Transactional emails are essential to doing business
You probably use Klaviyo primarily as a tool to conduct digital marketing and promotional activities via email. But there is another category of email that is essential to the operation of your business: transactional messages. These are defined as essential, non-marketing communications that are triggered in direct response to a transaction-related event. Common transactional messages include:
- Order confirmations
- Shipping notifications
- Password reset messages
- Double opt-in subscription confirmations
- Return or refund confirmations
The key difference between the two message types is that recipients do not need to opt in to receive transactional messages. But how do you know whether a message is considered transactional or not? Watch the video below to learn more.
Compare the content elements of each message type
The trigger of a message and the content within a message dictate whether or not it is considered transactional. Learn what key elements to look for to differentiate between transactional and marketing messages.
Transactional
- Opt-in/explicit consent is not required for this type of message
- The send is triggered by an individual user based on a key action related to a transaction
- Subject line is clearly transactional
- Primary purpose of the message is to provide essential details related to a transaction
- There is minimal to no marketing or promotional content anywhere in the message (80% or more of the email content must be transaction-related)
- Only flow messages can be considered transactional
Marketing
- Opt-in/explicit consent is required for this type of message
- Topic of content is non-essential to the recipient and primarily focused on selling or promoting products and/or services
- People can unsubscribe from these messages
- Legislations like The CAN-SPAM Act in the US or GDPR in the European Union give recipients the right to opt-out of promotional emails, so you must include a very clear unsubscribe option in all marketing messages
- You may face heavy penalties or legal consequences for sending marketing messages to contacts who have opted out
The sending features within Klaviyo are optimized to help you follow good sending practices, such as obeying profile consent status. Klaviyo will never allow you to send marketing messages to a profile who has explicitly unsubscribed from marketing. These profiles can still receive flow messages that are marked as transactional, but nothing else.
Set up transactional flows in Klaviyo
Klaviyo gives you the power to manage both your transactional and promotional messages all in one place. If you’d like to send transactional flows through Klaviyo to maintain consistency of data and message format/branding, follow the steps below.
Create the flow in Klaviyo
Create a flow from scratch and configure your flow to trigger based on an essential transactional event. A great example is using the Placed Order metric to trigger an order confirmation flow.
Draft the transactional message
Draft a clear and concise message within your flow that communicates the essential details of the transaction at hand. If you’re building an order confirmation flow from scratch, you’d likely want to include images of all the products ordered, along with the price, quantity, and the order total.
Do not include any content that is not relevant to the particular event or user who triggered the flow. The simpler, the better. Save your message as a draft and do not set it live.
Request transactional status
Follow these steps to request that a flow message be marked as transactional:
- From the flow builder, click on the message you want to mark as transactional.
- Switch the message to Manual mode.
- In the right sidebar, click Apply for transactional status.
It will take at least 24 hours for the message to be approved. You will not be able to edit the message content or set up an A/B test while the message is pending approval.
Note: If you have a flow with multiple transactional messages, you will need to request transactional status on each individual message.
It is possible to have transactional email messages within a flow where not all of the messages in the flow are transactional. While this is an option, it is not recommended. We recommend keeping transactional messages isolated within their own flows, and then creating separate flows with the same trigger metric for marketing-specific communications for ease of reporting.
Using our Placed Order example, we may want to invite qualified customers to join our loyalty program if they are not already members after they order. By creating 2 separate flows for Order Confirmation and Loyalty Invite, we can clearly differentiate between the number of recipients who entered each flow within a given time period.
Adjust your Smart Sending settings
Once Klaviyo’s team has approved your request for transactional status, you should turn Smart Sending off for the messages that are marked as transactional. You can do this at the account level by going to Settings > Email > Sender preferences > Smart Sending and clicking the box that says Ignore transactional messages.
For more guidance on setting up transactional flows, check out our guide on how to use flows to send transactional emails.