Promotional and Transactional Email Campaigns

Understand the different bulk email protocols and how they are used to communicate with customers.

In an effort to protect consumers, email marketing has become strictly regulated over the years.

Spam laws require all marketing emails to feature an unsubscribe link and the sender's physical address. We call these Promotional emails, and both required elements are automatically added to the footer of every promotional email to ensure compliance.

These laws, however, do allow certain kinds of emails to forgo these elements for increased deliverability. These emails are called Transactional emails, and they are sent under a different protocol that tells most spam filters that the email should be allowed.

What Is a Transactional Email?

Transactional emails are a type of email sent to facilitate an agreed-upon transaction between the sender and the recipient. Transactional emails typically contain information a recipient wants or needs, and consequently have very high open rates.

Common transactional email use cases might include:

• Purchase receipts
• Account creation emails
• Password resets
• Account notifications
• Social media notifications

In the past, spammers have used transactional email protocols to bypass spam protection and take advantage of the high open rates, resulting in heavy penalties if a promotional email is sent as transactional because, without the unsubscribe link, the recipient does not have the ability to opt out, and does not have recourse without the sender's address.

Transactional Email Campaign Approval

In order to help prevent transactional emails from going to the wrong recipients, we have implemented a light approval system that allows our Client Success team to give your transactional campaigns a final glance to make sure it sends to the right people with the desired results.

• Create your campaign, and the emails within it.
• Click "Request Approval for this Campaign" at the top of the campaign's page.
• Once submitted, we will review the criteria and content and either approve the track or recommend changes to bring the transactional emails into compliance with the law.