« Back to How-tos

Using Pseudo-Transactional Email Campaigns:

The first question that likely comes to mind is "What exactly is a Pseudo-Transactional Email Campaign?" - good question.

Our Pseudo-Transactional Email Campaigns aim to give customers the ability to essentially send the same campaign over and over again without changing much of the content. These are not true transactional emails. For true transactional emails, check out our STS API

How could that possibly be useful? Consider these uses:
  • Follow-up and reminder emails
  • Forgotten Password emails
  • Other one-off emails

Of course you also get all the power of our Campaign Stats tracking functions with these!

Welcome Emails

Are you managing your own double-optin process, or in another position where you just want to send a Welcome Email when you subscribe someone via the API? We've made that a piece of cake! Head on over to the most recent listSubscribe() docs to see how. All you need to do is turn the double_optin parameter off and the send_welcome parameter on - now any new subscribers will automatically get your List's Welcome Email!

Woah, ok, so how do I use them?

Also a good question. First we'll cover the steps necessary to use them, then we'll cover some caveats and other things you should keep in mind.

Steps to get going:

  1. Create a new List via the web interface
  2. Configure any Merge Vars or Interest groups for the List - this can be done via the API or the web interface
  3. Use the campaignCreate() method to create your campaign. Be sure to use a type of "trans"
  4. Now just rinse & repeat... err, uh -
    1. Call listSubscribe() for each email address. Note that if you'd like, it is perfectly reasonable to add multiple addresses before sending.
    2. Call campaignSendNow() to send to everyone who has not received this before
  5. Done!

As mentioned, there are some caveats that you need to pay very close attention to:

  • When you send a transactional campaign, only those subscribers who have been added to the list since the campaign was created (or since the last send, if you've started sending) will receive it.
  • You can't simply send the campaign to the same address multiple times. We say simply because you will have to use listUnsubscribe(), then listSubscribe() again in order to resend to an address.
  • In general, you likely will not want to use a List with multiple transactional campaigns. The easy solution is to add people to multiple lists if you need to support multiple transactional campaigns and then periodically remove users from those extra lists who have already received the campaign.

However, there are other things that work exactly like you'd expect -

  • You CAN send normal campaigns to these Lists without them having any effect whatsoever on the transactional campaigns associated with the list.
  • As mentioned, Stats and Reports will be collected just like normal.