Marketing Cloud Next - Resolve email not sent reason "Tried to send promotional email to recipient without opt-in"

Confirm that Consent Upload

The most common reason to see this error is if you have not imported consent. Consent is not default "opted in" so it must be imported. You can check on an individual record's consent using instructions in this article.

Understanding Consent Validation Settings

Another common problem is seeing this error when sending transactional emails. 

There is a common misconception that disabling Require transactional email messages to use communication subscriptions to validate consent setting in Marketing Cloud means that all transactional emails will not check for consent. This is not correct.

• The Require transactional email messages to use communication subscriptions to validate consent setting in Marketing Cloud only controls whether the Communication Subscription field is required during configuration of the Send Email Message flow action.
• The "Tried to send promotional email to recipient without opt-in" error occurs because consent validation is still being enforced due to a Communication Subscription being selected in your email configuration. 

1. Navigate to Setup → Marketing Cloud → Assisted Setup → Channels → Email
2. Locate the Manage Consent Validation section
3. Disable the setting: "Require transactional email messages to use communication subscriptions to validate consent"

1. When configuring your transactional email in Flow
2. Leave the Communication Subscription field empty/blank. Do not select any Communication Subscription from the dropdown

• Enabled = Communication Subscription field is required
• Disabled = Communication Subscription field is optional, but if selected, consent is still validated