Email Messages

Properties

When you define an email message interaction, also known as a "send definition," you specify the name, external key, and description of the message interaction to identify and describe the message within the application interface as well as with API calls.

You also select the message content to send. You create the content of the message before you can associate it to an email message interaction. To create email content, see Creating, Building, and Maintaining Emails.

Send Management

When you create an email message interaction, you specify the send classification to use. You must create a send classification before you can include it in the interaction. You can override the sender profile and the delivery profile for the send classification that you choose.

If you use have the data extensions feature enabled in your account, you can choose to enable send logging when you create the email message interaction. Logging sends capture an email's variable values for each send in a data extension and maintains that data for as long as you specify. In addition to selecting the checkbox on the interaction, you must create a send logging data extension and update the data extension with AMPscript in the email message content. See the Data Extension Guide for more information about the Send Logging data extension template. See the AMPscript Guide for more information about functions that update a data extension.

Audience

You indicate the audience that receives your message when you create an email message interaction. The audience can be:

• Any number of lists and/or groups. An audience that contains lists and/or groups cannot contain data extensions, filters, or Salesforce items.
• Exactly one data extension
• Exactly one filter
• Any number of Salesforce report or Salesforce campaign, if your account is integrated with Salesforce.

You can also select subscribers to exclude from the audience. If your audience contains lists, groups, data extensions, or filters, your exclusion can contain any number and of lists, groups, and data extensions, as well as a domain exclusion list. A domain exclusion list is a data extension that contains a list of email domains. By selecting your domain exclusion list, the system excludes any email addresses that use that domain.

If your audience contains Salesforce reports or campaigns, then your exclusions can contain only Salesforce reports or campaigns.

You can also exclude subscribers using a script. You create exclusion criteria and subscribers in your audience who met the criteria are excluded from the send.

The lists, groups, and data extensions that you target or exclude show the number of subscribers so you can estimate how large your send will be before you send it.

You can choose to deduplicate the send by email address. If you select this option, the message interaction sends only one email to an email address, regardless of how many times it appears in your audience. If you do not select this option, the interaction sends to all email addresses in the audience, even if they appear more than once.

Test Audience

You can use the same tools available in the Audience section in the Test Audience section. The test audience is the test list that receives the message when you click the Test Send button. This feature lets you test message interactions without editing them.

Message Properties

If you have the optional CC and BCC feature enabled on your account, you can specify CC email addresses and BCC email addresses for the email. Email addresses you enter as CC email addresses will be visible to all recipients of the email. For example, if you send a message to a subscriber and CC your customer service email address, the subscriber will be able to see that the message was sent to both addresses. Email addresses that you enter as BCC email addresses are invisible to recipients of the email.

The email message interaction allows you to specify whether to send the message in Multi-part MIME format. For procedures on this topic, see How To Create a User-Initiated Email Interaction.

User Tracking

When you create the email message interaction, you can decide whether to track the email links and whether to suppress the send from reports.

See Tracking and Reports for more information.