Emails are typically divided into two main types, in part, due to compliancy reasons. The promotional messages sent to opted-in customers, containing a marketing or commercial message to retain or acquire subscribers, are considered marketing emails. They’re primarily sent to both customers and prospects.

Transactional emails, however, are one-to-one emails containing information that completes a transaction or process the recipient started with your brand. This might include an order confirmation email, or a password reset message. These messages are typically targeted to an individual based on their action rather than sent to a larger list in a pre-scheduled deployment.

With OptiMail, it is easy to automatically send personalized transaction confirmation emails to customers. These transactional emails are typically generated in response to events such as a purchase made, shipment sent or game level reached.

This document outlines the steps required to set up automatic transactional emails.

Setting Up Transactional Emails in OptiMail

Prior to integration and warm-up, it’s important to first identify your need for a transactional IP and account based on the messages you intend to send. Are you sending messages triggered based on a customer action? Is the action that’s triggering the send specific to a transaction or a customer-based process? Are you able to message both opted-in and opted-out users? If you can answer “yes” to these questions, consider the following steps for attributing and integrating your transactional account.

Step 1: Complete the account form

Make sure when completing your account request form in your Customer Portal, that you’ve properly filled out a separate form specific to creating a transactional account.

Once complete and submitted, Optimove’s Product Integration Team will provide you with the DNS records for your account/IP.

Step 2: Implement your transactional IP’s DNS records

As you did for your marketing account, you will need to implement the records provided to you for your transactional IP in your domain management platform by adding them to your DNS host before you can start triggering transactional messages from your account. This step is required for sender authentication. Once complete, simply confirm with either your CSM or Project Manager so we can validate the records and complete this step.

Step 3: Create an API Key and Connect to the Optimove API

To have your transactional campaigns in Optimove triggered by transactions and events initiated by your customers, your system must help trigger these events directly to Optimove. To do this, you will need to create a new API Key and connect to the Optimove Transactional Email API.

For detailed information on the API and its user guide, click here. Additionally, for Optimove’s transactional mail functions and details on both request and response structures, click here.

Step 4: Create or migrate your transactional templates

As you had done for your marketing templates, you will have the option of using Optimove’s drag & drop Visual Editor or HTML Editor for building transactional templates into your transactional account.

However, your transactional templates are maintained and stored separately from your marketing messages in the OptiMail system. To create transactional templates, make sure you first select “Transactional” from the drop-down menu under account “Type” to correctly store your template.

Additionally, when personalizing content within your transactional templates, confirm that your personalization tags are using the correct transactional tags or “EVENT’ tags from your account.

In Optimove transactional accounts, personalization tags should preface with “TRANS:” to pull in data correctly or you will run into issues with your template not being validated.

Step 5: Confirm daily anticipated send volumes

Should your daily transactional sending volumes exceed 5,000 at the kick-off of onboarding/migration, accommodations and planning may be required to throttle the migration of your transactional campaigns to allow for a safe and strategic approach to developing your IP’s reputation.

For additional questions or support, please contact your CSM or Project Manager.

|| Important notes:

Refer to the Optimove Developer Hub for detailed documentation of the Optimove API.
Your CSM will provide you with credentials for accessing the Optimove API if you do not already have them.
The TemplateID for each template can be found at the bottom of its Manage Templates page in the Optimove UI:
Each SendMail call can contain one or more recipients (email addresses) and associated personalization tags.
For each recipient, you can provide a set of personalization values using Tag/Value pairs. The Tag string must be identical to the personalization tag name string defined in the system by your CSM and must begin with the prefix ‘TRANS:’ (example: [%TRANS:CART_URL%]).
You can provide the scheduled time (in UTC) for each SendMail call using the optional ScheduleTime parameter. If a scheduled time is not provided, the email will be sent out immediately.

Retrieving Metrics for Past Transactional Emails

You can use the Optimove API in order to retrieve post-execution metrics per template or recipient, using the GetTemplateMetrics and GetUserMetrics API calls, respectively. Refer to the Optimove Developer Hub for details.

Tracking Performance for Transactional Emails

You can use Optimove's Campaign Deliverability BI report in order to monitor the performance of your transactional emails as well as gain valuable insights into the key factors that impact your sender reputation. For more on this report visit this article.