Brevo Transactional + Marketing Emails: The Complete Strategy

Most e-commerce businesses run their transactional and marketing email from different systems. Transactional emails — order confirmations, shipping notifications, password resets — go through Shopify’s default mail service, or a standalone SMTP provider. Marketing emails go through Mailchimp, Klaviyo, or another ESP. These systems do not share data, do not coordinate timing, and produce a fragmented customer experience.

Brevo is one of the few platforms that handles both transactional and marketing email natively, in a single account, with a unified customer data view. This is a meaningful operational and strategic advantage — but only if it is configured correctly.

This post covers the full picture: how to set up Brevo for both email types, how to protect deliverability by keeping the two sending streams appropriately separated, and how to turn transactional emails into revenue opportunities without compromising their primary function.

Understanding the Two Types of Email — and Why They Are Different

Transactional emails are triggered by a specific user action and contain information the recipient genuinely needs: their order details, their tracking link, their password reset code. These emails are expected, often eagerly awaited, and have open rates frequently above 50%. They are not marketing emails.

Marketing emails are promotional or relationship-building: campaigns, newsletters, automated flows, promotional offers. They are sent to subscribers who have given marketing consent, and they are measured on engagement and revenue metrics.

The operational risk of mixing these two types is deliverability damage. If your marketing campaigns generate a high unsubscribe rate or spam complaints — as they sometimes will, especially after a sale or a reactivation campaign — that reputation signal should not affect the inbox placement of your order confirmation emails.

Brevo handles this through sub-account IP separation and dedicated sending domain configuration. Understanding and implementing this separation is the most important technical step when using Brevo as a combined platform.

Technical Setup: Configuring Brevo for Both Email Types

SMTP for Transactional Email

Transactional emails can be routed through Brevo via two methods: the Brevo SMTP relay, or the Brevo API.

The SMTP relay method replaces your e-commerce platform’s default email provider with Brevo’s SMTP credentials. In Shopify, this is done via Settings > Notifications > Custom Email Domain. In WooCommerce, use a SMTP plugin (WP Mail SMTP or similar) configured with Brevo’s SMTP host and your API key.

The API method is more flexible for custom transactional flows — you can pass full template data, contact attributes, and attachment handling via Brevo’s transactional email API. This approach is recommended for brands with custom order management systems or complex transactional requirements.

DNS Authentication: The Non-Negotiable Step

Before sending either transactional or marketing email through Brevo, complete DNS authentication for your sending domain. This means adding:

SPF record: Authorises Brevo’s mail servers to send on behalf of your domain
DKIM record: Adds a cryptographic signature to outgoing emails, verifying they have not been tampered with
DMARC record: Policy that tells receiving servers how to handle emails that fail SPF or DKIM

Brevo provides all three records in your account’s “Senders & IPs” settings. This step is not optional — unauthenticated sending now results in major inbox providers (Gmail, Yahoo) routing your emails to spam or blocking delivery entirely following 2024 enforcement updates.

Separating Transactional and Marketing Sending Reputation

In Brevo, you can use different dedicated IP addresses for transactional and marketing sending. This is available on higher-tier plans and is recommended for any brand sending significant volumes of both email types.

Alternatively, use dedicated sender addresses: transactional from [email protected] or [email protected], marketing from [email protected] or [email protected]. This subdomain-level separation helps ISPs and filtering algorithms distinguish the sending streams even on shared IPs.

The most important operational rule: never add transactional email recipients to your marketing list without explicit opt-in. Purchasing from your store does not equal marketing consent in most jurisdictions. Brevo’s platform allows you to manage transactional contacts separately from marketing audience lists — use this feature correctly.

Deliverability Benefits of a Unified Platform

When transactional and marketing email share the same platform with separate reputation management, you gain visibility that fragmented setups lack.

Brevo’s unified analytics show you every email sent to a given contact — transactional and marketing — on one timeline. This means you can see when a contact received an order confirmation, whether they opened it, and how that correlates with subsequent marketing email engagement.

You can use transactional engagement data as a positive deliverability signal. A contact who opens every order confirmation is an actively engaged customer — ISPs see this positive engagement from your domain, which benefits your marketing email inbox placement.

Brevo’s bounce management is also centralised. A hard bounce from a transactional email (invalid address) is automatically reflected in your marketing list status, preventing continued marketing sends to an address that cannot receive email. In fragmented setups, a bounced transactional email and a live marketing subscription can coexist, distorting your list quality metrics.

Upgrading Transactional Emails Into Revenue Opportunities

Transactional emails are the highest-opened emails your brand sends. Using them purely for functional information is an opportunity cost. With careful design, transactional emails can generate meaningful incremental revenue without sacrificing their primary purpose.

The key principle: the functional content comes first, always. The marketing element is secondary and should never obscure or delay the information the recipient actually needs.

Order Confirmation: Cross-Sell Block

After the full order summary — items, pricing, estimated delivery — add a “You might also like” block featuring two to three products that complement the purchased item. This block should be clearly separated visually from the order details.

In Brevo, build this as a dynamic transactional template using the API to pass recommended product data based on what was purchased. Alternatively, build manually curated complementary product blocks for each product category and use template conditions to show the relevant block.

Brands that have tested order confirmation cross-sell blocks consistently report 3–8% click rates on the recommendation block. At high order volumes, this generates meaningful additional revenue at near-zero incremental cost.

Shipping Notification: Review Seed

The shipping notification is sent when the customer is anticipating their delivery and feeling positive about the purchase. This is an excellent moment to seed the review request — not ask for it yet, just prime them.

“Your order is on its way! We’ll check in after it arrives to see how you’re getting on” plants the expectation of a follow-up review request, which improves response rates when the review request actually arrives.

You can also include a “Track your order” CTA linked to your branded tracking page rather than the carrier’s generic tracking interface. Branded tracking pages keep the customer in your environment and allow you to display related products and loyalty programme CTAs alongside the tracking information.

Delivery Confirmation: Review Request

The delivery confirmation email — sent when the carrier marks the order as delivered — has the highest relevance timing for a review request. The customer just received the product; it is literally in their hands.

Keep the delivery confirmation short: confirm delivery, ask how everything looks, and include a single CTA for the review. If you also send a separate marketing review request email through your automation platform, suppress the marketing email for contacts who receive and click the review CTA in the delivery confirmation transactional email. Brevo’s contact attribute update actions can handle this suppression logic.

Why Unified Sending Data Benefits Your Marketing Strategy

When transactional email data flows into the same customer profile as marketing email engagement, your segmentation becomes significantly more powerful.

A contact who purchases every 45 days — visible in their transactional email history — should be in a replenishment flow triggered at day 40 from their last order confirmation. In a fragmented setup, your marketing platform cannot see the transactional order data with this precision. In Brevo, it is all on one timeline.

Post-purchase marketing email timing can also be calibrated against transactional delivery confirmations. Rather than sending a post-purchase email a fixed number of days after the order was placed, trigger it from the delivery confirmation event — which is when the customer actually has the product. This timing improvement alone tends to increase post-purchase email conversion rates.

How Excelohunt Sets Up Brevo for Combined Sending

Correctly configuring Brevo for both transactional and marketing email requires careful attention to authentication, IP separation, list management, and template design. Done properly, the setup creates a compounding advantage: better deliverability, richer customer data, and transactional emails that pull their weight commercially.

The Excelohunt team works with brands to set up and optimise Brevo as a full-stack email platform — from DNS authentication through transactional template design and marketing automation configuration.

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