Send Transactional Messages
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe how transactional messages are set up using REST APIs.
- Know where to direct your developer to API documentation online.
- Identify the teams or individuals to help get started.
So how does this all work? First, let’s define application programming interfaces, or APIs: An API is equivalent to a user interface, except it’s designed for software instead of humans. This is why APIs are often described as technologies that allow applications to talk to one another.
Marketing Cloud Engagement offers easy-to-use REST APIs for sending transactional messages and retrieving send status. Messages are processed and deployed in real time, with predictable deployment in email or SMS channels.
To get started, a non–Marketing Cloud Engagement system must communicate to your Marketing Cloud Engagement instance using APIs. To do this, you need to gather a few folks or teams together. Marketers, developers, and analysts are typically involved with transactional sending. Here are their roles in starting and continuing the process.
As a marketer, you configure your Marketing Cloud Engagement platform and define the content to be used in your transactional sends, whether these are emails, mobile messages, or combination of both. You can quickly set up content with predefined templates within the Marketing Cloud Engagement. Additionally, you can use Content Builder to easily extend your branding to transactional messages.
As a developer, you need to understand how the APIs work in order to implement transactional sending from your organization to your customers. The best place to get started is by reviewing the Transactional Messaging API Guide.
As a reporting user or business analyst, you need to view the status/details on transactional messages sent to one, many, or all of your customers. As an example, you may need to view the messages sent to a particular customer to help troubleshoot why they are not receiving a password reset or a multi-factor authentication token.
These features distinguish the Transactional Messaging API from triggered sends in Email Studio and from MobileConnect outbound SMS messages.
- The API runs on an updated messaging platform, which improves scale and send speed.
- All messages are sent as quickly as possible. For email, there’s no need to select high, medium, or low priority in a send definition.
- You can track each message through Marketing Cloud Engagement from your host system, including the Event Notification Service, using the messageKey attribute.
- Real-Time send event notifications are only available on the Transactional Messaging API.
By easily integrating in-house applications to a robust messaging service, companies can quickly roll out new types of transactional messages using Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement. Developers can integrate into a simple interface that powers their marketing team to deploy email and SMS messages quickly.
