Transactional vs marketing email

Choose the sending mode according to the purpose of the message. Marketing email promotes or nurtures a customer relationship; transactional email supports a specific customer action such as a receipt or password reset. The mode determines the consent and unsubscribe behavior applied when sending.

The choice belongs to the content, not to how you send it. A template, a broadcast and a workflow can all send either kind, and no send call can override what the email itself says it is.

Choosing the sending mode

The picker offers two cards, in the app's own words:

• Marketing: "Only subscribed contacts; manages the unsubscribe link."
• Transactional: "All contacts regardless of subscription; no unsubscribe link."

Newsletters, announcements, promotions, win-backs and re-engagement are marketing. Password resets, receipts, order confirmations, shipping notices and account alerts are transactional.

What actually changes

Everything else in the footer is the same for both: your socials, footer text, disclaimers, copyright and your business address, from the brand kit and brand in use.

On the free plan every email also carries a small "powered by maxclicks" logo below that footer, marketing and transactional alike, linking back to the maxclicks site. It disappears as soon as the space is on a paid plan, see billing.

Consent, for marketing email

A marketing email goes out only when the contact has agreed to receive email from you. If the email also carries a topic, they have to have agreed to that topic too.

Marketing also needs a real contact. Sending marketing content to a bare email address that is not a contact yet is refused, because there is nobody to check consent against and no working unsubscribe link to give them.

Topics

A topic narrows consent further, so someone can take your product updates and skip your promotions. Set Topic in the email-level Delivery settings in the right rail. It offers No topic or the email topics defined in Settings, Topics. The recipient header in the rich composer also exposes the topic selection.

Topics only apply to marketing email, and the field is hidden on a transactional email for that reason.

The topic belongs to the template, alongside its sending mode. Check it explicitly when copying or reviewing content; consent to email alone is insufficient for a topic-bound message.

Suppressions

A suppression blocks an email address, not a contact, so it covers every contact using that address.

Any suppression stops marketing email. Only a bounce suppression stops transactional email, which is what lets a password reset still reach someone who unsubscribed from your newsletter, while nothing is ever re-sent to an address that hard bounces.

Hard bounces and spam complaints create suppressions on their own, and unsubscribe every contact on that address. See contacts.

Why a send gets refused

maxclicks checks these requirements before dispatch. A direct template send can be refused, a workflow can fail at its Send Email step, and a broadcast can exclude or reject an ineligible recipient. Inspect the response or email history in the sending context:

If the email clears all of that and then fails at the mail provider, it is recorded as a failed send with the provider's reason attached, which you can read on the email itself.

For the exact codes and status numbers behind these, see the templates API reference and error handling.