Building Email Templates
How your messages is look is determined by a template. You have three ways of building your email templates with Smartmessages.
Build your own
If you’re happy working with HTML, we won’t get in your way. Use an app like Dreamweaver or your favourite text editor to create your HTML, then just paste it in.
If you want us to host your images, you’ll need to upload them through the files tab and alter your image URLs to point at them.
We can generate a plain-text version from your HTML, or you can write it yourself.
You can add dynamic field placeholders to drop in dynamic greetings, company name, a link to a web version, an opening tracker, unsubscribe links and much more.
It’s possible to drive this kind of template through our API, so you can automate your mailshots completely.
Use a standard template
If you’re not comfortable with handling HTML, you can use one of our standard templates and enter your content using a simple visual editor, no coding skills required!
You choose a reusable template or a global template on the send tab, and enter your content on the content tab and add your text and images.
If you want something different or more complex than our standard templates, ask us about creating a reusable template that’s designed & built for you. The big advantage of these templates is that you can change their content without having to touch the underlying template, so you don’t need to return to your web designer (or us) every time you want a change.
RSS templates
We all like to be achieve our desired outcomes with the minimum of effort, and using RSS to generate your email content is a great way of achieving that.
To use this you will need a source of stories in the form of an RSS/Atom feed. Most CMS-driven sites and blogs will already have one of these. An RSS template typically includes introductory and trailing paragraphs sandwiching a series of story introductions and ‘read more’ links that take you to your web site.
At present we need to build custom templates for you to make the most of this.
Getting it right
However you choose to build your template, check your links and images to make sure nothing’s broken, as it’s just embarrassing to get that wrong! It’s a good idea to validate your markup if you want to have any chance of it rendering consistently across browsers and email clients. Smartmessages provides tools for all of those checks to help you get it right with the minimum of effort.
Test, test and test again!
When you’re happy with your template and content, it’s vitally important that you test it by sending it to a test list – any mistakes are your own, and you can’t unsend an email message!