Email Builder Intro
TRANSCRIPT
StarChapter is excited to announce the new Email Builder tool! Email Builder is now live on all StarChapter systems on a current plan. If your system doesn’t have Email Builder yet, please reach out to our Support Team for more information about upgrading to a current plan and design, which will include many new features and enhancements.
As email standards and email clients have evolved over the years and those updates affect the rendering of email, deliverability, and user engagement. Email Builder is designed to address those changes while making your email look professional for all recipients, improve deliverability, and align with user behaviors against fraudulent emails.
Email Builder includes more dynamic default templates and email builds, which do replace all previous email templates. You will need to recreate any scheduled or recurring emails or any drafts you had in the system previously. The new tools will allow you to draft emails including dynamic content from multiple areas of StarChapter, such as a list of upcoming meetings, multiple announcements, and a display of sponsors, within a single email. Additionally, you will have the ability to customize the layout of your emails, just as you can for your webpages in StarChapter. With this increased flexibility, there are a few extra options available, so let’s review some of those now.
To get started, go to Communications > Send an Email and click the New Email button at the top of the page. You can choose to send a One-Time Email, which can be sent immediately or scheduled for a later date, or you can set up a Recurring Email. For this example, let’s send a One-Time Email.
As with the former Email Manager tool, you can narrow down the Mailing Type and then select your preferred Email Build.
The Content display will provide an opportunity to edit content, but you may also see placeholders if you are sending a recurring email or need to enter text. Be sure to keep all updates within the table provided. If images are added, they must be sized appropriately for the template. All templates are 600 pixels in width. For this example, we’re going to leave the placeholder text.
The Recipient’s screen should look familiar, as it’s the same as it was in Email Manager. Select your Recipients and click Next.
Be sure to review your email and make any necessary changes. Send yourself a test email to review the formatting before sending. When you’re ready, click either the Send Email button to send it immediately or the Schedule Email to set a future time for this email.
For this example, I am going to Cancel out of this page and return to the Send an Email page. Please note that the draft we just created is in this list, but there are no sent messages. The Send an Email table will only include active drafts. Once they are deleted or sent, they will be removed from this list.
We will see the same approach in the Scheduled Emails table which will only include active and suspended scheduled emails. Once those emails have been sent and have no further recurrences, they will no longer appear on this list.
All email history is now organized in the Email History page. Use the Reports button to access the Delivery Report for each mailing. If you need to resend an email, you will also do so through the Email History page.
Finally, we can see the available Email Builds in the Email Builder tool. Since Email Builder has the ability to pull dynamic content from many areas of the system, there are two layers to the setup. The email builds include the layout and all templates that will pull content into your emails or allow you to enter content into a blank content section. This tool works much like the Page Content tool by allowing you to control the layout and content of each email build. The templates for each email content section are located in the Design area of StarChapter, but we recommend reaching out to our Support Team if you would like changes made to those.
To review email builds, search for the type of email you would like to use. You will see that there are many email builds to choose from. To see an example of each email build, click the Preview button next to each build. Before making any changes to email builds, we do recommend reviewing all options as you may find one that aligns with your preferences has already been provided.
Since there are so many new options, you can also select the Default email build for each type of build. If you want to have a different email build as the default version, click the Make Default button beside your preferred email build. This option will display first when drafting a new email or be used automatically if you are setting the default version of a transactional email, such as a receipt.
Please remember that all support services are included with every StarChapter plan, so don’t hesitate to submit a Support Ticket with any questions or training requests.
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