Transactional messages
Overview
About transactional messages
Transactional messages are messages sent automatically in response to an action of the recipient. To use such messages in Optimizely Campaign, you first need to define a transactional campaign on the page Transactional Mails. When this is done, there are two ways to send transactional messages:
- Marketing Automation messages. Used in a Marketing Automation campaign. You cannot directly edit message drafts in a Marketing automation campaign. Instead, select a previously defined message draft from a transactional campaign.
Both use cases require that your transactional campaign is properly defined and started. Once started, transactional campaigns have the status Sending. This status means that the campaign is ready to send messages via API calls or via a Marketing Automation campaign.
Notice: Sometimes transactional messages and transactional campaigns are called "transactional mails".
For viewing and editing transactional campaigns, go to the page Transactional Mails.
Calling up the page Transactional Mails
- In the Menu bar, select Campaigns > Transactional Mails. → The page Transactional Mails shows the transactional campaigns in your client. Notice: You may need to edit the filtering of the list to see all transactional campaigns in your client (see below).
Viewing campaign details
Presentation of campaigns and messages
The list of transactional campaigns shows campaigns and the corresponding message drafts. The message drafts in a campaign are displayed below the row for the entire campaign and three dots "..." are added before their name. This is the same presentation that is also used for Smart Campaigns.
Usually, transactional campaigns contain only one message draft, but they may contain more if an A/B test is used.
Possible states
Each transactional campaign or message draft has one of the following states:
- New. Fully configured but not started.
- Incomplete. Elements are missing or necessary parameters are not defined.
- Sending. Active and ready to send messages.
- Canceled. Sending was canceled and cannot be restarted.
- Sent. This applies when a transactional campaign used to have multiple message drafts for an A/B test and then one of the message drafts is removed. The removed message draft remains in the list with the status Sent.
Notice: Message drafts with the status sent are hidden by default. You can change this by editing the filtering options of the list (see below).
Filtering the list of transactional campaigns
Context: The list of transactional campaigns can be filtered by the values in the status column.
Caution: This filter excludes values if you checkmark them. Clear the selection to see all messages.
- Click on the header of the status column. → A Menu is displayed.
- Checkmark all values that you want to exclude from the list.
- Click outside of the menu. → The menu disappears. The entries are filtered.
Creating and editing transactional campaigns
Similarities with Smart Campaigns
Many aspects of working with transactional campaigns are similar to working with Smart Campaigns. The list view and the campaign editor work the same way.
See Creating and editing campaigns to learn how to
- create
- open
- edit
- save
a transactional campaign. There, you can also learn how to:
- send test messages
- analyze your campaigns.
Differences to Smart Campaigns
Transactional campaigns do not have campaign drafts. You start with a blank campaign, as if you had selected the empty draft for a Smart Campaign.
The campaign editor offers fewer types of nodes. Since transactional campaigns work in combination with API calls or Marketing Automation campaigns, there is less need for complex logic within a transactional campaign.
Transactional campaigns must use a recipient list that is suitable for transactional campaigns. If you do not yet have an appropriate list, contact customer support. The structure of the selected list is important but the recipients it contains are not important, because the recipients for transactional messages are controlled by incoming API calls or the recipients defined in a Marketing Automation campaign.
Tip
Copying a transactional campaign to another client
Note
Prerequisites: The registered user has permission to create Campaigns in the target client(s). The target clients have the same message template used in the transactional campaign that you want to copy.
- On the page Transactional Mails select a transactional campaign and click Copy to Client…. → The Copy Transactional Mail to Client window opens.
- In the Transactional Mail area, in the New Transactional Mail Name in the Target Client field, enter the name for the copy of the transactional campaign in the target client.
- In the Target Clients area, select clients into which you want to copy the transactional campaign. To select all available target clients, check the box in the menu bar.
- Click Copy. → The campaign is copied to the selected clients. Recipient lists and target groups are not transferred to the target clients.
- Archiving of messages
Purpose of the archiving function
Some messages contain information with long-term relevance for legal reasons. You can configure message drafts so that the messages generated from them are archived in Optimizely Campaign. Then you can prove a message was sent to a specific recipient at a given time.
Archiving period
You can change the archiving period any time. The change will be applied to already archived messages as well. If you disable archiving, all new sent transactional messages will not be archived anymore and the existing archived mails will be removed according to the last configured period.
Warning: Shortening the archiving period can lead to immediate deletion of existing archived messages!
Activating archival for a message node
Prerequisites: You have created or opened a transactional campaign and you see the campaign in the campaign editor.
- Click on a message node and select properties.
- Click Edit content.
- In the top right of the page, click More > Archive sent emails.
- Activate archiving by clicking on the checkbox.
- Select the time for which the messages should be archived.
- Click on Apply.
- Close the message draft by clicking on Close.
- Save the campaign. → Messages sent via the configured message node will be stored for the configured time.
Displaying archived messages
Prerequisites: There are archived Messages. The selected archival time has not yet passed.
- In the menu bar, click on Recipients > Recipient History.
- In the field Search Recipient Based on, select the recipient property you want to use for searching.
- In the field Search Value, enter a search string.
- Optional: Use the fields Start date and End date to search for messages sent within a given period of time.
- Optional: If you want to limit your search to one or some recipient lists, select these lists in the field Search In.
- Click on Start Search. → Matching archived messages are displayed in a list.
- Select a message by clicking on it.
- Below the list, click on Show Sent Mail. → The archived message is displayed.