The Transactional option is available on both the opt-in and opt-out configurations within the New Email tab.
What are transactional emails?
Transactional emails are emails that you would send out in the course of doing business. For example, an invoice, a receipt, or an updated agreement.
As these are non-marketing emails, it does not matter if a contact or lead is subscribed to or unsubscribed from your emails as transactional emails override any preferences and your recipients would be expecting this type of communication from you.
Send transactional emails with caution. Make sure you are abiding by any laws you are subject to abide by. Transactional emails are only meant for non-marketing, necessary emails.
How do they work?
Transactional emails sent via Click Marketing Automation will not check against any unsubscribe records, subscription preferences, or the Do Not Allow Bulk Emails and Do Not Allow Emails fields. The only things that will be checked are the attached Suppression Lists and the blocked list which contains email addresses that have had too many bounces or have marked your emails as spam. Any recipient on a suppression list or blocked will be excluded from the email.
Enhanced Transactional Emails
Marketing Automation supports the ability to trigger individual transactional email sends from an external system or process outside of the Click UI with more consistent delivery times. These emails are intended for scenarios such as consumer transaction updates and service notifications and should not be used for marketing purposes.
This feature is intended for advanced users who have experience designing workflows or inserting records into Dynamics tables. For assistance in inserting records into the appropriate table, you may need to reach out to a Dynamics/CRM partner.
This feature monitors the Transactional Email entity (cdi_transactionalemail) to send a single transactional email to an individual recipient (Contact/Lead/Account). If multiple recipients are included, then we will send to the first recipient determined by this order: Contact, then Account. Records can be inserted into the cdi_transactionalemail table using workflows or manual addition, but any method that properly inserts a record into the table should trigger a transactional email.
When a properly created record is inserted into the cdi_transactionalemail table, an email with the specified information will be sent to the target recipient. The transactional emails will ignore unsubscribes, subscription preferences, the Do Not Allow Bulk Emails field and the Do Not Allow Emails field in Marketing Automation. However, the processing does still honor the blocked list which contains email addresses that have had too many bounces or that have marked the sender’s emails as spam.
Once the transactional email record has been created via Workflow, Click's plugin will automatically create an Email Send record of type ‘Transactional’ and ‘Transactional’ field set to ‘Yes’ including all the fields information from the Transactional email record. If the workflow was set to ‘Track Email Events’ then you will be able to see the Email Events (opens, clicks…) associated to that Transactional Email, as well as ‘Sent Emails’ records.
If an error occurs during the creation of the transactional email process, then the email address set in the Email Notification field will receive an email with the following error information to help resolve the issue:
- Transactional email ID
- Email subject line
- Recipient ID (for the CRM record that was sent to)
- Detailed error message(s)
What are non-transactional emails?
Non-transactional emails are marketing types of emails that contain a commercial message. For example, event updates or promotional updates.