Use transactional email

Automatically send triggered, transactional, non-marketing content to individual contacts, providing personalized and timely updates.

Gareth Burroughes avatar
Written by Gareth Burroughes
Updated over a week ago

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.


Before you start

Things you need to know:

  • You must not use transactional email for marketing purposes.

⚠️ Don't use transactional emails for marketing purposes

Using a transactional email to send marketing content is a compliance violation because unsubscribe links are automatically removed from transactional email campaigns.

To protect your sender reputation, only use transactional emails for transactional purposes:

  • Account balances

  • Password reminders and resets

  • Order confirmations

  • Shipping notifications

  • Other non-marketing messages


Create a transactional email user for SMTP

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


Create a transactional email

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


Send a transactional email

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

  • Europe (region 1)
    r1-smtp.dotdigital.com

  • North America (region 2)
    r2-smtp.dotdigital.com

  • Asia Pacific (region 3)
    r3-smtp.dotdigital.com

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.


Send using the API

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

  • REST

  • Send transactional email

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.

Learn more about sending your transactional email as a triggered campaign by SMTP or the API:

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

Limits and sending transactional emails

  • You can include as many contacts as you want in a transactional email batch (as long as the request is under 50 MB).

  • You can add a maximum of 100 contacts to the Cc/Bcc box for a transactional email, and the send only counts as one send; it doesn’t matter if you have multiple contacts.

  • Sending transactional email using the API doesn't count towards your API limits or usage.

  • You can make up to 25 SMTP connections from a single IP address at any one time.

  • It’s possible to send transactional emails to your unsubscribed or non-mandatorily suppressed contacts. However, you can't send transactional email to an email address that is on the Global Suppression List (GSL). To learn more about the GSL, check out the Using the Global Suppression List (GSL) article.

  • Attachments are supported in our SMTP version only and have a limit of 20MB. Attachments aren't supported if you're using SMTP to send a transactional email as a triggered campaign.

  • 50,000 is the default transactional email limit per calendar day. A calendar day is measured using the UTC time zone.

Transactional email IP addresses

Transaction email uses our dedicated transactional IP addresses.


Use the Dashboard

To go to the Transactional email dashboard:

  1. Go to Analytics > Dashboards.

  2. Expand the MORE DASHBOARDS drop-down menu, and select Transactional email.

    This area shows you an overview, including a graph and table, of your sent transactional emails.

Date range

Select Date range to change the transaction email data time frame. You can select today, yesterday, last seven days, last week, this month, last month, last 30 days, all time, or you can enter a custom date range.

Reporting tiles

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.

Reporting graph and table

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.

Download a campaign

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.

Delete campaign data

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.

Be GDPR compliant

This allows you to be GDPR compliant when a contact wants you to remove them from your transactional email marketing.

Filter by status

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.

Search for a contact

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

Export a report

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

Change the display

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.


Edit your settings

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.

From addresses

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.

Replies to transactional emails

To handle replies for transactional email, you must set an Unknown mail forward.

Even if you are using a triggered campaign template to send your transactional email, any email addresses added to the 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.

Complaints

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.

Learn more about sender reputation and how it affects your deliverability in Understanding your sender reputation article.

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.

Complaints aren’t added to your suppressions

Contacts that complain are not placed on the suppression list. It’s your responsibility to regularly check for any complainers in this area and to make sure you deal with any complaints promptly and appropriately.


You can check out our Developer Hub documentation to learn how to manage this process and keep your transactional email recipients up-to-date.

Credentials

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:

  1. Select NEW USER.

  2. Complete the Description, Password, Confirm password boxes.

  3. Set the Status to Enabled.

  4. Select Save.

Delete a user

To delete a user, select the checkbox that’s in the same row as the email you want to delete, then select Delete > Delete.

Tracking

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:

  1. Expand the User menu and go to Settings > Tracking > Transactional email link tracking.

  2. Clear the check box for any metric you no longer want to track.
    To re-enable tracking for a metric, select the checkbox

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