It sounds ludicrous, but sometimes you need to be able to send emails from Dynamics Marketing to an unsubscribed or non-consented contact. Dynamics 365 Marketing is more than just a tool for sending marketing emails, even more so with the launch of real-time marketing. Some examples of a non-marketing email are: a purchase receipt, account statement, or consent request. It must not include advertisements or promotional content.

DISCLAIMER: I am not condoning that you should send marketing emails regardless of whether you have consent or not - that’s totally not cool and often illegal (country legislation dependent)

Create a Transactional Email

You might already have an email created you want to use. You can change the ‘Email type’ of an existing email by selecting the cog icon on the email desiner header. Expand the ‘Email Settings’ section on the right hand panel. Then select the ‘Email type’

Sometimes this is not possible to change an existing Email of type Commercial to Transactional. Instead you can create a copy (using Save As…) then changing the ‘Email type’ on the quick create

Design a Transactional Email

If you converted a Commercial email or used one of the standard commercial templates you will likely see the above message when you try to ‘Go Live’ with or test send the email. The Subscription Centre link aka {{msdyncrm_contentsettings.msdyncrm_subscriptioncenter}} is not allowed to be included a transactional email so make sure you remove that. Its likely hidden as a link at the bottom of your email with a label such as unsubscribe.

Your email should not contain any adverts or promotions, only the information you need to communicate the Transactional message. There is nothing to screen or stop this, but the obligation is on you to adhere to relevant legislation.

Use a Transactional Email in Customer Journey

You can use your transactional email in a customer journey just like you would with a commercial one. There will be two main differences here:

1. You will see a ‘warning’ message reminding you that the message is not commercial, but this will not stop you going live with the Customer Journey

2. The message will be sent to anyone included in the audience of the customer journey, even is ‘Allow Bulk Email’ is set to No i.e. unsubscribed from all Marketing communications.

NOTE: If the contact has an invalid email address, is inactive or on any suppression lists then they will not receive this message. there is also a way to prevent sending the contact any emails from Dynamics 365, without deactivating a contact or removing their email address. Read on to the next section for how.

Prevent Transactional Emails

Apart from expected reasons why Dynamics 365 Marketing will not deliver an email (e.g. invalid email, reputation issues or inactive mailbox) there is a way to prevent even Transactional emails being sent to Contacts. This can be done by setting the ‘Allow Email’ column on the Contact record to ‘Do Not Allow’. This will suppress emails form being sent to this contact any way via Dynamics 365 both from a Customer Journey, Quick Send or even an individual Email sent from the Activity Timeline.

Who knew there would be so much information about changing the Email type setting - congratulation if you made it this far and hope it helps.

P.S speaking of real-time marketing, I’ve done a few posts on working with real-time marketing that you might want to check out -> https://www.ameyholden.com/search?q=real%20time%20marketing

Real-time marketing in Dynamics 365 -> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/marketing/real-time-marketing-overview

Further reading on Transactional Emails in Dynamics 365 Marketing -> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/marketing/email-properties#set-the-legal-designation-to-identify-each-message-as-either-commercial-or-transactional