Email creation workflow -- What can we do better?

Hi VR Lounge People,

I'm exploring ways to improve our Wizard and Canvas email creation tools and I want hear from you. I'd like to know what you think is or isn't working so we can make changes that make it easier for you to create and send email. Whatever your specific concerns are let me know your thoughts so I can include your feedback as we consider changes. I'm looking forward to seeing your replies to this discussion!

Bryan
Product Manager, VR

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Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by NonProfitEmailer on April 1, 2009 at 12:20pm: Hi Bryan, I have been a user for a few years and have convinced quite a few of non-profits to switch over to you through your generous program for non-profits. The only problem I continuously have is the seemingly random font formatting (size, style, spacing) results I get from the Canvas and the Wizard. Since we are a small non-profit, our folks are not super-critical, but I am not happy with the look of what goes out. I understand the other threads about old formatting sticking around inside the code, but the suggested solutions do not work consistently. In addition, since we are staffed by volunteers, we can't start from scratch each time. We have created a format we like and need to be able to copy and reuse it over and over. I also get extra space that seems to appear out of nowhere. Last time, it delayed our campaign from going out.

I hope a solution is close at hand for VR. It is quite frustrating when the newbies and techno-phobes at our local school district seem to be able to send polished looking emails through one of your competitors.

Thanks for looking into this. Looking forward to a solution!; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Bryan Adamson on April 3, 2009 at 9:59am: Thanks for your comments and for convincing non-profits to use VR. We love to hear things like this from our customers and in return we'll do our best to keep you happy about our service.

You mentioned problems with formatting fonts. That's on our radar to improve so customers have more control over formatting. In the meantime, search the VR Marketing Blog for keywords "formatting text" and you'll find a list of tips that might help.

Regarding reusing your format over and over, what format is that? Is it HTML from your own HTML editor, or do you keep it in MS Word? That's also on our radar to improve so it's easier to reuse saved emails. Again, we have some tips that might help on the VR Marketing Blog for copying and pasting text. Maybe that will help a little in the short run.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Laurel Groh on April 2, 2009 at 9:57pm: I'd like to see "cleaner" wizard options - more simple. I'd also really like to see a wizard or canvas where you could insert a general format (ie 2-column/ 3 column/ 2 tables/etc.) but it is easily customized.

thanks!; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Bryan Adamson on April 3, 2009 at 10:10am: Excellent suggestions! I agree that we need to be a bit "cleaner" with the wizard options. For your next comment, do you mean to suggest that we have format options for customers to "select" and that they can then modify and customize? If that's the case, that is something we've heard from other customers and are considering in a future release.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Tim Rooney on April 6, 2009 at 5:04pm: Hi Bryan:
To maintain a consistent corporate identity, it's difficult to make sure that our staff isn't messing with alignments and other parts of the general template when they're doing mailings.

I would advocate a feature to "lock" the entire template and allow my users to only make changes to the core body of that newsletter. So, if I have a basic "This week at the store" newsletter, no one should be able to move my logo around or add extra line breaks in the nav bar in the template. All they need to edit is the blank white space to input the weekly annoucement message.

Similiar to php includes and SSI includes, where I can eliminate the potential for messing around with the formatting (purposefully or mistakenly).; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Bryan Adamson on April 8, 2009 at 9:50am: Hi Tim,

Sounds like having the ability to save and reuse approved templates, with permission settings that can limit editing to text content (and maybe images) is what you want. Your comment echos similar comments from some other customers who want a level of control over their templates.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Lauren T on April 8, 2009 at 2:22pm: That would be exactly what my organization needs! It has to be in 'canvas' right? Not a good idea to have a coder do it and just try to change the copy in the html area?; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by yamaha_hub on August 6, 2009 at 2:31pm: yes! This is a terrific suggestion... "I would advocate a feature to "lock" the entire template and allow my users to only make changes to the core body of that newsletter. So, if I have a basic "This week at the store" newsletter, no one should be able to move my logo around or add extra line breaks in the nav bar in the template. All they need to edit is the blank white space to input the weekly annoucement message." I second that. :-); ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Tim Rooney on April 6, 2009 at 6:53am: Fonts tend to change to times new roman when deleting blocks of text in a template. Also, as a retailer with multiple users of our account, we regularly copy templates for re-use (i.e.: a product promo template, or a newsletter template). These are custom templates built by our web developer to make everything look consistent through-out.

But, some of our staff is not technically savvy and it could potentially take quite some time to drop in content and deal with the potential of formatting meltdowns (it's way too easy to affect the table structure when copy/pasting).

It would be great to have the ability to build a template (or multiple templates) and lock it in. Then, allow users to modify only certain blocks.

Our staff has no need or reason to make any changes to the formatting of the template. All they do is put content into the areas marked as needing content. This could rapidly speed up campaign creation!; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Catherine Bowden on April 8, 2009 at 2:58am: Hi Bryan,

This is a really small thing, but it would be great to have a "save" button to use when editing the email layout. Clicking "Next Step" in order to save the email is quite unintuitive and it also means you have to exit the edit mode and go back in after saving. Could we maybe have 2 buttons, "Save" just to save the layout and keep working and "Save and exit" or "Next step" to save your work and carry on to the next step?

Hope that makes sense!

Catherine; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Bryan Adamson on April 8, 2009 at 10:00am: That makes perfect sense and is a very important small thing that lots of people want. Thanks for reinforcing the need for this.; ▶ Reply to This

Permalink Reply by Tracy on April 8, 2009 at 4:31am: Hi Bryan,

I've been using VR for the last two weeks, and have found the Wizard much easier to use than the Canvas (for many of the reasons already listed in this post). The Wizard's formatting is much easier to use - what you see is what you get. It would be perfect if you could "jazz up" emails in the Wizard - be able to change font, add colour banners, change column sizes. I find the Canvas template way too busy for our needs...and yet the Wizard is a little too basic (boring). A middle ground between these two options would be ideal.

Thanks,
Tracy.; ▶ Reply to This