How to send a transactional email with Batch?

Need help creating your first transactional email automation? Here are useful insights and steps to follow.

A bit of context first

Transactional what?

Transactional emails contain information about an action a recipient has taken, unlike marketing e-mails that intend to drive the recipient towards an action you want them to take.

They take the form of 1-to-1 automated and personalized scenarios, usually linked to account activity or a commercial transaction, like a password reset request or an order validation.

What about delivrability?

Some specific rules apply to transactional emails:

• They do not require a marketing opt-in status;

• They are sent in real time;

• They have a higher criticality than other scenarios, and tend to generate higher engagement rates as well.

With Batch, each email sending purpose is isolated for deliverability reasons.

Transactional emails are sent from a dedicated subdomain (e.g. service.domain.com) and a specialized IP / IP pool with an excellent reputation.

This protects the deliverability of transactional emails from other types of scenarios sent with Batch (newsletters, marketing automation, etc.).

Management on the Batch dashboard

To satisfy the need of brands and media to no longer have silos between marketing and transactional emails, we have chosen to handle them in a coordinated manner on the Batch platform.

This has several advantages:

• Technical simplicity: you have a single endpoint for all server-side data operations: our Profile API. In the case of a transactional scenario, it allows you to track an event enriched with additional data for message personalization purposes. This single event can be used across different types of scenarios and different channels, streamlining API calls and data flows and considerably simplifying technical implementations.

• Integrated tracking: delivery and engagement indicators are tracked in a centralized way on the Batch dashboard. You can consolidate information related to a recipient, such as scenarios received, opened and clicked.

• Operational team autonomy: business teams can modify templates or carry out A/B testing independently. This frees up the bandwidth of technical teams to concentrate on other tasks.

Technical implementation

When a transactional trigger is detected in your back-end, call the Profile API to track a user event for the given recipient, via its Custom user ID.

Attach to the event any data you need to personalize the email as event attributes.

In case of highly personalized emails such as order confirmations, you can use attributes objects to structure your data.

For example, in case of an order tracking email, track a parcel_sent event when the order has just left the warehouse.

Here is an example of how the payload could look like:

[
  {
    "identifiers": {
        "custom_id": "johndoe123"
    },
    "events": [
        {
           "name": "parcel_sent",
           "attributes": {
                   "carrier_name": "DHL Express France",
                   "collection_point": "E-mobile Paris 3",
                   "date(delivery_date)": "2024-02-12T10:10:10",
                   "url(tracking_link)": "www.dhl.com/suivi/456",
                   "order_id": 456
                   }
        }
    ]
  }
]

And that's it! The rest is done on the dashboard.

💡 In addition to email, the trigger event can be used to trigger a message on any channel operated by Batch, thanks to our centralized data model.

How to setup the email from the Batch dashboard?

Go to the Batch dashboard, Automations → Email → New automation → Email Trigger.

Set up entrance

Click on 'Select trigger' and choose the event that will trigger the email:

Select trigger in automation

Target opt-out users

Click on 'Add targeting' and uncheck the toggle Only send to opted in users.

Transactional emails do not need a marketing opt-in status.

Disable marketing opt-in in targeting conditions

Compose your email

1. Add your sender

   Click on the message block and select a sender attached to your transactional sending subdomain.

2. Define the subject of your email

   You can add dynamic personalization by clicking on the brackets {...} if needed.

3. Compose your email

   Last but not least, there are 2 ways to create the body of your email:

   1. Design your message with our Email Composer.

      

      Design an email template with the email composer

      Batch allows you to create an email from scratch via our Email Composer.

   2. Upload your HTML template.

      

      Upload an HTML template

   If you have a template ready to be used, you can upload it here!

Do not forget to add your dynamic variables coming from the event!

Set an email sender and an object

Saving your automation

Click on the 'Save and run' button at the bottom of the form to activate it or save it as a draft and come back later.

Your email is now ready to be sent! 🎉 (in real-time as soon as the trigger event is captured by Batch, from your sending subdomain dedicated to transactional emails).