Emails are the most popular form of communication to send through Agillic. We have lots of features which enable you to easily create and personalise emails, boosting open and click rates.
In Agillic, emails are made up of Content Blocks. They help you arrange the content of your emails and you can insert static text, personalised text, images, or links into them. The underlying email HTML template determines the layout, available elements, and overall structure of your emails. Read more about HTML Templates here.
Our Email Editor is located in the Channels module. Select 'Outbound' in the left sidebar, then 'Email' or 'Transactional Email', and finally 'Create Email'. Please note that Transactional Emails require that a Verified Domain has been created, and marked as 'To be used for Transactional Emails'.
Learn more about Verified Domains.
- Email Properties
- Email Editor Configurations Panel
- What are Content Blocks in Agillic?
- Adding Images to your Emails
- Length and Size of an Email
Configuring a newsletter email on the Staging environment in the Email Editor
Email Properties
When you enter the Email Editor, a sidebar appears with the list of properties of your email. This is the Configurations Panel. You can edit the properties of your email here.
Subject Line - The subject line of the email.
Subject Line Test - Check the box to enable a Subject Line Test.
Subject Line Tests check the performance of various subject lines, testing in terms of either opens or clicks. On the Flow Step of your email, you can define the percentage of recipients to be included in the test. The remainder will receive the best performing variant.
From email address domain name - The domain name the email is sent from.
From email address - The local name that will appear before the chosen domain name.
Merge Person Data to ‘Email from address’ - When checked, you can choose a Person Data value to use as your ‘from email address’.
From name (Personal) - Name that will appear as the sender.
Reply-to email address - Email address that will be used for replying to the email.
Merge Person Data to ‘Reply-to email address’ - When checked, you can choose a Person Data value to use as your Reply-to email address.
UTM Campaign - Will appear if Google Analytics tracking is enabled. Check out this article on Google Analytics tracking.
Email Editor Configurations Panel
The Configurations Panel contains lots of other options too which help you build your emails.
Attachment - This feature allows you to attach a media resource, most commonly a PDF file, directly to the email. Supported storage locations are the Assets Manager, Promotion Fields, Agillic Print file, and external sources. Please note that if you wish to attach a resource from a Promotion, the Promotion Field should be of the type ‘PDF’.
Learn more about attachments.
Attaching a PDF file stored in a Promotion
Link URL parameters - This feature allows you to define and add a static parameter to links, followed by the value of a Person Data or Global Data field.
Preview - The Preview feature enables you to preview your email in the Editor. You can select a specific Target Group and recipient in the drop-down menu and view the version of the email that they would see. The preview feature is especially useful for verifying that dynamic content and dynamic Blocks are behaving as expected.
Previewing an email based on recipient id ‘blue@sweetmail.com’
Test - The Test feature enables you to send an external copy of your email. You can choose to send the content based on a specific recipient ID. If you choose to send a test email without entering a recipient ID, buttons, links, and recipient-centric styling may not function.
Sending a test email to support@agillic.com, based on the data of recipient id ‘support@agillic.com’
In order to test an email with different types of content based on Person Data (Promotions, merged data, Multi Content Blocks etc.) in a single test send, you can enter several Recipient IDs separated by commas in the Test tab. This will send a test email pr. recipient ID to the email address entered.
You can also send the test email to more than one email address at a time. In order to do so, simply enter the email addresses separated by commas in the email field in the Test send tab.
What are Content Blocks in Agillic?
To build the content of your email, you use Content Blocks which can contain static text, personalised text, images, and links. They can be either static or dynamic.
Dynamic Content Blocks are personalised for each recipient. You can set rules to either show or hide them from specific recipients or to dramatically change their content, based on available recipient data.
By using the different types of dynamic blocks to show personalised content to your recipients, you avoid having to create multiple outbound communications or portals pages.
Types of Content Blocks
There are different sorts of Content Blocks which are used under different circumstances. If you would like to identify what sort of Content Block you have in your communications or portal pages, hover over it and click the 'i' button.
Static Block
All Blocks in outbound communications or portal pages are static by default. This means that your recipient will see the Content Block as it is, with the exception of personalised text, like ‘hello ${FIRSTNAME}’.
Multi Content Block
A Multi Content Block is an outer container block. It has blocks inside it which can be of any type apart from another Multi Content Block.
What sets this block type apart is the ability to define a Target Group on each inner block. Only the first matching block is shown to the recipient, evaluated from top-to-bottom. The remaining blocks are hidden when the email is sent.
Multi Content Blocks allow you to display only relevant content to your recipients and focus your outbound communication.
Promotion Block
A Promotion Block is a container for Propositions. Propositions, or variants, have conditions attached to them, enabling you to control what content is shown to each recipient or Target Group. Promotions are created and maintained centrally and are re-useable across several types and instances of outbound communication.
Promotion Fields are used to control how and where the content of the Proposition is shown in the email.
Learn more about Promotions.
One-to-Many Block
A One-to-Many Block lets you display data directly from the One-to-Many Table of the recipient. This might include a recipient's recent purchases or favourite products.
The One-to-Many Block can be configured to show one or more entries via the Block Settings. You also have the option of attaching Conditions to narrow down the entries displayed.
The data returned from the One-to-Many Block is inserted via Merge Fields, available through the 'Personalise' section of the right-hand side panel. This allows you to combine One-to-Many data, static text, Global Data, and Unique Lookups.
Global Data Table Block
A Global Data Table Block allows you to display data from a Global Data Table directly in your outbound communication. This might include your best selling products of the day or popular sale items.
Through the Block Settings, you define how many rows of the Global Data Table results to display. Like with the One-to-Many Table block, you also have the option of attaching Conditions to narrow down the results returned.
The data returned from the Global Data Table is inserted via Merge Fields available through the 'Personalise' section of the right-hand side panel. This allows you to combine Global Data Table data, static text, global data, and unique lookups.
Merging in the value of the Global Data Table field ${STORE.OPENING_HOURS}
Data Lookup Block
A Data Lookup Block allows you to display data returned from a Data Lookup which can be of several types.
Creating a lookup between the 'Subscription' One-to-Many table, and the Global Data table 'Publication', allowing us to merge in general publication data for the matching subscription
Like the One-to-Many and Global Data Table Blocks, you have the option to control the number of repeating blocks shown. You also have the option of attaching Conditions to control which results are displayed.
The data returned from the Data Lookup is inserted via Merge Fields, available through the 'Personalise' section of the right-hand side panel. This allows you to combine Data Lookup data, static text, global data, and unique lookups.
Person to Person Lookup Block
A Person to Person Lookup Block lets you display Person Data which is connected to the recipient of an email. For example, this sort of Content Block would be useful if you wanted to include the contact details of a recipient’s connected sales representative. This means each recipient sees the specific contact information of their representative, rather than general info. In this example, the sales representative is the ‘Parent’ and their customers are the ‘Children’.
Each ‘Parent’ can have multiple ‘Children’. This means that any Person Data field marked as unique can be 'Parent' data. The ‘Parent’ data will be repeated for each of their ‘Children’ in this Content Block.
Adding images to your emails
When working with images in emails, there are two main ways you can insert them. External images are located on an external server and internal images are located in the Assets Manager.
Internal images (Assets Manager)
When inserting images from the Assets Manager, you simply click the place in the email where you would like to insert the image and under the image tab to the right, you can choose to change or insert the image. Doing this will open the Assets Manager where you can navigate to the image you would like to insert and press 'Insert Image'. 
Changing the image in an email
The image picker appears in an overlay, allowing you to easily browse media resources uploaded to the Assets Manager.
Assets Manager overlay that opens after pressing 'Change image'. Here, you can simply navigate to the images you would like to insert.
External images
You may have images located externally. If you'd like to reference them, simply choose 'External Image'. Then, you type the path to the image you want to have in your email.
Inserting an image hosted on an external site
You may want to base the image path on data to make the images displayed depend on a data-driven foundation. This makes the emails more dynamic. Please refer to this article for an in-depth explanation of how to achieve this: How to Insert Data Fields as an Image.
Length and size of an email
It's also important to consider the size and length of an email before sending it out. This makes sure that as many of your recipients as possible, across devices, can access your email.
Read up on Litmus' informative blogpost about what to be aware of in terms of size and length when setting up content for emails.
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