It’s been said that transactional messaging is an incredible tool to increase customer engagement. Can it really make such a big impact? We know that today, consumers expect real-time communications from the brands they interact with. Examples of such messages include order confirmations, account alerts, identity verification, time-triggered reminders, and other messages with expectations of immediate delivery. The bottom line is that companies must be able to quickly respond to their customers’ ever-changing needs for information and services, otherwise they risk losing loyal customers.

Critical messages need to be delivered in a timely manner in order to effectively inform and communicate with customers, and at the same time, these messages must honor compliance and data privacy. So how can Salesforce help?

Set up your transactional messages

By easily integrating in-house applications to a robust messaging service, companies can quickly roll out new types of transactional messages using Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Developers can integrate into a simple interface that powers their marketing team to deploy email, SMS, and push messages fast.

Here is an example:

Megan, a customer of Local Credit Union, needs to access her bank account but has forgotten her password. She decides to reset her password using her email address, which was previously stored in her credit union account. She receives an email immediately asking her to verify her password change request.

In this example with Megan, we have a person-initiated single message confirming the completion of a process with expectations of immediate delivery. The credit union can push the password approval back to Megan in near real-time.

In another example, Steve is a customer of College Choice 529 and updates his personal account information on their website. Afterwards, Steve receives an email message confirming the information has changed in his account and notified Steve to call the customer service if he did not initiate the change.

In Steve’s example above, there was a system-initiated single notification message triggered by an application, immediately when the event occurred. This is how Steve was able to receive such a timely email from College Choice 529 informing him account updates have been made.

So how does this all work? Salesforce offers easy-to-use RESTful and SOAP APIs for sending messages and retrieving send status. Messages are processed and deployed in near real-time, with predictable deployment in email or SMS channels. Additionally, content creators will be able to leverage Content Builder to easily extend their branding to transactional messages.

The great news is that Transactional Messaging APIs will be available soon! We’ll keep you posted as to when you can start leveraging these APIs. Developer documentation will have you integrated and sending in no time. Please join our Marketing Cloud Developer webinar on August 2 to hear how to leverage transactional messaging and see it in action from our product experts.

To learn more about using REST and SOAP APIs, check out the API Basics module in Trailhead.

Finally, for more developer resources on all things Marketing Cloud, check out our newly launched Marketing Cloud Developer Center.