Implementing such a functionality is possible, but it greatly depends on your SubscriberKey setup. If you have a Sales/Service Cloud or any CRM connected and your SubscriberKey is tied to an id in this system, your reciepient needs to have such an id, so a record (a Contact if it is Salesforce CRM) needs to be present/created. If you are using the email address as SubscriberKey, no record needs to be present.
Any additional data needed in the email can be passed to the triggered send as additional contact attributes via API (see example below).
Your request could look like this:
POST Request to: messaging/v1/messageDefinitionSends/key:[external key of triggered send]/send
{
"To": {
"Address": "to@subscriber.com",
"SubscriberKey": "SUBSCRIBER_KEY",
"ContactAttributes": {
"SubscriberAttributes": {
"passwordResetLink": "https://example.com/pwreset?code=123456"
}
}
},
"From": {
"Address": "you@company.com",
"Name": "your company"
},
"OPTIONS": {
"RequestType": "SYNC"
}
}
Reading that value in the email:
You can access this value using AMPscript in your email:
%%[
Var @link
Set @link = AttributeValue("passwordResetLink")
]%%
<a href="%%=RedirectTo(@link)=%%">Reset password</a>
EDIT / UPDATE:
As I'm seeing some activity around this post lately, I'd like to add information regarding a recent addition tor Marketing Cloud. You can now also use the Transactional Messaging API in order to use Marketing Cloud as a mailing API. Here are some of the key differences:
- Email interaction isn't configured in Email Studio anymore, but rather via API
- Immediate delivery using high priority sends isn't necessary anymore and don't cost 4 supermessages per send
- Updated messaging platform (improved speed and scalability)
- Message tracking
For further information check out the documentation article "Transactional Messaging API" and it's subpages.
EDIT / UPDATE 2:
Sends thourgh the Transactional Messaging API can now also be configured using Journey Builder and the new "Transactional Send Journeys". To find out how this is done, you can follow the instructions in my article about Transactional Send Journeys and the Event Notification Service.
Further reading: