Transactional Campaigns

A transactional campaign is a one-to-one campaign which is initiated by some sort of trigger. Examples of transactional email messages would be an email sent as a purchase confirmation, an electronic sales receipt, or a password reset confirmation message. In such cases, the recipient triggers the transactional campaign by performing a specific action.

Each Transactional Campaign in Accelerator contains most of the information necessary to render the message, except the recipient and context data which are provided each time a transactional message is triggered.

Overview
The Overview page of a Campaign provides a wealth of information about the current setup of the campaign. You can preview using the “Inspect Message Content” button, which takes you to the Personalization page, or by clicking the Send Test.

Additionally, you can view important details of the campaign such as:

• Template
• The template associated with this campaign is displayed here.
• Clicking the template name brings you to the Overview page of that template.
• Spam Assassin Score
• Displays the score from the Spam Filter testing page.
• Clicking the score takes you to this campaign’s Spam Filter testing page.
• Approx. Message Size
• Displays the size of the template and shared content for this campaign.
• Approx. Render Time
• Displays the anticipated render time of a single message for this campaign.
• Created By
• The user who generated the campaign. 
• Clicking the name will bring you to the User Details page for that individual.
• Date Created
• The date and time (GMT) when this campaign was generated.
• Last Updated By
• The user who last made changes to the campaign. 
• Clicking the name will bring you to the User Details page for that individual.
• Date Last Modified
• Date and time (GMT) of last campaign edits.
• Groups
• This corresponds to the User Groups with permissions to access this campaign. 
• Clicking on a particular group will bring you to a Group Details page.

From the Overview, you can also Promote the campaign. See the "API Examples" guide section for more information about promoting and triggering a Transactional Campaign.

Settings
The Settings page for a Marketing Campaign is where you designate the Template and List for the campaign’s design and recipients.

Name and description can be edited from what was set during the original creation of the campaign, and changes will display on the Overview page. These items are internal and only visible to users, not recipients.

The Category field is meant to be used as a reporting tool, allowing you to categorize and identify groupings of campaigns together. Category is returned with internal reporting data, and can be pulled into campaign content using the personalizable field for Job Category: ${Gears.jobCategory}

In the Template field, you will start typing the name of a Template created in the Content section of Accelerator and select the one you want to send.

Advanced Options

Notification Email Address allows you to provide an address to receive error notifications related to this campaign.

Using the URL Append field, it is possible to add parameters to all links in the campaign, such as Google Analytics UTM strings or other parameters for internal analytics.

Testing Transactional Campaigns
Personalization (Testing & Preview)
On the Personalization page in a Campaign, you can generate a live test of the content on the page in order to test personalization rendering times and results across HTML and text content versions. 

Spam Filter Testing
On the Spam Filter page in a Campaign, you can generate and view spam scores associated with the template. This can help to identify content issues which may lead to the campaign emails landing in spam folders rather than recipients’ inboxes. This tool is powered by SpamAssassin, a commonly used spam filter.

API Examples
Using an API request, the recipient and context data can be provided resulting in a single email to a single email address being triggered. The TransactionalCampaignSubmit API requires that a CampaignId be provided with the request, as well as the recipient data used to render and send the message.

Since Transactional Campaigns are triggered by API, the necessary Account ID, Campaign ID, and API Key are all provided on the Transactional Campaign’s “API Examples” page. Additionally, we provide sample code for submitting the API request via REST, Java SDK, or C# SDK.

Read more about the parameters for the TransactionalCampaignSubmit API here:
http://docs.messagegears.com/docs/web-services/transactionaljobsubmit

Note: a Transactional Campaign cannot be triggered until it has been Promoted.

Promoting a Transactional Campaign
Transactional Campaigns are initiated by triggers, but before any transactional messages can be sent the campaign must be initially Promoted. When first Promoting a Transactional Campaign, there will not be any messages triggered to be sent; it merely assigns a campaign ID and makes the campaign available for triggering. Before being Promoted, a Transactional Campaign will not have a Campaign ID to use with the TransactionalCampaignSubmit API.

After being initially Promoted, subsequent changes to content of campaign settings can be made and tested without affecting live triggers. Once the changes have been tested and approved, Promoting the campaign again will push the new content live, and future messages will use the new content.

The Promotion process takes up to 5 minutes to take effect in triggered sends of the campaign, during which time API requests will continue to receive the previously Promoted version.

Analytics
Charts on this page reflect daily and monthly statistical trends in engagement with this Transactional Campaign.