 days, including information about the delivery process and any potential errors.

Operational Emails

In addition to transactional emails, there are also operational emails.

These are also non-marketing messages, but their purpose is to inform customers about important changes or updates that are not directly related to a specific action they have taken.

Typical examples include:

• changes to the Terms and Conditions,

• updates to the Privacy Policy,

• notifications about scheduled service maintenance,

• changes to the company’s contact information.

Unlike transactional emails, these messages are not triggered by a specific customer action and are typically sent as one-time campaigns to a larger group of recipients.

As with transactional emails, operational emails can be sent to all relevant customers, regardless of whether they are subscribed to marketing communications.

Recommended Sending Method

We do not recommend using the API Trigger for operational emails, as it is primarily intended for individual transactional emails sent in response to specific events. Sending a large number of API Trigger requests at once may exceed rate limits and prevent your campaign from being sent.

Instead, we recommend creating a one-time email campaign and using a separate sending domain with dedicated sending IP addresses.

Current Limitations

• For one-time campaigns, it is not currently possible to select a different sending domain directly in the campaign settings. If you want to send an operational email from a different domain, you will need to temporarily change your default sending domain for the duration of the campaign.

• One-time campaigns always include the One-Click Unsubscribe header, and it cannot be disabled.

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