Build your campaign in EasyEditor

The second step in the campaign creation process is to add your content to your campaign and finalise its design.

Laura Russell avatar
Written by Laura Russell
Updated over a week ago

Design and add content to the HTML version of your email campaign using EasyEditor's drag-and-drop interface. EasyEditor is a hugely powerful tool, but for now, let's look at the basics.

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Before you start

Things you need to know:

  • 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.

You won't be able to save your campaign if it doesn't conform to these requirements.


Get to know EasyEditor

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When you’re starting off from one of our free templates, there are a number of content blocks already added to the campaign. All you need to do is edit their content or position to your liking. You can identify a block’s type by hovering over it. The block’s content type is displayed in the header:

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Move a block

To move blocks around the EasyEditor design canvas, select and drag them by the header. A dashed line shows you where else on the canvas the block you’ve selected can be placed.

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Add a block

Similarly, you can add a brand new block by selecting and dragging it from the left side menu and placing it onto the canvas. The Build tab of the menu contains all the different content blocks available to you.

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Edit the content of a block

Select a block to edit the content inside it, for example, to replace some text or change an image. Depending on the type of block you have selected, a range of options will be available to you in the left side menu.

Delete or copy a block

You can also delete or duplicate a block using the relevant icon in the block header.

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More EasyEditor actions

Below we cover a few other common things you might want to do with your campaign.

Upload and insert an image

  1. Select Images in the left side menu.

  2. Select the Add icon ( + ) and choose an image from your computer.

    add-image.png


    The chosen image is uploaded to the image manager and is available in the side panel.

  3. Drag and drop the image into your campaign. You can either add the image to an existing image block, replacing any previous image, or just drop the image to an available space on the design canvas. It‘s automatically placed into an image block for you.

If the image you want to use in your campaign has already been uploaded, you can just skip straight to dragging it from the left side menu into your campaign.

To organise images into folders, edit images, download images, or move images to the recycle bin, select MANAGE to open the image manager.

Add a link to a web page

  1. Highlight the text that you want to turn into a link, and select LINK in the toolbar.

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  2. By default, the link type is already set to Hyperlink.

    Under Add a hyperlink (standard link URL):

    1. Add or edit your link text, if you need to.

    2. Enter the link’s URL.

      Optionally, you can also:

    3. Add a link title - this is the text displayed when you hover over the link, and it is also used by screen readers.

    4. Add link groups - use link groups to organise different links from your campaigns together. This is useful for link click reporting and link click segmentation.

    5. Add a link name - enter a link name (keyword), so you can track which links are selected when you view your reports. This can be particularly useful if you have the same link URL in more than one place in your campaign - a different link name for each means you can differentiate the links in your reporting.

    6. Select Do not track this link - if you don't want to track any clicks on this link, meaning we don’t store any data about contacts who may have engaged with this particular link.

    link-details.png

  3. Once you’re happy with your link settings, select INSERT to add the link to your campaign.

Add or edit a button

  1. Drag a button block onto the design canvas from the left side menu.

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  2. Select the button block. On the Settings tab of the left side menu, select ADD A LINK.

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  3. Select the type of link you want to add to your button, add the relevant details, and then select INSERT.

  4. On the Settings tab of the left side menu, adjust the colour, alignment, padding and minimum width of your button.

  5. Select BORDERS to adjust the button’s border colour, width and radius.

Learn more in Using button blocks.

Preview your campaign

Once your campaign has content in it, select PREVIEW to see how the campaign should look in your recipients’ inbox.

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Campaign previews

The preview tool gives a good idea of how your campaign should appear to your contacts, however previews in a browser can only be approximate, so we strongly advise you to perform text sends to different mail clients and devices. You can also make use of our inbox testing tool.

Learn more in Testing your campaign.

The preview tool allows you to:

  • Switch between HTML and plain text versions of your campaign using the drop-down menu in the top left.

  • Check how your campaign looks on desktop, tablet and mobile. To do this, select the relevant icon in the top right of the Campaign preview window.


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  • See the campaign with or without the images. To do this, toggle the Images switch to On or Off.

  • Preview the campaign as a specific contact. To do this, select the Personalisation icon and search for the contact using their email address. Select FIND, and then select the Preview icon for the contact you want to view as. Alternatively, select SHOW RECENT to display the ten most recent contacts you’ve imported and preview each one in turn.

    This feature is useful for campaigns which make use of personalisation or dynamic content, for example.

    preview-personalisation.png

  • Select the dynamic content icon to preview any dynamic content you may have

    This option is only available if your campaign contains any dynamic content.

Previewing a split test campaign

Switching between split test version in a preview is only available when using the previewing tool outside of EasyEditor.

To do this:

  1. Go to Campaigns > Email.

  2. Select the Preview icon for the campaign you want to view.

  3. Expand the drop-down menu and select which content version you want to preview.

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When inside EasyEditor, you can only preview the split test version of the campaign you currently have open in the editor.

Keyboard shortcuts

We've also included keyboard shortcuts so you can make even speedier use of the preview tool:

  • 1, 2 and 3 switch between desktop, tablet and phone previews, respectively.

  • r rotates between landscape and portrait views when previewing in tablet and phone formats.

  • i switches between images being on and off.

  • h and t switch between HTML and plain text.

  • p opens the personalisation preview dialogue window.

  • d opens the dynamic content preview dialogue window.

  • Esc closes any dialogue window, including the overall campaign preview window.

Once you’re happy with your campaign preview, select SAVE & CONTINUE.

Next steps

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