Create Your Own Emails

Overview

Most of the time you use templates curated by your supplier to create emails in your campaigns. You can also create your own (CYO) emails for use in your campaigns, if the option is provided by your supplier.

You can quickly build emails without having to be an expert in HTML using the WYSIWYG email builder. The WYSIWYG email builder editor provides a way for you to quickly modify email with simple drag and drop functionality. Additionally, you can modify text and images directly, without having to access the source code.

The campaign is the container that holds all the tactics associated with a marketing campaign. The campaign keeps multiple types of content (tactics) organized. Email is a popular tactic in any marketing campaign. Having multiple tactics in a campaign allows you to get reporting for the campaign, not just the tactic. The WYSIWYG email builder provides you a way to quickly create emails for a campaign other than those provided by your supplier.

Before creating your own emails consider the following:

• You cannot send an email without a campaign.
• You can have a single email in your campaign.
• Emails are sent to recipients from your contact list. Email is one activity type (tactic) used to generate leads for the sales staff and provide a way to engage with partners while gathering data about the recipient.
• The WYSIWYG email builder supports special links for adding unsubscribe, opt-in, and view email in browser.
• The WYSIWYG email builder supports merge tags (content placeholders) that allow you to create personalized emails with recipient-specific information.
• Photo search (free stock photo gallery) in the WYSIWYG email builder provides access to a large repository of high-quality images via popular stock photo services. The images are free to use under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license.
• Dynamic images are available via the WYSIWYG email builder. Users can specify both a static placeholder image and a dynamic image URL when adding an image content block. This allows for scenarios such as personalized birthday cards, countdown timers, dynamic ads, and many other user cases where an image is built dynamically at the time it is served.

for more information about the WYSIWYG email builder, see Advanced Email Editing. and Content/Formatting/Display Options for Marketing and Comms Content.

Read up on tips for creating effective emails at Best Practice: Email Design and Content.

Before You Begin

Creating your own emails is one of the more advanced tasks in the portal. Before creating your own emails, you should already be familiar with major portal functions, such as activating campaigns, activating emails, and adding activities to emails.

Review these articles before continuing, if required:

• About Emails
• Manage Templates
• About Browse Campaigns
• About Campaign Statuses
• About My Campaigns
• Activate Campaigns
• Manage Campaigns
• Manage Emails

Contents

Click + to expand each section.

How to Create Your Own Email

You can create your own (CYO) email for a particular campaign. The new email is added only to the campaign from which you created it.

Note

The Create Your Own Email option may need to be enabled on your system. Reach out to your supplier if you want to use it.

To create a new email:

1. Activate the campaign to which you want to add an email. Alternatively, open the campaign from your My Campaigns view, if you've already activated it.
2. Click Add Activity and select Email.

3. Click Create Your Own Email.

   

4. Name the email and click Create. This opens the activity dashboard for your new email.

The blank email is added to your list of marketing activities for this campaign. You can begin designing and building it by adding images, text, links, and other content. For more information, see Edit a CYO Email, Advanced Email Editing, and Content/Formatting/Display Options for Marketing and Comms Content

After adding content to the email, activate it. To learn more about activating emails, see Manage Emails.

Edit a CYO Email

The WYSIWYG email builder provides an easy-to-use interface for building new emails from scratch. You can drag-and-drop content blocks including text, images, videos, and links. You can rearrange content and add new rows or columns by dragging-and-dropping structure blocks.

This article describes how to open the WYWIWYG email builder and general information about the different tasks you can do inside it. Learn more about building your own emails at Advanced Email Editing.

To open the WYSIWYG email builder:

1. Navigate to Campaigns > My Campaigns.
2. Open the campaign that contains the email you want to edit.
3. In Mailings, click the name of the email to open it.
4. Click Edit and navigate to the Personalize Email tab.
5. Click Edit.

6. Select a template to start from, if you're editing for the first time. You can select a layout template now, or select blank to build a new template from scratch. Learn more at Manage Templates.

   

   If you have a Default Template set (under > Settings > Manage Templates if you're the administrator), that template will automatically be applied. To change the template, click Templates > Change Templates and select from the pop-up.

Once your builder is open, you can use Content / Rows / Settings panels customize the page. For more information about the options available in the builder, see Content/Formatting/Display Options for Marketing and Comms Content.

To get started building your own email, we suggest starting with the Settings tab. Here, you can set global changes that will apply to all new rows and content blocks that you add to the email. These settings can be overridden for each row or content block in the Content Properties tab for each content block and Row Properties tab for each row.

For more on adding images, buttons, landing pages, social media links, and HTML, see Advanced Email Editing.

After adding content to the email, activate it. To learn more about activating emails, see Manage Emails.

Generate Emails with AI

If your supplier has enabled Ask IQ in your portal, and provided Create Your Own (CYO) functionality for emails, you can use Ask IQ to generate marketing emails on your behalf.

For more information, see Creating Marketing Emails with AI and About Ask IQ.