Marketing emails vs. transactional emails

Marketing emails, are messages sent to promote, inform, or engage your audience. They include newsletters, event announcements, presale alerts, and other campaigns designed to drive awareness, sales, or engagement. These emails are sent to subscribers who have opted in to receive marketing communications.

In Canada, emailing contacts who haven’t opted in violates CASL, which requires express or implied consent for all marketing emails. Penalties can be costly per violation, and even company officers can be held liable.

In the U.S., the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t require prior consent but enforces strict rules on transparency, opt-outs, and accuracy.

In both countries, sending unsolicited marketing emails can also damage deliverability, brand reputation, and sender trust.

Transactional emails, on the other hand, are system-triggered messages that provide essential, non-promotional information to an individual user — for example, purchase confirmations, password resets, or ticket delivery messages. These are sent in direct response to an action taken by the user.

In many cases, ticketing platforms provide basic transactional emails, such as order confirmations or ticket delivery notifications.

At this time, Hive focuses exclusively on marketing emails and does not have the ability to toggle or send transactional emails (bi-passing subscription preference) through the platform.