For B2C brands, transactional emails are a critical component of the messaging toolboxes for both marketing teams and customer service teams — providing confirmation after an order has been successfully completed, sharing order status updates, and or communicating critical account updates.
In this video, Hannah Vanderbosch (Email Developer at Stitch) walks through the simple steps of creating a basic transactional email using Braze — including pulling in data for order confirmation personalization, building a Canvas, and creating a simple email template.
Hi everyone. My name's Hannah Vanderbosch and here at Stitch, I'm an email developer. Today I'm gonna teach you how to create a transactional email. So let's get started here. We're gonna start out in Braze, on our home screen. The first step is going up here on the left corner. We're gonna go to Canvas. Next, we're gonna go right here to create a canvas. We're gonna give it a name, and then for this example, I don't need to assign this canvas to a team or apply any tags. But if you do need to help with organization within your platform, that's where you would do that. Next, we're gonna go to the entry schedule. We're gonna click action based since we know our transactional email is gonna be triggered by someone making a purchase.
Next, we're gonna keep going down here to our action-based options. Here for this example, we're gonna go with Make a Purchase. One way that you can make this more specific is if you click to add a trigger, you can go to make a specific purchase, go down here, and then these are all items that have already been logged as a purchase event within my workspace. For, but for this example, we're gonna just go with, make any purchase. Next, we'll look down here for our entry window. This is just saying that you can enter this canvas by making a purchase after any time after 2:10, which of course, as you can see right now, it's 2:14, so that works for us. Next, we'll continue with our target audience. Scrolling up to the beginning, we can see in order to enter this canvas, we'll go up here to add a segment.
For this example, I'm gonna use all users within my HB Test web segment, a way that you can test if your users are within this segment. You can go right here to user lookup. I know the external user ID for the user I'm testing with. I know that external ID is one, so I'm able to type that in here. Search and you'll see there's one match. So now I know that the person that is going to be making the purchase in this instance is in that segment. So they'll be good to go once they make their purchase. As we continue through our options right here, we'll click allow users to reenter this Canvas. This will allow users, if they make multiple purchases to continue getting their confirmation email that's gonna be the situation when we're setting up our transactional email. In this instance, as we keep going, if you were to need exit criteria for the Canvas, this is where you would enter that. For example, if someone purchased a backpack once and they can only purchase one. For some reason, you would go in here, click, make a purchase, add a trigger, make a specific purchase, and select a backpack. But of course, we don't need that for this instance, so I'm gonna leave it blank since there's no reason for anyone to exit this canvas. Next, we'll go into our send settings. For this example, with our subscription settings, we're gonna allow users who are subscribed or opted in. The way that they're opting in is by making the purchase
These next things with our rate limit, frequency capping, and quiet hours, can all be applied for more detailed Canvases. For this example, they're not needed but they're fairly self-explanatory when it comes to applying them when needed. Next, we're gonna go to Build Canvas. As you can see with our entry rules, you can see everything that we just set up, so we're gonna scroll down. When we go to add Variant, we're gonna press this plus sign since everyone is getting the same triggered email. That's what this 100% is for right here. So click the plus sign, come down here, and we're gonna select message. Next. When we click again, we're gonna choose what kind of message. And in this example, we're setting up our transactional email.
So next we'll click drag and drop editor, and go down here and click our blank template. When we click into our email, this is where we'll add our content. So we're gonna make a pretty basic email. We're gonna put our header image, we'll add a paragraph and a title, and then we'll add a row for a f some footer content. So next, we'll come up here for our image. Choose from our media library. I'll select the Stitch banner that I'd like to use for my transactional email on our title. We'll add something like… Next, we'll go right here into our paragraph block. This is where we're gonna be adding in that personalization, pulling in that order details. We'll go in here on the left, we'll click personalization. We're gonna scroll down until we see Canvas entry properties. Next, I'm gonna type in my attributes, and the way that I know which attributes I'm able to choose from is in an API call, you can see these are the properties that I have to choose from my product name, whether the backpack has embroidery, the color, and the product amount. So first I'm gonna pull in my product name. I'm gonna copy my liquid snippet. I'm gonna add some context to the copy of the email so that way we know what's being pulled in. Next, I'll add embroidery as well, and of course these will be specific to whatever transactional email you're setting up. These are what we're going to use for our examples.
Lastly, we'll pull in our product. So as you can see in Braze, it's very easy to be able to pull in all the information that you need for your transactional email. We'll paste that in. And then down here we're gonna go ahead, change our background color. Next in our footer content, we're gonna go ahead with this example, I'm just gonna paste Stitches address down here in the footer. Center a text, go for a little bit more of a gray color, and there's our transactional email. Next, we'll click Done. Oh, don't forget your subject line. Can't send an email without a subject line. Right here. We'll go in and we will say thank you for your purchase, and we can go back to our content. You can preview and test all from right in here. So we will then click done and click done again. Now we're gonna click: Launch Canvas.
Once that's all setup, we're able to go over here into our API, here I'm able to see the external ID that I'm able to test against. The person that I wanted to test and make sure was in my segment when I set up this canvas, so this person with the external ID of one, is making this purchase of a backpack. We're gonna go ahead and click send. And this API call is very similar to the one that Brandon set up and his Braze the Bar video. So if you'd like to see how it's done step by step, feel free to go to his video. We are gonna go to our inbox and here you can see in our inbox we've got our subject line. Thank you for your purchase. We see our beautiful email right here that we've pulled in with the name, custom, embroidery, color, and price, which matches everything. That we see in our API call. So thank you so much everybody, and I hope you have fun in Braze. Bye.
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