Can I Use Marketing Cloud for Transactional Emails Just Like Mandrill?

Question

Our marketing team recently moved to Marketing Cloud. I need to transfer our transactional emails to MC.

Our current system uses Mandrill to send transactional emails using the following workflow:

• User requests a password reset
• I queue up the request into our own queue with the required Mandrill TemplateId and replacement info (first_name: Johnny, token: 181821829138192831293)
• Our email processor grabs the queue, using .NET to connect to Mandrill, and sends the email

Can this same workflow work with Marketing Cloud? Everything I have read suggests not. I can create Triggered Sends but they seemed to be tied to actions/events stored in SF and uses SF Contact data for the replacement/merge tags. The replacement tag data (ex: password reset link) will only live in our custom Db and not in SF.

Answer 1

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>

Further reading:

• Create a Triggered Email Message Interaction
• REST Reference: POST /messaging/v1/messageDefinitionSends
• AMPscript Syntax Guide
• AMPscript: AttributeValue(1)
• AMPscript: RedirectTo