Triggered Email is the Emarsys solution for delivering high volumes of time-sensitive, personalized emails triggered by customer interactions with your brand.
As a quick reminder, here is the onboarding video about Triggered Email creation:
What is Triggered Email?
Triggered Email is the Emarsys solution for sending time-critical email messages via their own dedicated mail-sending architecture (PMTAs) to ensure that delivery is immediate and unaffected by any other activities on your account.
Since Triggered Email is designed for operational emails, it ignores the opt-in status of the contacts it sends to.
It is also the only Emarsys solution for sending email attachments.
How does it work?
Triggered Email consists of two parts: external events and mail streams.
- External events are identifiers that use the API to link an action (such as a purchase) to a mail stream, providing the data needed for the message and triggering the email.
The payload size limit of External events is changing:
We are introducing a limit of 500 KB for the payload size of External events effective July 1, 2023. Events exceeding this limit will not be accepted and you will receive an error response from the API. As a result, External events over the limit will not trigger any Triggered Email campaigns, Automation Center or Interactions programs.
- Mail streams are event-based emails that are personalized and sent when their associated event is triggered. These are differentiated from other event-based emails by having their own dedicated sender domain registered by Emarsys.
When should I be using it?
Triggered Email is optimized for speed and deliverability, so you should be using this product instead of event-based email campaigns if you need to send important, time-critical messages to your customers.
Since it ignores opt-in, Triggered email should only be used for operational emails such as double opt-in confirmation, password reset and transactional emails relating to purchases. You should not use this product to send marketing messages.
For a full list of use cases, click here.
Supported functionality
- Triggered email dashboard.
- Copy and re-use existing email campaigns for Triggered Email mail streams.
- Create new mail streams.
- Personalize emails with contact and/or transactional data.
- Launch broadcast mail streams without referencing your Emarsys database.
- Add attachments.
- Trigger emails via the API.
- Trigger emails via an external integration.
- Use triggered email with the Automation Center.
- Stop emails without attachments from being sent (optional).
- Pause and edit live mail streams.
- Track deliverability and responses over time.
Transactional emails vs. triggered emails
You can see the main differences between transactional emails and triggered emails below:
Transactional emails:
- Every on-event emails.
(Exception: External event campaigns automatically become triggered email campaigns.) - Can be created from the Email Campaigns module.
- Sent via Automation Center (with data change).
- Triggered emails are a subset of transactional emails.
- Created in the Triggered email channel
- Sent via their own dedicated mail-sending architecture (PMTAs).
- Use the triggered sender address that has been configured by Emarsys Support in your account.
- Directly triggered via API or Interactions programs by setting External event as recipient source in the email settings.