Hi all, happy Friday!
How to send campaign (non-transactional) emails inside an automation?
My current workflow:
*I have users leaving their emails on my website ahead of them receiving something in return (a free downloadable I they get after they confirm their email)
*Users then get a new email with instructions about what that free downloadable they got
*So far so good the emails above are transactional emails
But I then send automated emails on day 2/4/6 which are all marketing emails trying to persuade the user to buy a paid downloadable.
On these marketing emails I have unsubscribe links.
When debugging in Brevo now I saw these marketing emails are still seen as transactional emails by Brevo. So, when a user unsubscribes to these emails they are unsubscribing to « transactional emails », I even saw they are still subscribed to « campaign emails » but have self unsubscribed from transactional emails.
I don’t think this makes sense as in reality those emails I’ve created with an unsubscribe link sent via automation should actually be campaigns and the users themselves are definitely not expecting to have unsubscribed from transactional emails, they are unsubscribing from marketing.
So, how can I send campaign (non-transactional) emails inside an automation?
Hi @patonbrevo ,
Thanks for posting on this community!
Actually, here are the differences between marketing emails and transactional emails:
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marketing emails: basically, they are campaigns: you send one email to N users, in one time
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transactional emails: you send one email to one person.
More details on this article: https://help.brevo.com/hc/en-us/articles/360021196220-What-is-the-difference-between-Marketing-emails-Transactional-emails-Automation-
So, if the emails you send on day 2/4/6 are sent through an automation, they are considered by Brevo as transactional emails.
If you were to send them manually from a campaign, they would be considered as marketing emails.
Back to your use case, if you want to consider people who unsubscribe from these emails as being « marketing only » unbsubscribed, from my current knowledge you have no other choices than sending them through a campaign.
Thanks for the clarification, I’ll create new senders (email addresses to separate these unsubscribes from actual transactional emails then).
Thanks again
Bear in mind that unsubscribing is not related to the sender: one contact can unsubscribe let’s say from transactional emails, and in this case will not receive any transactional emails, irrespective of the sender.
Updated: actually, a contact is unsubscribed form a sender, see below
Interesting, the documentation seem to say something different: " Transactional emails have a different blocklisting behavior than other channels. By default, when a contact unsubscribes from your transactional emails, they are only blocked from the sender of this specific email . This means that they won’t receive any transactional emails from them anymore but can still receive t ransactional emails sent from another sender . This way, if a contact unsubscribes from a transactional email, they may still receive important notifications such as order confirmations or password reset." https://help.brevo.com/hc/en-us/articles/209458705-What-are-the-different-types-of-blocklisted-contacts-
I hope it works as per documentation 
Since I find logic in unsubscribes being by sender and it enables my use case. Also, the implementation seem to be aligned with the documentation. And if so, I am all good
Yes absolutely you’re right @patonbrevo , I missed that in my explanations, I’ll update my comment above. Thanks for that!
I completely agree that this doesn’t make sense. The way it is currently set up, you cannot really cannot use the powerful automation capabilities of Brevo for your marketing, which people do OPT IN for (in my case). I have people who opt into my list, and then I put them on a drip sequence (which Brevo considers transactional). If they unsubscribe from that, and then, for example, two days later I send a monthly « campaign » to ALL of my contacts, the people who have previously unsubscribed will still receive that « campaign. » This is a HUGE flaw to me. Do other CRM programs handle it this way? Seems like the only way to solve this is to give the customer a choice. Ask recipient: What would you like to unsubscribe from? Transactional emails or marketing emails. In fact, it’s a really bad idea to let people unsubscribe from transactional emails. If they’re a paying Customer…???
This is a huge opportunity for Brevo. (And, this explains why a woman was upset with me the other day when she said she unsubscribed, but she still received my email.) I’m going to post this as a new thread also. It surprises me that this has not come up as an issue for more people.
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But your drip sequence is marketing isn’t it? Then in my world it should have an unsubscribe link in it (should you have added an unsubscribe link to it)
Also, a drip sequence is in response to a customer action (a signup or a purchase) and it is triggered per individual, not mass-emailing like campaigns, so it should not go into campaigns.
The issue I see is that for emails in the drip sequence, even if they do not have an unsubscribe link in them they still are « unsubscribable ». They do get picked up by email inbox cleaning tools as sadly, the header now informs these are mailing-list type emails.
So, in my drip sequence, the first email does not have an unsubscribe link, it is a response to a signup action and provides information on how to use an application (I also use a separate email address for this). Then, the next emails in the drip sequence are marketing and in those I add an unsubscribe link (and send with a second email address).
Because the first email without unsubscribe links has its header wrongly defined, I get users unsubscribing to the first email. Then since unsubscribe is per email address, they end up receiving the drip sequence (since it is sent by another email address) and I’d rather they didn’t since they have actually tried to unsubscribe from my marketing emails.
The issue here in my case is with the header of emails with no unsubscribe links. I’m opening a new thread on this specific issue.
On your issues with not sending campaign to user that unsubscribed, I also had this issue: the Brevo team suggested this workaround How to filter out recipients in campaigns that have unsubscribed to transactional emails?