Today, our Senior Manager of Content & Promotions, Anne Marie Robson, answers another common question that we hear from clients looking for ways to boost online engagement.
I use your ENGAGE Suite Contesting product to run sweepstakes, and I’m wondering how I can spruce up the automated emails that are sent to participants and winners. Any tips?
Anne Marie: That’s an excellent question! For clients using the ENGAGE Suite Contesting engine, offering an attractive, HTML design for those automated emails is a great way to improve participants’ interaction with your contest mailings. You can use the WSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) visual editor in the Email section to easily add and format text, embed images or videos, and even link to special landing pages or your sponsor’s site. However, if you have a designer with HTML knowledge on staff, you can also create an attractive email within the HTML view by clicking on the </> button in the top left of the visual editor:
If you choose to build your Contesting emails by importing the HTML, I’ve pulled together a few best practices below to take into consideration when designing those mailings:
- Keep your design simple to ensure that it will render properly across a wide variety of browsers, email clients, and viewing devices.
- For a clean layout, code the structure of your email using the table element. Use attributes such as cellpadding, valign, and width to set the table dimensions. For a detailed list of available HTML attributes, check out HTML.com. Also avoid hard-coding table width and instead use percentages to ensure that your design can be responsive.
- Avoid using JavaScript or Flash as those technologies are no longer supported by many email clients.
- If you’re including images in your email template, be sure to use only absolute links for the images, and host them on a reliable server. Also avoid hard-coding image sizes and use percentages instead to ensure they’re responsive.
- Use the available tokens to further customize your contesting emails. Tokens are short codes used to represent a value that can be pulled from your member table on a member-by-member basis to personalize emails to that specific listener. We have an extensive list of available tokens that allow you to customize these mailings–just make sure that your database is set up to collect the information offered in the Personal tokens section before including them in your template.
- Always test your emails! You can enter a test email address, such as your work email, in the “Test Email to Address” field near the top of the Emails setup page. Once you’ve built your design in the visual editor, click the “Send Test Email” button to receive a copy of the email. The admin will confirm that your test email has sent by displaying a message above the visual editors.
Once you’ve received the test copy, review the design within your inbox to check for typos, broken links and images, or other display issues.
For other ways to optimize your contesting designs, check out this recent post.
