Intro To Rich Text Email Templates

hello and welcome to the live stream uh my name is Drew and I work here in customer success at vipecloud and today we're going to talk about our Rich text email templates and so the format here is just that I'm going to give a quick definition of what Rich Text templates are by the way they're commonly referred to as RTE and then we'll be doing a demo to show you how to use these rich text templates and then at the end we're going to be doing a Q&A and so feel free to send in your questions throughout this live stream you can send them in at any time through our suite in the in the comment section there or in the chat also feel free to send them in if you're watching on YouTube in the chat there and we're going to answer those at the very end of this this live stream but no need to wait to send those in though and um yeah so just to kind of Define what we're talking about here what the premise is is that uh in VIP Cloud we have two different email template Builder types and one is the HTML Builder which is what you use for creating colorful uh designed templates so as a consumer these are the kinds of templates that you might receive from from any of the places that you do business with like any e-commerce platforms their newsletters are probably in this kind of very colorful image-based design uh now a rich text template is more like something that you would make in your personal like Gmail or Outlook something that's very text first and that's what this is and so it's going to be a very text first template but you can also put images through bipl you can put in video emails there and you can also uh put in attachments or links too and so these are primarily used for yeah like your operational kinds of emails and these can be sent as mass emails and they can also be sent as individual emails to people too and so this will save you from where you might be doing a lot of copy and paste you can just make a template and use it going forward and these can be used for your drip campaigns too so just to give you a couple more practical ideas of where these are used uh these might be used in sales situations like intro emails meeting reminders thank yous uh product pricing detail Pages follow-up emails and also any automatic email that you want to have just feel like it was personally written by you this is a great uh use case for this kind of a template so let's dive into the demo portion here and take a look at what um like how you can use these rich text email templates so logged into VIP Cloud here you will want to go to your uh to your emails and then

templates and now we're going to make one from scratch by going to the create button

and you can give it an internal reference title your customers will not be seeing this

so and then you can give it a subject line this is what people will be seeing and just note as well that what you put in here can be edited later so it's okay if you don't have a perfect subject line when your first making your

template template landing pages are rarely used for Rich Text uh templates so you can honestly ignore that and then here you can see what I was referencing earlier how you've got uh our two Builder types here the HTML type Builder and then got our Rich text right

here all right and so now we are looking at the editor itself and you're going to see a whole bunch of options up here and um let's go through some of these most frequently used ones like if you want to insert an attachment as a trackable Link in your template all you need to do is first put the cursor where you want it to go and then you can click on the button and you'll see all of the stuff that you've already uploaded into your account and you can click on the add content button to browse your computer for any new files you want to insert and when you're inserting an attachment as a link in your in your email template you can kind of think of it as like a Dropbox or Google Drive link that you might be sharing with people it's the link itself that people can click on to download the attachment inserting images it works very similar you just simply put the cursor where you want to where you want the image to be added click on the button and then you can either browse your existing images or upload a new one same goes for inserting videos so videos here uh you can send video email through vipecloud it's a great way to make a personal connection through an email that you send to somebody and we' got merge tags now this is very commonly used in fact you can even see an example of a merge tag right here and so this is going to merge in the recipients in this case first name so you send a mass email you can greet Everybody by their first name and when we click on this you can see that pretty much any contact information you might be looking for you can find it here first name company name job title these are all going to be very commonly used fields that will be merged into the template wherever you put in that tag and also you can merge in your own user information this is especially useful for teams that where you might share a a template and then you can have uh everybody in there just have their their own you they can introduce themselves by name or their title of the company and they don't have to edit this template themselves also very commonly used is this signature merge tag which if you put in there that'll actually grab whatever your latest signature is that you've got built into your user settings it'll just pull that into this template and so that way you have a big library of email templates you don't have to update every single template just because you updated your signature because if we look here we can see my signature was uh automatically added to this template uh in many cases I recommend just putting in a signature merge tag and that way your email will your your library of emails will all be updated automatically and I'll show you how you can do that in a second so uh when you're making a a a template in here obviously this is just like pretty much uh drafting a Word document um and in most cases I recommend that you just draft your templates in Cloud wherever possible now if you are not able to do that like maybe you have a whole host of Word documents that you have built outside and you just want to copy and paste them into this into vcloud to make templates out of it um first of all I would say I recommend not doing that if you can avoid it but if you really uh need to copy and paste I'm going to show you how I would recommend going about doing that and so I have a template here that I've drafted in Microsoft Word and I'm going to just highlight everything and copy it over here so I know I'm doing that off screen here but I just highlighted

the I've highlighted all the text in my word document and now I'm going to right click and paste as plain text into this template here and again just do it slowly I right clicked and then it says paste as plain text in the little box that pops open and you use that it might also say paste and merge formatting you want to do that so that you can avoid any of the Hidden markup is what it's called that copies over from a place like word and what that does is it has a formatting that can just break things and make the formatting of your template really ugly and so this way we avoid all of that and we do lose the formatting of this template but it's going in the end this will actually have a Time Savings for you and so now all you need to do is just add some of the formatting like paragraph spaces or Bolding things along those lines so in this case I can put in the merge tag for first name and I'm not going to go through this whole template but by just going around and adding some of these line spaces we're able to pretty quickly get our template looking decently usable and at the very bottom here you can see an example of that signature merge tag this is what I'm talking about and that will when you when you hit send that will merge in your signature so I'm going to hit save email template we're going to pretend this template is good to go now and I'm just going to show you how you can send this template as a mass email as well as to an individual contact so for the for the mass email we can just start from right here we got our email templates I'm going to hover over the template and I'm going to hit send you can see you got an option here send a contact or send a contact lists if it's a mass email it's going to be going to a contact list we're going to choose our contact list preview send and here we go so we've got our template already drafted in here you're able to tweak these templates on the Fly too so if you have you want to kind of personalize it to the uh to the occasion you're able to do that right here just note that this will not change the template itself so changes you make here will only be saved for this particular send not for future ones and then you're able to go but we always recommend sending a test to yourself of course and once you've confirmed it looks good then you can send it as a mass email now if I'm going to be sending this to a contact let's just search for the contact First we're going to look for our friend uh Bugs Bunny

here got our contact we're going to click into the contact record and I'm going to hit

email and I can find it by searching for the email templates here we go our agency welcome email and now we're able to load up this template and again if I want

to I want to personalize it I can edit it on the Fly and I can schedule it or send it right

now all right and I would say that pretty

much those are those are the basics I would say for using Rich Text templates now I just want to see if uh if there are any questions so uh Adam were there any questions hey there great work yeah we have a couple questions here um the first one let me show it as a banner um Can these rich text templates be shared with teams and whatnot like HTML templates yes they can and so templates are email templates are templates so they actually the sharing side of it all works the same and I'll just quickly demonstrate what that would look like so we go here to templates and I select that and I can go from here and share with team so and this could even be uh you know you could you could share like a folder that might have HTML as well as Rich Text templates in there and then your users who you share it with will find it under shared with me and in that sense it works exactly like your Rich Text uh or your your HTML templates perfect perfect very good one only one other question here and that is uh can I paste an image into a red a rich text template yeah so um definitely definitely recommend not doing that so U that will in fact break the template itself so if you are going to be putting and actually by the way I was talking earlier about how you can copy from a Word document over into uh viip cloud and if you you need to be careful that there are definitely no images when you're doing that and it's only text that you're copying over um and so yeah if you're going to be inserting an image the way that you do that is by is always by using this insert image button right there and you just make sure the cursor is where you want it to where you want the image to go you click on that button and that you paste in this the image like so and then that way the images will indeed work so yeah always gota be careful to not to uh do that correctly yeah we've seen some tickets on the text side where it it basically overloads the email it gets way too long when it becomes That Base 64 just pasted in so that and it will break things all right that's it very straightforward love this absolutely yep uh definitely if you have any questions at all don't hesitate to add them to the uh the vi Cloud customer success Suite we'll be happy to help there we've also got the the widget that you can use in the bottom right for opening a chat with the support team and we'll be eager to help and and uh yeah want to wish everybody uh Happy Happy selling