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Private preview
This feature is in Private preview and should be considered a beta feature. It may be subject to service disruption and short notice changes or improvements. If you're interested in joining the preview, contact your Customer Success representative.

The Marketing email API provides the ability to send marketing emails without the complexities of having to create a campaign, an audience, and then schedule it to send. It's ideal for allowing your platforms and systems to send marketing emails on demand, with ease.

For the email content, you can either provide your own custom HTML, or you can include a triggered campaign ID to send a campaign you've already designed in Dotdigital.

Marketing opt-in checks and contacts

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Email marketing status is checked
The Marketing email API automatically checks that the email address being sent to is opted in to marketing communications. If an opt-out exists then the email is not sent.

Contacts are created for unknown email addresses

If the email address that you're targeting doesn't already exist in Dotdigital, then a new contact is created and it is assumed to be subscribed to marketing emails.

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You must ensure you have email marketing consent for sends
If we don't recognize the email address sent to, we create a contact and set the email channel to subscribed. It's important therefore that you only attempt to send to email addresses that have consented to receive email marketing.

Allow recipients to unsubscribe

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List-unsubscribe
We include the List-unsubscribe tag in the technical header of all marketing emails sent through this endpoint; you don't need to add it.

In both campaign templates and raw HTML used for sending marketing email, you must include a clear and obvious way to unsubscribe from future marketing email by including Dotdigital's unsubscribe link.

You can add the Dotdigital unsubscribe link to your HTML using the $UNSUB$ token. This is replaced with the full URL to the correct Dotdigital unsubscribe page when the email is sent.

This link is automatically included when you send using a triggered campaign ID, as you can't save a triggered campaign in Dotdigital without including this link.

In raw HTML content, you must include the token $UNSUB$ in your HTML and we replace this with a contact-specific URL to unsubscribe them from future marketing email.

The $UNSUB$ value does not include the protocol HTTP:// or HTTPS:// so that you're able to control this. If unsure, use //: as the protocol and this follows the protocol used by the parent document.

Example usage of $UNSUB$ :

<a href="//:$UNSUB$">Click here to <b>unsubscribe</b></a>

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If you don't include the $UNSUB link in your email, the send is rejected.

Other ways contacts are unsubscribed

Dotdigital also unsubscribes a contact from email marketing if:

they unsubscribe through a preference centre .
we're notified by an ISP of an unsubscribe using the List-Unsubscribe header.
For example, contacts using Gmail's subscription management function to unsubscribe.
we receive an ISP complaint related to the email sent to a contact.
the email has hard bounced, or soft bounced a given number of times, and is considered a bad email address.
Learn more about automatic suppressions for bounced email addresses.
The contact is on our global suppression list due to being a known problematic email address.

Personalization fields

When using a triggered email template to provide the content of the email you can optionally provide overrides to any existing contact data fields in the personalizationFields array. The overrides will be used to populate any personalization fields in the template just for that email and will not be retained on the contact.

This can be used to provide value for contact data fields for use in the email that may not have been synced to Dotdigital yet.

Tracking email status

You can track activity related to your Marketing email API sends using either Data Firehose or the Events API.

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Coming soon
Message events in the Events API are not yet available, but we are working to make them available soon.

Events raised by the Marketing email API:

Event	Events API event raised	Firehose event raised	Applies to
Email is sent successfully	message.sent	Email send	Triggered campaign Raw HTML
Email delivered	message.status		Triggered campaign Raw HTML
Email read/opened	message.status	Email open	Triggered campaign
Email soft bounced	message.status	Email failed	Triggered campaign Raw HTML
Email hard bounced	message.status	Email failed	Triggered campaign Raw HTML
Email failed for reasons other than a bounce For example, email address is opted-out of marketing.	message.status	Email failed	Triggered campaign Raw HTML
Link clicked in email	interaction.click	Email click	Triggered campaign
Unsubscribe triggered by email	interaction.unsubscribe	Email unsubscribed	Triggered campaign Raw HTML
Unsubscribed by list subscription notification from ISP	interaction.unsubscribe	Email unsubscribed	Triggered campaign Raw HTML
ISP Complaint received	interaction.unsubscribe	Email ISP complaint	Triggered campaign Raw HTML
Inbound	message.received	Email reply	Triggered campaign Raw HTML