An event based email is sent when a defined event occurs, such as an account upgrade, a purchase, or a product milestone. These emails respond to behavior and can be highly relevant because they match a real moment in the user journey. Event based emails are often implemented as a specialized form of triggered messaging.
How Events Get Into Your Email System
In modern stacks, product events are emitted by your application and passed to downstream systems. Developers commonly deliver events using webhooks or through direct API calls. Some platforms expose event callbacks so teams can respond to events within a broader integration framework.
Designing Email Around the Event
Event based emails benefit from a tight feedback loop. If a recipient clicks a CTA that should change product state, confirm the state in the app and prevent follow-up emails from contradicting it. This avoids situations where a user receives “complete setup” emails after they already completed setup.
Because these emails are contextual, the message should be specific about what happened and what the recipient should do next. Many event based emails behave like a triggered email because they are tied to a single event, but the key difference is the technical source and reliability of the event pipeline.
Reliability and Monitoring
If you have multiple event sources, normalize event naming and payload structure so templates can be reused. This reduces the number of near-duplicate templates and makes it easier to maintain email quality as the product grows.
If event delivery is delayed or duplicated, users may get confusing messages. Treat event based email as a systems problem. Add idempotency, log event IDs, and monitor failures. If you send via an email API, validate payloads and handle retries cleanly.
Event Based Email and Topol
Topol helps teams build event based templates with stable structure and predictable rendering, making it easier to integrate email creation into event-driven systems. Learn more at Topol or sign up at Topol signup.