Today, I am going to explain about the process of implementing the CC (Carbon Copy) and BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) functionality for the Transactional Campaign Emails within the Sitecore Send.
Sitecore Send is an AI-powered, microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native email marketing automation platform designed to help businesses create and manage email marketing campaigns. It enables business users and marketers to design and execute contextual and personalized email campaigns using customer behavior data, along with robust automation and tracking features.
So, let us firstly understand what CC and BCC are and how they are useful.
CC (Carbon Copy) is an effective way to keep additional people informed about a campaign without designating them as the main target or primary audience. When you add someone to the CC field, they receive the exact replica of the same email as the main recipient receives, and their address is also visible to others on the list. This is especially handy and useful when you want stakeholders such as marketing managers, compliance officers, or project leads to remain updated on the campaign content for reviewing or record-keeping purposes.
BCC (Blind Carbon Copy), on the other hand, sends a discreet copy of the email to selected recipients without revealing their information to the rest of the mailing recipients. This is especially important when you need to protect privacy, such as including internal teams, auditors, or regional managers, without exposing their email addresses to the rest of the audience. It also helps to prevent accidental “reply-all” situations, ensuring smooth communication flow.
In the marketing campaigns, CC and BCC are more than just convenience features. They help to maintain the transparency, recipient privacy protection, and ensure that the right people have access to important communications. They are also valuable tools and come in handy for internal coordination, compliance monitoring, and quality assurance before a campaign reaches the full audience.
CC and BCC in Sitecore Send Transactional Campaigns
In July 2025, Sitecore Send released a powerful enhancement feature to its transactional email API within the Sitecore Send platform that enables support for CC (Carbon Copy) and BCC (Blind Carbon Copy) fields. This feature empowers marketers with greater control over their email campaigns. This significant update enables them to include additional recipients, whether visible or discreet, by leveraging custom fields. With this release, Sitecore Send brings transactional email capabilities up to par with modern enterprise communication needs, offering developers and organizations more granular control over email delivery, visibility, and compliance.
Previously, the Sitecore Send Transactional API only allowed developers to specify direct recipients using the “To” field. This imposed limitations for common business scenarios, such as sending an invoice to a customer while also notifying the account manager, or copying legal or auditing teams without exposing them to the main recipients of the mail. Now, using the CC and BCC features, organizations can easily add secondary recipients via "Cc" and "Bcc" fields directly in the API payload, both at the global level or per individual recipient.
The update applies to the transactional API endpoint: POST https://{hostname}/v3/campaigns/transactional/send.{format}
The endpoint requires an API key, passed as a query parameter (i.e., ?apikey=your_api_key). Headers must include Accept: application/json and Content-Type: application/json. In the request payload, developers can now specify Cc and Bcc either as a top-level array that will affect all the recipients or within each item in the Personalization → To array, for user-specific configurations. This flexibility allows for dynamic use cases, such as sending a customized message to a user while copying different managers or internal departments based on conditions in the payload.
The importance of CC is that it keeps additional recipients informed, with their addresses visible to all other recipients of the email. This is useful when transparency is necessary, such as in customer service communications involving both the customer and their assigned agent. On the other hand, BCC is used for privacy and oversight. BCC recipients remain hidden from all other recipients, allowing sensitive recipients like compliance officers, QA reviewers, or logging systems to quietly receive transactional emails without cluttering the visible recipient list or violating user trust.
Why This Functionality Matters
Integrating CC and BCC into Transactional Campaigns brings several advantages:
Visibility and Oversight: Using CC ensures internal stakeholders such as marketing managers or compliance officers also receive copies of the email, fostering transparency and accountability.
Privacy and Discretion: BCC allows internal parties to monitor campaign communications without exposing their email addresses to primary recipients, which is ideal for confidential or sensitive monitoring.
The introduction of CC and BCC support for Transactional API in Sitecore Send (rolled out on July 7, 2025) marks a significant enhancement in transactional communications. Developers can now build richer, more intelligent email workflows with less effort and greater compliance. Whether it is copying a customer success manager on user onboarding messages, sending silent BCCs for monitoring, or creating dynamic routing based on customer type, this change unlocks countless possibilities.
References
Sitecore Changelog - https://developers.sitecore.com/changelog/send/07072025/expanded-recipient-options:-a-cc-bcc-support-in-transactional-api
Transactional Campaign - https://doc.sitecore.com/send/en/developers/api-documentation/manage-a-transactional-campaign.html