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About Transactional Email

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If you have an online store, you may want to send your contacts transactional emails with information about their purchases and account activity. Transactional emails are sent to one person at a time, and are limited in the type of content they can include. Mailchimp offers a few different ways to send transactional email.

In this article, you'll learn about transactional email and how you can use it.

Definitions

Bulk email
Email sent from one sender to multiple recipients, usually for marketing purposes.

Transactional email
Email sent from one sender to one recipient, usually related to account activity or a commercial transaction. Examples include password reminder emails, purchase confirmations, and personalized product notifications.

Mailchimp Transactional Email
A delivery API that can send transactional emails from websites and applications. Transactional Email is available as an add-on for Standard and higher monthly plans.

Automation
A tool that allows you to create an email or series of emails that are triggered by a sending event.

Order notifications
Automated transactional emails that are triggered by purchase activity in your connected store.

Abandoned cart email
Automated transactional emails that are triggered when someone adds products to their online shopping cart, but doesn't complete their purchase.

How transactional email works

Transactional email allows you to provide information that is uniquely relevant to the recipient. These emails can provide requested information or remind an individual of needed action, like if they placed items in their shopping cart but didn't complete the purchase.

Transactional email generally uses an API or SMTP integration to send emails. This usually requires a developer to set up a system that will send coded templates to specific recipients based on a specific action. In Mailchimp, however, you can quickly create transactional emails like you would any email campaign. You can send these emails to most types of contacts in your audience.

Example uses

For many companies and organizations, it makes sense to use both bulk and transactional email. This chart provides examples for when you might use one or the other.

Bulk emailTransactional email
Uses• Newsletters

• Product promotions

• Event invitation or announcement

• Welcome series

• Educational series		• Abandoned cart messages

• Account creation

• Order notifications

• Password reminders

• Product or service feedback

Transactional email in Mailchimp

Mailchimp offers a couple of ways to send transactional emails: our built-in automation feature and our add-on Transactional Email service, formerly known as Mandrill. The one you use depends on your business goals and access to developers.

Mailchimp vs. Mailchimp Transactional Email

Mailchimp’s built-in automation feature includes a few types of transactional emails, like abandoned cart messages and order notifications. Use our drag-and-drop editor to customize these emails to fit the look and feel of your brand.

If you're a developer, you may want to add our powerful delivery API, Transactional Email, to your Mailchimp account. Transactional Email can be used for personalized, one-to-one e-commerce emails, as well as automated emails like password resets, order confirmations, and welcome messages.

Here’s a comparison of Mailchimp and Mailchimp Transactional, to help you decide which works best for you.

MailchimpMailchimp Transactional Email
What it's forMailchimp is an all-in-one marketing platform that specializes in bulk email. Bulk email is sent to multiple recipients at once, usually for marketing purposes. You can also create certain types of transactional messages in Mailchimp, like order notifications.Transactional Email is Mailchimp’s dedicated transactional email service. Transactional email services send email to one recipient, triggered by the recipient's action or inaction.
Plan requirementsMailchimp has several plan options with different sets of features to best fit your needs. Single-step automations, including a limited number of transactional emails, are available to all users.Transactional Email is a paid add-on to a Standard or Premium Mailchimp plan. You'll buy blocks of Transactional Email credits at a recurring monthly rate.
Audience vs. recipientsMailchimp is an audience-based system. You create audiences in Mailchimp to organize your contacts and send them emails, ads, postcards, and other types of messages. Our Terms of Use require you to get express permission from anyone you send marketing emails to.Transactional Email is a recipient-based system. Contact lists and other recipient information can't be stored in Transactional Email. Instead, this data is managed in your own database or application, and passed to Transactional Email in your API request or SMTP message when the transactional email is triggered.
Level of skillMailchimp offers beginner-friendly tools to help you design and send emails. You don’t need any prior knowledge of HTML or APIs. And when your email looks how you want, you can schedule or send it from the Mailchimp application.Transactional Email requires HTML and API knowledge to design and send email. Although Transactional Email is accessed through your Mailchimp account, it doesn't offer the same design tools as Mailchimp. And when you're ready to send, you'll use the Transactional Email API or an SMTP integration.

Get started

Ready to begin sending transactional emails with Mailchimp? Here are some resources to help you get started.

Mailchimp

Create Order Notifications
Create an Abandoned Cart Email

Mailchimp Transactional

Add or Remove Transactional Email
Mailchimp Transactional Email Guides and Tutorials

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