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1.
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This image shows the administration sub panel page for managing your promotional emails. There
is a separate administration sub panel for creating the email lists and email segmentation
groups for sending out your promotions.
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2.
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The first step in creating a promotional email is to choose either a built in system
template or decide to create your own html.
This image shows the html templates you can choose from when building a promotional email. However,
if none of the 26 html templates meets your needs you can create your own. The 26 html templates
represent every permutation that 5 blocks can be arranged horizontally and vertically plus templates that
have 4, 3, 2 and 1 blocks.
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3.
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This image shows the page where you can see the system html template and also make the design
choices to fill in the template. These choices include the images to be displayed, background colors,
border type, border size, the text to be displayed in each block, the anti-spam text, font face,
font size, font colors and more. The sections in the tab bar (Blocks 1-5) refer to the choices
for each block on the template (numbered 1-5). Most templates have 5 blocks but it is NOT necessary
to make design choices for all 5 blocks. Blocks with no selected choices will be ignored. System templates
are NOT editable however you can copy them and use them as a starting point for your own
custom template:
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4.
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This image shows the page where you can test your template. Once you have made some initial design choices
and have saved them simply click the View System Template button and it will display the template with your
design choices. You can move back and forth between the template edit page and the view template to refine
your design choices until you are happy with the look of your promotion. If you intend to send the promotion
to members of the community using a set of segmentation parameters you can even look up a member to test with
so their first and last name will show in the promotional email just after the salutation you enter:
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5.
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Once you are happy with the design of your template you need to copy these design choices from
the template to a promotion. To do this you create a new promotion record which is basically and
empty vessel for you to copy your template design choices into. You can create as many different promotions
as you like and copy any of the template designs to to them. This allows you to store the set of template design
choices in the promotion and then move on to reuse the template again for a different promotion. But
don't worry you can also make design choice changes in the promotion directly without having
to rebuild it in the template.
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6.
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Once you have saved your new promotion (based on a system template), you can always return to it
to make additional design changes from the list of system template based promotions. You can also
delete existing promotions from this page. Deleting a promotion does not delete the template it
was copied from:
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7.
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When you are finished with the design work you can test your promotion by sending it to
an email address of your choice. This allows you to see your promotional email in your own
inbox before ever sending it out to community members or a list of email addresses:
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Once you have completed testing your promotion by sending it to your own email address
you can schedule it to be sent to either a list of email addresses you have stored or
a segmentation group which is a list of parameters which identifies a group of community
members:
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9.
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Once the promotion has been scheduled to be sent you can check the status of your promotion.
This page shows you a list of all of the promotions you have scheduled to be sent. If you
need to make changes you can always stop the promotion from being sent by either deleteing the
entry on this page or even just setting the promotion to an inactive status without ever deleting it
from this list. Once you are ready to send it simply make it active again and it will be
sent on the next cycle. Scheduled promotions are sent out every 6 hours:
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10.
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Once the promotion has been sent it will appear in the promotions sent list. You should
also receive an email informing you that your promotion has been sent sucessfully:
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11.
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As promised above if none of the 26 system template meets your needs and you have the
html skills to create you own template this page will allow you to roll your own custom
template. This works in a very similar way to creating a promotional email with a system
template. The difference is that there are no (blocks) to set values for. Instead your are
left on your own to add images and set values within the template itself. However, you can
use some constants provided to perform replacements in the template when it is sent out. You can
test these replacements just as you do with system based promotions. For example if you insert
*MemberFirstName* or *MemberLastName* in your template and you are sending the promotion
to a segementation group (i.e. it looks up member information for each sent email), it will
substitute the member first and last name. For sending promotions to simple email list this
does not work because the recipient is not a community member for which it can access their
information.:
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Just as with system templates and promotions once you save your custom template
and custom promotions they can be access from pages that list them. This is also where
you can delete them once you have finished with them.:
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11.
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Finally here is an example of a custom html template promotion. As you can see you
are free to make it as complex as you need it to be:
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