New Email Message

The new email message page is commonly used to craft all aspects of your email message, from layout & design to more technical email tasks.

The page is virtually identical when creating a new message and editing an existing one.

For a complete guide on email marketing best practices view the Email Marketing Resources, which includes:

How to create a relevant email message
How to avoid common mistakes in email marketing
Understanding email authentication methods (SenderID, SPF, DKIM, DMARC)

Using the Email Editor

The built-in editor allows you to:

Create an email without having to code in HTML with Design view (view screenshot).
Build your email in HTML language with Code view.

In alternative, you can work in another application, such as Adobe Dreamweaver or similar, and then copy & paste the HTML code directly in the Code view of the built-in editor.

The built-in editor has numerous useful features, including:

Uploading/editing images
Inserting/removing links
Inserting dynamic fields
Inserting dynamic content
Insert link to web version of message
Add a subscribe / unsubscribe link
Insert profile updates link
Paste from Microsoft Word

Using the Image Manager & Image Properties

Image Manager	Image Properties
The Image Manager allows you to upload images, which are saved locally in the system. Once an image is uploaded it will show up on the Browse Files tab. To insert the image into your email, select the image and click on Insert.	Once an image is placed in your email, right-click on the image and click on Image Properties. This tool is very useful to configure the image settings, such as adding an Image Alt text (i.e. the text shown when an image is not shown), including a description, and constraining the image to its original width-height ratio, so that once you resize the image the proportions are not distorted.

Intermediate-Advanced

Instead of locally saving your images into the system, you can choose to insert images from the web. This can be done by going into the HTML code and inserting an image tag.

Here's a basic example:

Inserting Dynamic Fields

How to insert a dynamic field into a message

To personalize an email message with recipient-specific information, you can use dynamic fields (also referred to as dynamic tags or merge tags). Dynamic fields retrieve any information (personal info, preferences, e-commerce data) stored in recipient fields.

For example, if your recipient list contains the first names of your recipients in a recipient field called "firstname", you could insert the [firstname] dynamic field as "Dear [firstname]" in the first line of the email and each recipient will receive a message that opens with a personalized salutation, such as "Dear John".

To add a Dynamic field to your message:

In the Email Editor, click on the Dynamic fields button (view screenshot) to view a list of Dynamic fields that you can insert into the message.
If a Recipient field is not listed, it means that it has not been set as Dynamic. You can change this setting under Recipient fields.
Select which dynamic field to add in the current section of your email message. The corresponding tag will be added to the HTML code.

To edit the default value of the dynamic fields, click on Dyn. fields.

You can set a default value at the message level. For example, if you don't know the first name of your recipients, the [firstname] dynamic tag will show as blank. To avoid this, click on Dyn. fields and under first name type the corresponding value, such as "friend".
You can also set a default value at the account level when managing recipient fields.

Dynamic fields containing a URL

Please note that if the field contains a URL, the URL should not contain the beginning HTTP:// or HTTPS://, which should instead be in the HTML code. In other words, the correct syntax for inserting a dynamic URL into a message is:

<a href="http://[mydynamicfield]">My link</a>

or for a secure URL:

<a href="https://[mydynamicfield]">My link</a>

If you instead use this syntax:

<a href="[mydynamicfield]">My link</a>

... the system will treat it as a relative link and will automatically add the URL to your control panel to the URL.

Profile Updates

To build and update recipient's information within your List, you can use the Profile Updates feature. This feature allows you to create a custom form that your recipients can fill out and update or add their info to your List.

Inserting Dynamic Content

Dynamic content allows you to display different content (banners, text, images, rss feeds, etc) into the email you are working on. To determine how to set the conditions to display different content to different recipients, you will have to be familiar with filters.