A transactional email is a type of email that’s triggered by user action on a website. Some common examples of transactional emails include order shipment confirmations, account activation emails, password resets, invoices and receipts, and welcome emails.


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How are transactional emails different from marketing emails?

Transactional emails are triggered by specific user actions and are sent individually. Marketing emails– sent in bulk or as a part of a journey– on the other hand, are one-to-many emails that are user-driven. Additionally, marketing emails require subscribers to opt-in to receive, like email newsletters and product updates. Hence, transactional emails generally enjoy much higher open rates when compared with marketing emails.

 

To understand this better, let’s consider an example. Let us set up a cart order journey email. In this case, the email follows a template similar to this:

 


Hi <first_name>, your order no. <order_no> containing <product_name> has been placed successfully and will be delivered latest by <tentative_delivery_date>

Total bill amount is Rs. <bill_amount>


 

This email is triggered and sent to the customer every time a purchase is made on the website. The template contains variables that can be filled in with relevant details sent from the website every time a transaction is completed. This can be accomplished by configuring an API call on your website that pushes transaction data.

 

Setting up the API call on your website (developer assistance required):

 

To send Transactional Emails, configure your website and add relevant API in order to enable your web application to receive data from the website and fill the personalization tokens. To know more, refer to crmdeveloper.freshworks.com.

 

Before configuring Transactional Emails on your web application, it is vital to set up triggers and define the supported variables that will initiate the email, and fill the personalization tokens in the outbound email. This can be configured on your website by using API. Your website will use a POST API call to send the payload to the web application which in turn will fill in the template and send it to the relevant contact.

 

Note: In order to trigger the API, the respective transactional email has to be in running status.

 

Request URL to trigger the API -

POST 

/mas/api/v1/mail/transactional


Attributes:

Personalization Fields

Token (Assigned in your backend) 

Sample Value of Token (Passed through API) 

First Name 

first_name

"Jack" 

Order ID 

order_id

"42735gh" 

Items Purchased 

items_purchased 

12 

Amount Paid by User 

order_value

300 

Expected Date of Delivery 

delivery_date

"2020-08-19 16:00:00+0000" 

Shipping Address 

address

"15, Kenneth Avenue, Madison, Wisconsin, USA"

 

Transactional Payload:

id

string

UUID of the created for the Transactional Email

tokens

JSON object

Transaction Merge Tag Token

recipient

string

Email Id to whom the email needs to be sent


Sample Code:

curl -X POST


"http://yourdomain.myfreshworks.com/crm/marketer/mas/api/v1/mail/transactional"

-H "auth-token: uui1tsmoao924im5n0i1f3rm7q37547flbvomggj"

-H "accept: application/json"

-H "Content-Type: application/json" -d

'{

  "id": "3970a1b0-6e27-448a-adfc-0083db15b2fb",

  "tokens": {

      "design_token1": "Hi",

      "design_token2": "Hello",

      "design_token3": "World",

      "subject_token1": "XYZ"

  },

  "recipient": "abc@123.com"

}'

 


Note: The ID on your code should be taken from the ‘configure details’ section of your Transactional Email.


  

Configuring Transactional email journeys:

1. On your account, click Campaigns on the left nav bar and select Transactional Emails. This opens the Transactional Emails page.


 

2. Click   and choose from pre-built templates or create your own from scratch.



 

3. Personalize the template for your Transactional email by adding personalization tokens wherever necessary. In this case, you can add an order number field if you’ve configured the API call on your website to push the value to your web application.

 

4. After personalizing the template, head over to the campaign settings section. 

 

5. Configure the campaign by adding the sender’s name, email address, reply-to address, and subject line for the email. You can also personalize the subject line with personalization tokens by clicking the button and choosing a relevant token.

Click after completing this step. This opens the page where you can choose the templates to create your email.


6. Review your email template, check for previews on mobile and desktop devices, and hit. This makes the campaign live. Alternatively, you can also schedule the campaign to start at a predefined time by clicking and opting for a schedule. Click the copy button to copy the ID and use it on the POST API configured into your website.



 

Note: In order to trigger the API, the respective transactional email has to be in running status.


Note: Starting 5th May 2020,

All email campaigns that has senders with the following email domains, will not be able to send or schedule the campaign: