Transcript

In this video you’ll learn techniques for designing a new campaign. Major topics include: Tips for using columns and components to make your emails beautiful, overriding global theme settings, and adding link tracking to buttons.

You can find campaigns within any SuccessBLOC that you have installed in your Totango environment. Starter campaigns come pre-loaded whenever you install a BLOC from the Marketplace. So, making a copy of any of these campaigns is a great place to start because the campaign settings–including target users, schedule, goal, are already defined, which just makes it easier when you’re starting from an example.

Or, of course you start designing a new campaign from one of the many templates in the library. Let’s choose a template that announces new product features. You’ll note that once I save my design, the campaign settings that we saw filled out in that last example are empty because we started from a template. You can learn more about these settings and tips for running a campaign in another video. For now, let’s turn our focus back to the campaign designer.

For purposes of training, I’m going to trash some of these components so we can get a sense of the campaign anatomy. The outer green box indicator here represents the column. When I click on it, I’m now looking at the design properties for that column. This one has a custom background color, which is no color at all. Whereas these columns use the global theme color, which happens to be blue. Email body changes the background color to white–or whatever is set in the Settings tab here. Within columns, you’ll find placeholders for components, which you can drag-and-drop into the placeholder.

In this top section, I already have a component–an image. Just like the column, when I click on a component I’m now looking at the design properties for that element. The properties are specific to that component type–in this example, it’s an image. Rather than having to manually upload my company logo, image components have a handy checkbox to use the logo already defined within global settings. But if I want to upload something new, I can click to paste files from my clipboard or browse my file system. If I don’t like it, I can double-click to change it out. Let’s go back to using my logo and then adjusting the size back to what it was.

To add another column layout, we can just drag and drop it into the editor. You aren’t required to have a column for each component, but it is often best practice for ensuring consistent spacing and giving you flexibility to add visual variety, such as alternating background colors. For example, I can add a divider component directly to this column, which uses the same column background properties. Or, if I instead add it with its own column, I could modify the background properties for the column separately.

Once you get properties for a column or component the way you like them, it’s also handy to be able to just duplicate your work and move the item where you want it.

Let’s see a quick example of all the other components. Text components have padding properties within the Design tab, and they also have an entire formatting bar above. And, if you do have custom HTML, you can toggle the source code option and paste it in. Just make sure that you only use inline styles, as email campaigns don’t support header CSS.

Video allows you to paste in links, add a caption, alt text, alignment, and of course adjust padding.

NPS is for Net Promoter Score surveys on an 11-point scale, CSat is for customer satisfaction surveys on a 5-point scale. When you add one of these items, you can modify the default text–although be careful with changing the core language for NPS, since likelihood to recommend is inherent to a true NPS score. And you’ll also need to choose an attribute for Totango to store the user’s response. So when they choose a 10–because they love us so much, we want to record that value in some field so that we can report on it or take action. If you don’t see the attribute already, then your permissions may give you the ability to add a new attribute to your data model right from this window.

A Usage Card is wonderful for sending monthly digests to show your customers their utilization of your product.

Signature allows you to sign your email, which adds a level of personal touch. Here, you can use the Company Signature, which is in Global Settings, or dynamically use the Sender’s Signature, which will insert the individual Totango team member’s signature whenever they are chosen as the email sender, such as whomever is assigned as the Customer Success manager on the account. If the team member doesn’t have a signature at the time of send, Totango will default to the fallback options.

Social icons allow you to insert these quick link icons in the body of your email. Overriding the global theme here allows you to choose different colors for shape style. Anytime you override the global settings, it only applies to this campaign. It’s more common for email design to place social icons in the footer of a message, instead of the body, which again, you can customize just for this email by overriding the global theme.

Finally, I saved the button for last. For style, I can choose my primary global theme color, which in this case is the same color as what I chose for my custom background, so a better option is to use the Secondary style. Of course, I can also go rogue here and override the global theme and style it the way I want. The most important part of button properties is of course the link. Where should the user go when they click on the Call to Action? In addition to the link itself, you can also add tracking. By adding a unique name here, you can later find out exactly who engaged with this button after the campaign runs and put them in their own segment.

When you are done designing, click Save. Then click preview to see how this email will look using a specific customer as an example, to verify any variables you added look good. You can also send a test email to yourself so that you can review the email as it actually looks in your inbox. The next steps are to choose additional properties for running the campaign, which you can learn about in another video.