Transactional email enhances communication by automatically sending personalised, non-promotional content to individual contacts using Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) or the API.

Transactional email is triggered in response to specific actions taken by a contact, ensuring timely and relevant communication. Examples include welcome messages, password reminders or resets, order confirmations, and shipping notifications.

Things you need to know:

You need to create a separate transactional email user to send using SMTP.

You can create a transactional email as a triggered campaign in EasyEditor. This allows you to design and brand your transactional email.

To send a transactional email using SMTP, you need to connect to the correct server where your account is based:

If you support secure sending by using the STARTTLS command, you can connect to ports 25, 587, or 2525. Otherwise, you can connect to port 465.

To send a transactional email by using the API, you need to use:

Once you create a transactional email, you can give your campaign ID to your developers to either send the transactional email by SMTP or the API.

You can also create your transactional email content elsewhere and pass the HTML to your developers.

Select DATE RANGE to change the transaction email data time frame.

Select from:

or you can enter a custom date range.

Four tiles are on the dashboard, so you can see the total amount of transactional emails sent in the time frame that is selected, the amount delivered, the total amount of opens, and the total amount of clicks for links within the transactional emails. This is shown as a number and a percentage for each tile.

The graph gives you a visual representation of similar information per day over the selected time period, with the different coloured lines showing you the amount of emails delivered, opens, clicks and transactional email bounces.

Below the graph data, you can see details in a table about each transactional email that was sent. This shows you the date and time the transactional email was sent, the email address of the contact it was sent to, the email subject line, the total email opens and clicks, and if it was successfully delivered or not.

If your transactional emails were sent using a triggered campaign template, the table shows the associated triggered campaign ID and name used at the time of the. These columns are available in the export and can be used for reporting purposes to know how many emails were sent using a particular campaign name or ID.

Select the Download icon to download the transactional email campaign to your device, so you can open it and see what was sent.

Transactional email campaign downloads are kept for 90 days. After this time, you can’t download the campaign.

You can delete details from the table by selecting the checkbox next to the record and select DELETE. This removes the email address you sent to, but any opens and clicks data is kept.

You can filter by success status. To do this, select the SHOW SUCCESSES ONLY drop-down menu to see which sends were successful or select Show failures to see which ones failed.

Enter a contact name into the Search box to find them in the report.

In the EXPORT drop-down menu, select Export all to download the report as an Excel file.

Select DISPLAY to change the amount of transactional emails that are shown on one page, and you can also add or hide visible columns in the report.

To get to your transactional email settings, expand the User menu and go to Settings > Transactional email. In this area, you can edit your credentials, from addresses, tracking, and complaints.
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In this area, you can see the date a from address was created, the email address, and status; you can set it as default or edit the address by selecting the Pencil icon in the Edit column.

To handle replies for transactional email, you must set a Custom reply-to address for the custom from address you use to send your transactional email messages.

If you don’t set a Custom reply-to address, then replies to your transactional emails are instead sent to the Unknown mail forward for the from address. If replies are handled using the unknown mail forward, then the messages appear in your inbox from a Dotdigital system address rather than from the recipient’s email address, so we advise you set a custom reply-to address so that you can more easily manage two-way communication with your contacts.

Even if you are using a triggered campaign template to send your transactional email, any email addresses added to the Reply-to or Forwarding address field during campaign set up do not apply for transactional sends.

You can use any of your from addresses to send from. If you send from a from address that isn't on this list, then the one set as the default is used. This applies to transactional emails sent using SMTP and the API.

You can also purchase a new address in this area.

If a contact reports your campaign as spam, they are added to this area. This helps you to know who reported your transactional email campaign as spam, and then be proactive about it to protect your sender reputation and deliverability.

This area gives you the email address of the contact that filed the complaint, and the date and time of the send. You can search the report for a contact's name by entering it in the Search box.

Select DISPLAY to change the number of transactional emails that are shown on one page, and to add or hide visible columns in the report.

Here, you can create, delete, and see information about users, such as the description, status, date created, date modified. You also have the option to edit each user by selecting the Pencil icon in the Edit column.

To create a new user:

To delete a user, select the checkbox that’s in the same row as the email you want to delete, then select DELETE, then in the confirmation window, select DELETE again.

By default for your transactional emails, opens, clicks, and bounces are tracked. If you want to turn any of these off, you can do so.

To do this: