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  • Make System Emails use a HTML template (and content editable via text-editor/ phrases)

It feels as though the editing of emails has been made with a different approach to the rest of the platform. Pure HTML is acceptable in many ways especially for emails but in 99% of cases the style of the email that are sent will have the same header, footer and the changes are essentially the body content, and my guess is most people would rather avoid messing with HTML as much as possible. 

I’d suggest, in order to be consistent with the rest of the product, that there be 2 sections to system emails in Control:

  • Email Template: You set the styling of the email including button style (If possible similar to the “Customise” experience of the homepage for example,  but not necessarily)
  • Email Content: Similarly to the Phrases section only the main recurring elements would be removed (ie. Header footer etc…) and the interface would be like the standard text editor + main CTA phrase

This would mean that any changes to the header or footer of the email can be done once in order to update all emails, as compared to today where each System email needs to be opened edited and saved.

This furthermore, opens the door to the ability of having more than 1 template and being able to choose which emails use what. (Perhaps to distinguish notifications from more critical communications (Password reset, post flagged etc..)

Hey @SmartlyGreg great idea! Thanks for sharing. :)

I think you’ve explained very clearly about the problem and potential solutions: Use customisable and sharable elements across system emails to have a better experience in configuring emails and avoid messing with HTML. 

I’m curious to learn how others think about this. I’d put this idea to open so we can collect more votes and feedback. 

Updated idea statusNew→Open

This would be so handy. While I don’t change these emails often, the flexibility to do so more easily would be great. 

I would love to see an easier way to update the style across the board the way you mentioned OR to have the ability to upload different templates that can be selected as an option for styling when going in to edit the actual content. This need to edit every template when we’re using the exact same style is time consuming to say the least. 

The rule of “if you have to repeat an action, it should be consolidated” really applies here. 

Upvoting and hope to see this go somewhere! 

Bringing this thread back up -- as a CS Journey Orchestrator user who’s embarking on a CC migration (@beatriz.winn for vis), the email template builder in CC looks vastly underpowered compared to the new (and even the old) email template builder available in Gainsight CS (screenshot below for comparison).

There’s a laundry list of features available in the CS email template builder that are NOT available in the CC template builder. Some of the biggest ones include:

  • Ability to edit content in the design (WYSIWYG) editor mode
  • Ability to edit styles (font style, alignment, etc) and add tokens, links, etc. without HTML
  • Block-based design structure
  • Ability to easily edit email template body settings
  • Drag-and-drop functionality (and cloning content blocks)
  • Ability to edit the plain-text version (in case recipients can’t receive HTML emails)

While some features (versions, for instance) wouldn’t be necessary for CC, there’s a lot of features that are definitely missing from my perspective.

How difficult would it be to implement this email template builder for CC?

New Email Template Builder in Gainsight CS
System Email Template Builder in Gainsight CC

 

As a followup -- while I understand the reason to have a more simplistic email editor that limits email campaign templates to one main content block (streamlines the process for CC editors and makes maintaining consistency across campaigns easier), it essentially makes it mandatory to have either HTML knowledge or access to a third party editor if you want to make adjustments to the email campaign template styles.

 

 

As a Gainsight CS user who has recently needed to step into the CC email world, can I just say… I’ve been massively underwhelmed by the CC template builder.

Use case:

  1. Built a template in the Gainsight CS editor (Horizon version) using the blocks and sections.
  2. Attempted to paste the code into the CC campaign theme editor.

Massive issues ensued, particularly that I was completely unable to save the new template because even updating the {content} token in the Gainsight CS code doesn’t translate to the CC editor.

My solution/workaround

  1. Copied the default Gainsight CC campaign email code into Dreamweaver.
  2. Edited the image, background colors, etc. to match our branding.
  3. Added a table (inside the content <td> container) to force the content block to respect padding on a mobile device.

​@revathimenon, ​@Kenneth R, could we get some eyes on the CC email template editor issues? While there shouldn’t need to be frequent changes, it shouldn’t be this difficult to implement templates -- especially when a good number of us are probably already using the CS template editor, and copying/pasting code from there SHOULD work.

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