In this article, we’ll cover how to design an Email Campaign using the EasyEditor in Dotdigital.
To design an Email Campaign in Dotdigital you can use the EasyEditor. The EasyEditor lets you create, edit, and style Email Campaigns without having to write HTML or CSS.
Before starting, you should be familiar with:
How to design an impactful email campaign
There are a number of ways you can design an impactful email campaign.
Before getting started with the EasyEditor, think about what content you want to include and what you want to achieve. You can use the following tools to help you achieve more with your Email Campaigns.
- Personalisation: Personalisation lets you add Customer data from Spektrix into your Email Campaigns. For example, you could include the first name of the Customer in your email.
- Dynamic Content: Dynamic Content lets you send one Email Campaign with multiple targeted messages for different groups of Customers. Different content will display dynamically based on the rules you set when you create the dynamic content. For example, an email which displays differently depending whether the Customer is a Member or not.
- Offers: Including an Offer in your email can encourage your Customers to make a purchase. For inspiration on Offers, read 3 Cross-Selling Strategies to Grow Revenue at Your Arts Organisation (5 min).
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Segmentation: Targeting your Customers with information which is relevant to them is one of the best ways to improve the success of your emails. Open rates on segmented emails outperform unsegmented emails by 56%.
- Split testing: Test different variables within your Campaigns, such as subject lines, friendly from names, content, and your email from address. You can then analyse your results to determine which content has the best performance.
These tools may help you increase the success of the emails, which in turn increases your Deliverability and sender reputation meaning future emails are more likely to succeed.
For more ideas, insights and inspiration on how to improve your email marketing strategy, take a look at the Spektrix Blog and Knowledge Library.
TIP: The Dotdigital Academy offers a number of short videos where you can learn how to use the EasyEditor. You can also read about the EasyEditor on the Dotdigital Help Centre.
The EasyEditor
In this section, we’ll give a brief overview of how to use the EasyEditor to design your Campaign.
REMINDER: To get to the EasyEditor, you’ll first need to set up your Email Campaign. Follow the steps in Setting up an Email Campaign in Dotdigital.
In the EasyEditor, on the left hand navigation pane, there are three tabs: Build, Styles and Settings.
Under the Build tab you’ll find building blocks, including:
The Styles tab will let you control the design settings of your email including: background colour, colour theme, borders and padding, display options and email width.
The Settings tab will display dynamically based on which content block you have selected.
WARNING: When working on your Dotdigital Email Campaign don’t forget to save your progress regularly. To save, click the Save button in the top right corner.
Unsubscribe Link
Campaigns must include an unsubscribe link. This will be added by default. Make sure your unsubscribe link is clearly visible and accessible. Do not try to hide your unsubscribe link as this will affect your Deliverability.
If you accidentally remove your unsubscribe link, follow the steps in the toggle box below.
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To add an Unsubscribe link:
- Add some text at the bottom of your email which says ‘Unsubscribe’
- Insert a hyperlink and choose Unsubscribe as the type of link.
- Add a link title.
- Click INSERT.
Titles and Text
There are four Titles and text content blocks:
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Title |
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Subtitle |
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Section title |
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| Text |
To add text to your email, follow these steps:
- Drag and drop the type of content you want from the left hand pane onto the body of the email.
- Type your text into the box. You can use the text editor menu to format your text.
Copying and Pasting
When copying and pasting text into your Email Campaign, you can use the Paste dropdown menu to choose one of three options:
- Keep basic styles: remove unwanted HTML but keep formatting.
- Remove all styles: remove all formatting.
- Try and keep everything: retain the original formatting where possible.
You can learn more about adding and editing text on the Dotdigital Help Center: Add, edit, and style the Text block.
Images
There are three different types of Image blocks:
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Image |
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| Image & Text | |
| Text & Image |
To add images to your email, follow these steps:
- Drag and drop the Image block from the Building blocks menu onto the body of the email.
- Click on the image block.
- This will open the images menu on the left. If the Images menu does not open, click Images at the bottom of the Building Blocks menu.
- Click the + button to upload a new image from your computer.
- Click the MANAGE button to browse the images you have in your image library.
TIP: For best results we recommend uploading JPG images as these can be automatically resized in Dotdigital, resulting in higher performing emails.
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Under the MANAGE menu, you can:
- Update your images with descriptive and memorable file names to make finding them again easier in future.
- Organise your images into folders to make them more easy to find in future.
- Add Alt text to images. Alt text will display when images can’t be downloaded by the server and make emails more accessible for people using screen reader software:
Buttons & Hyperlinks
To add a Button to your email, follow these steps:
- From the Building blocks menu, drag and drop the Button block into the body of the email.
- Type your Button text into the Button where it says Type text here.
- In the Settings menu on the left, click the ADD A LINK button.
- This will open the Add a link screen.
TIP: To add a hyperlink to text on your email that is not a button, highlight the text and click the LINK dropdown from the menu along the top.
Add a link
From the menu on the left you can choose the type of link you want to insert.
You can find out more about different link types on the Dotdigital Help Center: Insert Links into your Campaign. For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on adding a Hyperlink.
Complete the following information about your link:
- Text: This is the text that will display in your email.
- Link (URL): Enter the URL of the page you want to link to. Click Visit to check the URL that the link works.
TIP: Do not use public link shorteners in your email campaigns. Spammers abuse public link shorteners, and using them can damage your sender reputation.
- Link title: Enter the hover over link text. Screen readers also use this text for accessibility purposes.
- Link groups: You can use link groups to organise links from different Campaigns together. This is useful for link click reporting and link click segmentation. You can learn more in the Dotdigital Help Center: Using link grouping to group campaign links together.
- Link name (for tracking): Enter a link name keyword, so you can track which links are selected when you view your reports.
TIP: If you use the same link name your links will be grouped in both Spektrix Email Reports (ROI and Mailing Segments Reports) and Dotdigital reports.
- Do not track this link: Check this box if you don't want to track clicks on this link.
Once you have completed the above information, click INSERT to add the link.
You can then edit how your button displays visually under the Styles and Settings tabs.
Columns
To add a Column to your email, follow these steps:
- From the Building blocks menu, drag and drop the Columns block into the body of your email.
- From the Settings menu on the left, you can choose the number of columns to display:
TIP: To adjust the width of columns, click and drag from between the columns.
You can then choose how you want the columns to display across different devices:
- Visibility: You can choose to make columns only visible on Desktop, Mobile or have them display on both types of devices.
- Mobile device settings: Choosing the Stack content option will stack the columns on top of one another on mobile devices.
You can learn more about adding and editing Columns on the Dotdigital Help Center: The Columns Block.
Spacers
To add a Spacer to your email, follow these steps:
- From the Building blocks menu, drag and drop the Spacer block into the body of your email.
- Under the Settings tab you can edit the size of the Spacer.
Dynamic Content
You can learn more about adding Dynamic Content to your Email Campaigns in the Support Centre article Dynamic Content.
Saving and sending your Campaign
There are a number of essential requirements which you must include before you are able to send your Campaign:
- Campaigns must include an unsubscribe link.
- Campaigns must not contain links from other campaigns, for example a View in browser link for a different Campaign in your account.
- Campaigns must not contain full web addresses as link text. Instead, use a descriptive piece of text and embed the link.
WARNING: You will not be able to save or send your Email Campaign if it does not conform to these requirements.
REMINDER: All Integrated Email Campaigns are sent through Spektrix, return to Setting Up a Dotdigital Email Campaign to complete the set up and testing of your email. Then complete the steps in How to Send an Integrated Email Campaign to send it.
Further Reading
Once you have finished designing your Email Campaign, you may wish to return to Setting Up an Email Campaign or How to Send an Integrated Email Campaign.
To learn more about designing Email Campaigns, we’d recommend:
For more information about Dotdigital, take a look at the Communicate with your Customers section of the Support Centre.