On the 'Messages' tab in Engage you can create, design, and analyze your email marketing—all in one place. You can easily customize emails and show different, targeted modules for different segments of your audiences to get the best results with every send-out.
Read on to find out how you can work with different modules to create the right design for every purpose.
Design themes
Your email design theme is a set of predefined modules adapted to your brand's graphic guidelines. The modules within the theme are then used to construct your email messages. If you work with multiple brands in Engage you might have multiple themes installed. Read more about design themes here.
How to use email modules
Simply drag and drop the module of your choice from the left side menu into your email. A module may be used any number of times in a single email, and you can arrange them in any order. The modules have toggleable elements that can be shown and hidden, making designing emails very flexible—you can combine two modules, and show or hide elements, to make a new layout.
Examples of toggleable elements:
- Image
- Heading
- Text
- Button
- Top and bottom margin
- Margin under image
Examples of modules are Header, Fullwidth, Two Column etc. Read more about email modules here.
Getting started
Choose the module you want to use, for example Fullwidth. In the right-hand panel you can edit its look on three different tabs.
Content
Tick or untick the items you want to display, such as images, titles, etc. Use the text editor to write and edit your text.
Appearance
This is where you choose colors for each module. Here you have the option to change the color of the background, text and buttons. You can choose a color from your existing color library that is defined in your design theme, or you can insert a hexcode if you want to add a new color temporarily in your email design. Note that the hexcodes will need to be manually inserted every time you want to use a color that is not included in your color library.
The maximum number of colors you can use is about 30, but you'll rarely need that many.
Filter
Choose who should see this particular module. Perhaps only VIP customers should see a voucher in the email and women should see women's clothes only. You decide how personal each email should be using this tool.
To add a filter to a module, open the Filter tab and either choose an existing filter in the drop-down list or create a new one. For example, you can create filters based on saved segments. Read more about segmentation here.
Note that emails with many modules and a large number of filters mean more work for the application. This can mean that the delivery takes a little longer to get to all recipients.
Copy/Paste
Text formatted in different text editing software, such as MS Word, often includes HTML formatting which could affect the look of the module in Engage. So, when you paste text from an external source, it's always best to use the Clear formatting function.
Personalization
Personalization means that we insert a specific field from the recipient's contact card, a common personalization is the first name. It is important to only use fields where all or most of your contacts have relevant data. If data is missing and no information is retrieved, it is possible to add a fallback that is shown to anyone who lacks data in the current field. For example: personalization on first name [[firstName]], with fallback [[firstName, Best customer]] where "Best customer" will appear for those who lack data in the first name field.
For personalization, click Insert field in the toolbar and select the field that you want. Read more about personalized here.
Images
Which file formats depend on what the mail clients can handle. JPEG and PNG work for the majority of them, however SVG is not supported in many common browsers, desktop and mobile email clients.
The image surface has a fixed width, but the height can vary depending on the image. Maximum file size is 5 MB.
We have adapted the image surfaces for retina screens that have double resolution, a width of 1440 pixels. You should always use images with at least the width specified in the image surface, otherwise the image will be enlarged automatically and lose quality. You can choose images that are previously uploaded in the image archive or upload new ones when you want to use them in an email. Just click Select image to access the image archive (which can also be accessed under Administration). Once you have selected the image, you will be able to crop it or use the whole image. Crop by grabbing and dragging the markers to the desired size.
Tip: In order to avoid heavy send-outs that take an unnecessary amount of mobile data for the receiver and load slowly, we recommend a maximum size of about 250 Kb per image.
GIF animations
You can use GIFs in email templates. Read more about how to use GIFs in emails here.
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