Templates
What’s a template?
A template is the skeleton of a message that is merged with recipient and other data to form a complete message that gets wrapped in an email envelope before sending to a recipent. If you’ve ever used mail merge in a word processor, it’s much the same thing.
Creating Emails
Most senders provide two versions of a template: HTML and plain-text. The HTML version is much like a web page – it can contain styled text, colours, images, links and more. Unfortunately, most email programs (such as Outlook) and web sites (like Hotmail) fall far short of the flexibility and feature set offered by modern web browsers – designing for email is much like designing for web browsers of 10 years ago!
Some recipients may not be able to view HTML email (e.g. Blackberry users), so it’s normal to provide a plain-text version that contains only the text parts and shows links separately.
Templates in Smartmessages
There are several ways of using templates in smartmessages.
- WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) visual Editor – much like a cut down version of Word, no HTML skills required. Just paste in your text and style it with buttons and menu commands, add images and you’re done! You’ll find this editor in the content tab when you go to send a message.
- Template Editor – If you’re familiar with HTML, you’ll be at home here. Create your HTML in a program of your choice and paste it in. Add macros for unsubscribe and web version links, and placeholders for dynamic fields. We provide automated tools for importing from web pages, converting to plain text, and several useful checkers for validity, images and links. You’ll find this editor under the ‘Templates’ tab.
- API – Using RSS or a CMS system you can write code to automate template creation from your own systems, no human input required.
All templates are subject to filtering to avoid security issues relating to JavaScript, media embedding and other problem areas, but this shouldn’t affect normal markup.
Email design tips
- Design your template to look good with with graphics turned off as that’s how most people (typically > 70%) will see it.
- Personalise emails with greetings improve response rates.
- Improve relevance by using what you know of the recipient.
- Automated message content helps cut down on production time & effort, for example generating messages from an RSS feed.
- Validate templates before you start testing them, it’ll save you time.
- Spam-check templates before sending.
- Check for broken images and links before sending – getting it wrong is just embarrassing.
- Test, test and test again. Designing for email is much harder than designing for the web!
Smartmessages provides tools to help with all of these things.