How is your latest email marketing campaign doing? Has it been successful and brought you enough leads? Has its open rate finally pushed through that magic number (that only you know) and generated enough clicks and demand for your product? Was it easy to set up? Personalized and A/B tested? Easy to evaluate?
Email marketing can be tough and challenging sometimes. Although it’s not always apparent, there are so many little things that need to be thought through and linked together, so they all click perfectly and deliver that envisioned (and successful) email marketing campaign.
The easier it is for you to deal with an email campaign, the more time you have for brainstorming that next super-awesome campaign idea, right?
But that’s not always the reality. Ensuring that everything is correct and in place can often become complicated and overwhelming. Email templates, content, personalization, A/B tested variants, plain text version, preheader, the right group of recipients, sending date… You name it!
Simply said, the email marketing tool needs to be as intuitive and easy to use as possible. No excuses!
If you are of the same opinion as I am, you will love Kentico 11’s new Email Builder. If not, then at least you will be able to enjoy much greater simplicity and effectiveness when creating your next marketing email.
In this first blog post of a two-part blog post series, I am going to focus on the creation of the email content in Kentico 11, including drag-and-drop functionality, a variety of the email widgets that can be used there, and some other important parts of the marketing email’s configuration. In the second blog post, I will guide you through the personalization capabilities of the email builder.
The email widgets are your secret email-building weapon. Your developers can create an unlimited amount of them, so they can then be drag-and-dropped into the body of the marketing email. The widgets can be configured to load any kind of information and can even display your own custom data right away! The good news is that no back-end coding is needed. Widgets can be created right in the administration interface using HTML, CSS, and macro knowledge. Therefore, it is much easier to get your front-end developer to create one for you.
For example, you could have an email widget that displays the top five bestselling products on your website at the time when the email is sent. Another widget could be used to display the latest two (three, four, or more?) articles from your website. There is a lot of potential there, and it is just up to you and your development team for how you manage to push the limits of the email builder. The possibilities are endless!
As it is much more satisfying to see it in the action (instead of just a series of screenshots), take a seat, put your headphones on, and let’s dive into it in the following video:
So, what do you think? Can you see yourself having fun combining all the widgets to create the next state-of-art marketing email? Of course, in some cases, you will need some help from your developers to create the needed email widgets. But once implemented, email creation in Kentico 11 will reach a whole new dimension!
Just don’t forget to include the unsubscription and “view in a browser” links in the email. It is the best practice we strongly recommend to follow. The links can be easily generated by using one of these Kentico macros:
{% EmailFeed.UnsubscribeFromEmailFeedUrl % } -> Creates a link that unsubscribes the recipient from the current email feed
{% EmailFeed.UnsubscribeFromAllEmailFeedsUrl % } -> Creates a link that unsubscribes the recipient from all emails feeds at once
{% Email.ViewInBrowserUrl % } -> Creates a link that the recipient can use to see the email content in a browser.
So, what do you think about the new email builder? Are you excited as well? Let us know in comments!