Triggered Emails enable you to send time-critical email messages. The email delivery is immediate and unaffected by any other activities on your account. Since Triggered Emails are designed for operational emails, it ignores the opt-in status of the contacts it sends to. For more information, see Triggered Email - Overview.
Bypassing the opt-in status
There are exceptional cases when you need to legitimately bypass the opt-in status and send emails with critical notifications to contacts who have not opted-in, or even opted out of your marketing messages.
Exceptional cases made for transactional entry points:
- unplanned service messages,
- special company notifications,
- data breach notifications,
- delays in deliveries of products.
Transactional messages in Triggered email campaigns can be sent manually to contacts without Opt-In by using
- Emarsys Demo API and
- Triggered Email functionality.
For more information on opt-in status, see Transactional opt-in.
These opt-in bypassing emails should not contain any marketing content that is not directly related to the transaction that triggered them.
Best practices
- Begin with an explanation of why you are sending this message.
- Do not send promotional content: avoid vouchers, benefits and any language that might be considered as such.
- Include a link, or a description of your corporate identity (e.g.: legal imprint).
- Include a link to your Privacy Policy.
- Unsubscribe links should not be present in campaigns, that ignore Opt-in, but you can offer to set up preference for other communications.
Process of sending transactional messages by using Emarsys API
The following steps provide information on how to build a transactional message in a Triggered Email service and launch it to contacts without Opt-In.
1. Creating a sender mailbox for Triggered email via Emarsys support
For your Triggered email a dedicated sender address mailbox is needed.
The sender address mailbox must be enabled by Emarsys Support as it cannot be added via the interface.
In case you have not done it yet, contact the Emarsys Support Team via an Emarsys Support request. (Support ticket creation) and specify the mailbox (sender address, e.g.: notification@example.com) they need to add to your Triggered Email configuration. See, Adding a new sender domain.
If you use Emarsys Reply Management, create a reply mailbox. See, the Reply Management page actions.
2. Creating and launching a Triggered email campaign
Create and activate the Triggered email where the trigger source is the Ignore-Opt-in external event:
a. Create a Mail Stream. See, Triggered email end-user guide: Creating Mail Streams.
b. Create an External Event. See, Triggered email end-user guide: Preparing the external events.
Copy your External event id, which will be needed for your API call.
c. Create content of your campaign on the Content Creation step.
d. Go to Scheduling and activate your Mail Stream. See, Triggered email end-user guide: Scheduling.
3. Creating API credentials
a. Go to Management > Security Settings. In the API Users tab create your API credentials to be able to connect to your account via API. See, Your account security settings: API users.
The secret key is only available to copy while the confirmation dialog is open. You can store it securely and reuse the key when you need it next time.
b. Give permission to the API user: Edit the key and give it permissions for external events. See, API permission system.
c. Activate the flipper for externalevent.trigger.
This part can be executed only by the Super Admin or the owner of the account.
d. At the bottom, click Edit. Confirm your identity with your password in order to approve this change.
4. Building an API request and launching the email campaign
a. Open Emarsys API Demo and in the top-right corner type the API credentials you have created in the previous step.
b. Go to your API endpoint (Triggering an external event) and fill in the required data.
- EXTERNAL EVENT ID - The ID of the event you have created in the second step and assigned to your Triggered campaign
- KEY ID - The id of the field you will use as an identifier. Use the field "email" - id 3.
- KEY VALUE - Leave it blank.
- TRIGGER ID - Leave it blank.
- EVENT TIME - Leave it blank.
- DATA - Leave it blank.
- CONTACTS - If you need to send this email to multiple contacts, list the recipients here.
The contacts must exist on the account.
Paste the addresses in the following JSON format:
It is recommended to export the list of contacts to the correct JSON format with a text editor, for example Notepad++.
[
{"external_id":"user38630@example.com"},
{"external_id":"user69698@example.com"},
{"external_id":"user20283@example.com"},
{"external_id":"user67732@example.com"},
{"external_id":"user22991@example.com"}
]The limit for recipients in 1 API call (trigger) is 1 000 contacts. You can group contacts by 1 000 and trigger the event several times if you need to send the campaign to more than 1 000 recipients.
c. Click the Trigger button to send the email campaign to contacts with any Opt-in status.
d. Check the result of the request on the right side pane.
In case of more requests, make sure to clear CONTACTS and add the new list of contacts.
