Using transactional emails with BigCommerce – Dotdigital Help Centre

Learn how to use and edit your transactional email templates and keep your communications consistent with the transactional email manager.

Overview

Use Dotdigital transactional email with your BigCommerce store to provide your customers with consistent and relevant communications about their orders. You can see a list of different events that happen in your BigCommerce store, such as a new account, account updates, or new order confirmations and choose which transactional emails you want to send out to your customers.

Before you start

Things you need to know before you start:

You must have a BigCommerce store connected to a Dotdigital account.
When you activate transactional email on your account, it counts towards your messaging allowance.
To avoid duplicating emails, you must disable the transactional email notifications that are sent by BigCommerce. You must either disable all of the notifications, or only the ones that you enable in Dotdigital as a replacement. To do this, go to Marketing > Email Templates.

Create a branded transactional email template

Create brand familiarity with your contacts by branding your transactional email templates. You can upload a logo, add fonts, and change the colours of the template. To access the transactional email manager:

In Dotdigital, go to Settings > BigCommerce > Transactional email > Setup transactional email templates.
Set up your branding by editing the available fields:
- Logo
  Select Choose file to upload an image of your logo to brand your transactional email template.
- Font
  Select the font type you want to appear throughout your template.
- Body text colour
  Select the primary body text colour of your template.
- Heading text colour
  Select the heading text colour of your template.
- Button/link colour
  Select the colour you want your buttons to appear as in your template.
- Button text colour
  Select the colour you want your button text to appear as in your template.
- Brand highlight colour
  Add a line of colour to your template, so customers can recognise your brand faster.
- Email footer
  Add a footer to your transactional email template. This is a great place to put your legal text
Select Generate templates.

Or select Delete to delete the current transactional email template.

Once this is complete, you can turn on your templates.

Using the transactional email manager

You can turn on, swap, edit, or preview any of your transactional email templates in the Transactional email area. You can see all of your default email templates in this area, too. To manage your transactional email settings, go to Settings > BigCommerce > Transactional email.

If you have not created a transactional email template yet, select Setup transactional email templates. If you already created a transactional email template, select Configure brand styles to make changes.

Account notifications

In the Account notifications area, select Turn all off or Turn all on to turn all of your transactional email notifications on or off for your customers.

Order notifications

In the Order notifications area, you can find a list of default template settings:

A check mark (✅) means this default transactional email template is available.

Default transactional email template	Availability
New account confirmation
New order confirmation
Shipping confirmation
Shipping update
Order partially shipped
Order pending
>Order awaiting payment
Order awaiting fulfillment
Order awaiting shipment
Order awaiting pickup
Order completed
Order cancelled
Order declined
Order refunded
Order partially refunded
Order disputed
Order manual verification required

To activate a transactional email template, switch the toggle to On. To disable a transactional email template, switch the toggle to Off.

Each default template has an Actions drop-down menu. Expand the actions drop-down menu to preview, edit, or swap out the current template.

Design transactional email templates

To design your transactional email template:

In Dotdigital, go to Automation > Triggered campaign content.

Templates you wish to use for transactional emails must be created as Triggered campaigns.
Select an existing campaign to edit or select ADD NEW.
Design your campaign to your specifications using the EasyEditor canvas.

To learn more about designing an email campaign, check out the Getting started - Creating your campaign in Easy Editor article.
When you’re happy with your design, select Save.

Remove all unsupported building blocks When designing your transactional email template, you must remove all unsupported building blocks. To learn more about unsupported building blocks for transactional email templates, check out Create, design and send a transactional email template.
You don’t have to remove your unsubscribe link because it’s automatically removed when you send the campaign.

Insert variables

It’s possible to insert BigCommerce data variables into the campaigns you design using Dotdigital’s Easy Editor.

Variables help to personalise your email campaign so that the information is correct and relevant to your customers’ orders. For example, if you create an order confirmation email campaign, you might use the following variables for your campaign layout:


Hi, {{ data.order.billing_address.first_name }}.
Thanks for your order {{ data.order.id }}!

Your order status is now: {{ data.order.order_status }}.
You've ordered the following products:

Items

{% for product in data.order.products %}
{{ product.name }} ({{ product.sku }}) x {{ product.qty }}
{% if product.option %}
{% for option in product.options %} {{ option.name }}:{{ option.value }} | {% endfor %}
{% endif %}
Price:{{ product.price_inc_tax }}
------------------------------------
{% endfor %}

You must insert all variables used in the body of your email into text building blocks.
To learn more about the different types of variables you can use, check out Variables for transactional email templates in BigCommerce.

Subject line variables

You can only use three variables in the subject line of your transaction email template:

```
@FIRSTNAME@
```
Inserts the first name of your contact.
```
@LASTNAME@
```
Inserts the last name of your contact.
```
@ORDER_ID@
```
Inserts the order ID based on your contact’s purchase.

You can’t use other variables in your subject lines.

Use the Dotdigital SMTP server for your transactional email

When you use our SMTP server for your transactional email, you can make the most of our transactional email reporting.

To use our SMTP server for your transactional email:

In BigCommerce, go to Store setup > Store settings > Miscellaneous.
Select Let me specify my own SMTP server details and provide the SMTP hostname, your SMTP username and password and the SMTP port.
> To learn how to set up an SMTP user in Dotdigital, check out Create a transactional email user for SMTP.
Select Test SMTP Settings.
Select Save.

To learn more, check out the article Using transactional email