Hi,
We are coming from Mandrill and we use it to send transactional emails such as “Welcome to the system” or “You have received a new reward” etc.
With Mandrill you pass the email template identifier (e.g. welcome-email) the addressee (to: field) and the email merge variables to replace, e.g. name: ‘Roger’, signedUpDate: ‘Tuesday 2nd June’
Is there an equivalent ability with AC?
Thanks for your help.
Doug
Hi,
This can be achieved, yes, but with one important consideration: you will pass values to fields in the database, send the email, and then those values will be updated again for the following transactions.
So, you’re not storing a history of transactions as such, and you may have issues if multiple transactions can occur concurrently.
If you’re dealing with ecommerce transcations and a system that features a deep data integration with AC, then there may be a better way to handle this.
You may also want to investigate if you can capture transactions as Deals too, which are, effectively, a relational table of transaction (ie. you can have many deals per single contact). But I’m not 100% sure you can then populate your emails with values from each Deal.
Cheers,
Lawrence
Adding to @automatico’s feedback, lots of people have used AC in a transactional manner, utilizing Ecommerce Deep Data, Event Tracking and event start triggers, and personalization tags. Additionally, you can create and send a campaign via API.
One important thing to note though, is that these will still be marketing emails conducted transactionally. That means that there exists a possibility that a contact can unsubscribe from future communications, unlike “pure” transactional systems like sendgrid/SNS etc…
This is where it makes a lot of sense to have specific lists, so that if a contact does unsubscribe, they are only unsubbing from a few emails. I would think pretty hard about using in-app messaging (payment issues, password reset emails) in AC, but I would certainly handle all behavioral marketing messages in AC driven by events.
Let me know if you would like me to expand on any of that!
@jskole I’m in the same boat looking at using AC for transactional emails. When you said “think pretty hard about using in-app messaging (payment issues, password reset emails) in AC”, is the main issue you’re concerned about the one with users unsubscribing? Or is there more to it when evaluating the decision of using AC for e.g. password reset emails vs Mandrill?
@sarwa71708, correct.
I would move pure transactional emails (pw reset, payment failed) to a transactional system coming from your codebase, so they cannot be unsubscribed.
There could be other deliverability concerns depending on your marketing practices (scrub those lists!). Although truthfully, deliverability is more tied to sender domain than specific servers these days.
Hey all,
Biannca here from our CX team, I wanted to add on top on this post for anyone that comes across this thread.
ActiveCampaign has acquired Postmark app and you can now personalise and send out Transactional Emails.
Please don’t hesitate to reply back out or email us at help@activecampaign.com if you have any further questions.