Transactional Email Overview

  • Updated
Transactional emails are available through Act-On by request as an add-on purchase. Transactional sending requires strict adherence to Act-On's policies and must not contain any marketing or advertising material.
Important! The use of this feature has implications for your CAN-SPAM compliance. Act-On does not provide legal advice about transactional communications.

 

What is a transactional email?

Transactional emails are those necessary to complete a transaction or process that a recipient has already started with you. They are sent to existing customers only and usually relate to a specific, one-to-one transaction.

Examples of transactional email:

  • Receipts and purchase confirmation
  • Shipping confirmation and order tracking
  • Product registration
  • Password reset emails
  • Disruptions to products and services (like software downtime or facilities being closed)

These are not transactional emails:

  • Newsletters
  • Coupons or deals for existing customers
  • Reminders about a transaction that was not completed
  • All-customer emails not connected to past transactions

How does Act-On handle transactional sending?

Act-On will send transactional emails from IP addresses dedicated to this purpose. This ensures the highest possible inbox placement rate. We will also bypass opt-outs and email fatigue logic to prevent your transactional emails from being suppressed; however, domain-based suppression will still take place.

Act-On's Transactional Sending Policy

Because these messages are treated very differently from marketing emails, Act-On has strict policies governing this feature. To keep transactional IPs high quality, we monitor all transactional messages and will revoke this feature from accounts that use it inappropriately. Please talk to your Account Manager if you need more information.

 

Instructions

How to request transactional email

To purchase Act-On's transactional email add-on:

  1. Contact your Account Manager and provide the following:
    • The specific business cases you have requiring this feature
    • When you need to start sending transactional messages
      Please note: It may take two weeks or longer for this feature to be approved.
    • The account IDs that will need to use the feature
    • Examples of each type of transactional message you will send
      • Messages that are not shared and approved during this step will need to go through a longer approval process before they can be sent
  2. Our legal and compliance team will review your request – once approved, you will receive an order form to sign
  3. After the order is signed and processed, this functionality will be added to your account

How to send transactional messages

Note: Act-On's transactional email add-on is only available to admin users and not, for example, available to marketing users.

Select the Transactional Message check box in the Address section of your outbound message.

A popup will appear. Confirm all details before proceeding.

Please ensure that your list does not contain duplicate contacts before sending. As part of this feature's design, duplicates are not suppressed. If needed, you can run manual maintenance and remove duplicates from your list.

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