Emails are typically divided into two main types, partly due to compliance reasons.

• Marketing emails are promotional messages sent to opted-in customers, containing marketing or commercial content to retain or acquire subscribers. These are primarily sent to customers and prospects.

• Transactional emails are one-to-one emails containing information that completes a transaction or process initiated by the customer, such as order confirmations or password reset messages. These are triggered by individual actions rather than sent in pre-scheduled batches.

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

Before integration and warm-up, identify whether you need a transactional IP and account:

• Are your messages triggered based on customer actions?
• Are they related to a transaction or customer process?
• Are you sending to both opted-in and opted-out users?

If "yes," proceed with the steps below.

Step 1: Complete the account form

When completing your account request form in your Customer Portal, make sure to fill out a separate form specifically for creating a transactional account.

Once 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

Just like for your marketing account:

• Add the provided DNS records to your domain management platform (DNS host) before triggering transactional messages.
• This step is required for sender authentication.

Once done, confirm with your CSM or Project Manager to validate the records.

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

To trigger transactional campaigns based on customer events:

• Create a new API Key.
• Connect to the Optimove Transactional Email API.

For detailed API documentation:

• Transactional Mail API Guide

Step 4: Create or migrate your transactional templates

You can create templates using:

• Visual Editor (drag & drop) or
• HTML Editor.

Important:

• Transactional templates are stored separately from marketing templates.
• When creating a template, select "Transactional" from the account "Type" dropdown.

When adding personalization:

• Use the correct transactional tags.
• Tags must be prefixed with TRANS: (e.g., [%TRANS:CART_URL%]) to be recognized.

Step 5: Confirm daily anticipated send volumes

If your daily sending volumes exceed 5,000 during onboarding or migration:

• Special accommodations and throttling plans may be needed.
• This ensures safe and strategic development of your IP's sender reputation.

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

Important Notes

• Your CSM will provide API credentials if you don't have them.
• The TemplateID for each template is available at the bottom of the Manage Templates page:

• Each SendMail call can contain multiple recipients with associated personalization tags.
• Personalization tags must exactly match the system-defined names and begin with TRANS:.
• You can optionally schedule email sending time (UTC) with the ScheduleTime parameter. Without it, emails are sent immediately.

Retrieving Metrics for Past Transactional Emails

You can retrieve post-execution metrics by using the Optimove API:

• GetTemplateMetrics — metrics by template.
• GetUserMetrics — metrics by recipient.

Tracking Performance for Transactional Emails

Use Optimove's Campaign Deliverability BI Report to:

• Monitor performance of your transactional emails.
• Gain insights into factors impacting sender reputation.

For more on this report, visit The Campaigns Deliverability Report article.