How to use flows to send transactional emails

You will learn

Learn how to set up important transactional emails inside Klaviyo that are triggered when your subscribers purchase or interact with your brand. Customers expect these emails and will search for them in their inbox. For this reason, transactional emails are sent to almost all customers and should not contain any marketing content.

Before you begin

Please note that transactional emails:

• Are only available for paid accounts.

• Are only available for metric-triggered flows (such as Placed Order).

  • Cannot be used in price drop flows.

• Must be approved by Klaviyo, which can take up to 24 hours (1 business day).

  • Note: editing a transactional message removes the transactional status, and the message will need to be re-submitted for approval.

• Cannot be imported from your ecommerce platform into Klaviyo.

• Are marked on a per-email basis, not per-flow.
  • You can have 1 email within a flow that is transactional, and have every other email in that flow be considered marketing content. 
  • You cannot automatically mark an entire flow as transactional, though it is possible to create a flow in which all the emails are transactional. 
• Do not appear any differently than marketing emails to your recipients (i.e., your customers won't know that an email is marked as transactional).
• Cannot be requested for a message that has had an A/B test set up for it.  

Create a transactional email

When building out these emails, if the flow is triggered by an event that's synced through your ecommerce integration, like Placed Order, then you can use a post-purchase flow as a starting point in terms of the information that you will pull into the template (e.g., a link, image, and name of the item).

To instead build a flow from scratch:

1. Navigate to the Flows tab in Klaviyo.

2. Either:

   • Select an existing flow.
   • Click Create Flow in the upper right, then click Build your own.

3. Design or edit your flow in the builder, then personalize your flow emails.

   • You can leverage our guide to personalizing flows with dynamic data to learn how to pull event data into your email templates.

4. Click on the message you want to be marked transactional.

   Note: if you want multiple messages in a flow to be transactional, you must select them one at a time.

5. Check that the message is in Manual mode. 

6. In the right sidebar, click Apply for transactional status.

7. Wait at up to 24 hours (i.e., 1 business day) to see if your message was approved. While waiting for approval:

   • You will not be able to edit the message content.

   • You cannot set up an A/B test. Messages that had an A/B test previously, will not show the option to apply for transactional status.
     

8. Within 24 hours, you will see whether your message has been accepted or rejected.
   

What to do if the message was rejected

If your message was rejected you can:

• Keep the message as-is (and not have it be marked transactional).
• Edit the content and re-submit it for approval.
• Submit an appeal.

For the appeal, you must submit a ticket to Klaviyo Support and include:

• “Transactional appeal” as the subject line/reason for the ticket
• Flow message ID
• Example (or 2) of the message you want to send
• Screenshot of your call to action (CTA)
• Estimate of how many times per month someone could receive this message
• Links to your privacy policy and terms of service

Additional resources

• Understanding transactional messages
• How to send order updates via SMS
• How to create a post-purchase flow