Send transactional email

Letterhead’s transactional email feature lets you send triggered or one-off transactional messages — receipts, confirmations, notifications — separate from your regular newsletter sends. Transactional email is an early access feature: it has to be enabled for your company, so ask your administrator or contact Letterhead support if you don’t see it.

What transactional email is for

Newsletters go to your whole audience or a segment on a schedule you choose. Transactional emails typically go to a single recipient, triggered by something they did — a purchase, a signup, a password reset. Because they’re expected by the recipient, they’re sent independently of your newsletter campaigns.

Organize sends with tags

Tags let you group related transactional sends (for example, receipt or welcome) so you can analyze performance by type later. Every tagged send rolls up into per-tag metrics.

Track performance

Once transactional email is enabled, a Transactionals page appears under Newsletters, showing engagement metrics for your transactional emails rolled up by tag — sends, open rate, click rate, bounce rate, spam rate, and last sent time. You can view performance metrics for your transactional emails there, or ask the AI assistant for send counts and engagement rates grouped by tag over any date window.

Check what happened to a send

When you send a transactional email through the API, the response includes a uniqueId for that send. Use it to look the send up later and see where it stands:

GET /api/v3/transactionals/{uniqueId}

The lookup only returns sends from your own company. The response has a status, a reason and an updatedAt time. status is one of:

• queued — Letterhead has the email and is about to hand it off.
• accepted — our sending provider took the email.
• refused — the provider would not send it. reason holds the provider’s code and message.
• delivered — the email reached the recipient’s mail server.
• bounced — the recipient’s mail server sent it back. reason holds the bounce code and message.
• spam_complaint — the recipient reported the email as spam.

reason is empty unless the email was refused or bounced. A refused or bounced email often comes down to the recipient’s address, so the reason is there to help you fix it on your side.

You can also see the status of each send on the Transactionals page — see View performance metrics for transactional emails.

Related

• View performance metrics for transactional emails
• Ask the AI assistant about transactional email performance