Selecting a template
Email marketing best practice
Once you’ve set up the sender name, email and subject line, click save and you’re then ready to start designing your email.
To do this, click “Design Email” in Targeted Email.
You’ll then be brought to the template selection screen. In Templates, you’ll have a number of templates created by the Lib Dems, all of which start with a number (IE 00).
There are also a number of stock templates that do not start with a number.
These templates cannot be customised to look like Liberal Democrat emails and do not meet UK legal requirements, or the party’s accessibility standards.
These “Default” templates should not be used under any circumstances.
Unfortunately, NGPVAN, the company that makes Connect cannot remove these templates for us, otherwise you wouldn’t see them.
The HQ templates are set up to be accessible, comply with the law and have Liberal Democrat branding.
If you need a new template because none of the existing templates meet your needs, just email support@libdems.org.uk and we’ll be happy to look into adding a template.
HQ Templates
A full list of HQ templates, what they contain and what we suggest they are used for can be found in the appendix.
All HQ templates come in two variants, one with an image header - intended for you to add your own banner image and one in a logo format, with a Lib Dem Logo, which can also be replaced with a local version of the logo (guidelines for how to do this can be found in the Style Guide).
There are templates containing social media sharing buttons, donation button blocks and event invite information, as well as basic newsletter templates.
All of the HQ templates have been set up with stock content & fallback URLs, so that if you forget to add a URL somewhere, anyone who clicks it will end up on a page that explains what’s happened and you can understand what kind of content / what size of image you should be using where.
Modifying your template
You may need to add new content to your template. To do this, you should always try to do this by duplicating existing blocks, rather than adding new ones.
When adding a new block, the styling will default to NGPVAN’s defaults, which will clash with the rest of the template and will not be properly accessible.
If you do add a new block, you can find a list of what styles to apply to these blocks in the appendix.
To duplicate a block, you just need to:
1 - Select the block you wish to duplicate
2 - Click the duplicate icon in the bottom right hand corner
3 - Click and drag to move the block to where you want it in the email, using the move icon
You want to duplicate or move any content blocks before you add content, so you reduce the chance you replicate the wrong content and mess up your email.
Adding content
To add content to a section within the email, you need to start by selecting the segment you want to edit.
You can then highlight existing content by clicking and dragging and then hitting delete or starting typing your own content to overwrite it.
You can also use the section that appears above to format your text.
When formatting, you should generally avoid changing font sizes, text colour or adding italics, as these can cause accessibility issues for some readers.
Smart Links
Do not work for the Liberal Democrats instance of Targeted Email and cannot be used by us. Please do not enter these into email as they will not work.
Merge Fields
The merge fields option allows you to include a broad range of information from the MyCampaign database directly in emails, including items from custom person fields or personal information. Some of the merge fields do not work in our instance and a list of the fields that do work can be found here in the appendix.
Images
If you edit a content block that contains an image, you’ll see a number of new options appear in the content properties sidebar.
To change your image from the placeholder, you need to select the “Change image” button on the sidebar.
This will open the images menu
From here you can view images already uploaded to your committee, which you can select by clicking on them and then clicking “insert”.
You can also upload new images by selecting the upload icon in the top left, which will let you upload a file from your computer.
You can also use images hosted on Fleet by putting a link to the image in the URL field on the content properties window. You should only do this for images uploaded to Fleet.
Image best practice
In our templates, images have a placeholder telling you the ideal size of these images - this is usually set as 2x the size of the space they occupy, which improves their display on iPads and larger devices with higher resolutions.
You should always aim to keep image sizes as small as practical, so that you don’t clog up subscribers inboxes and phones with unnecessary junk. As a general rule, images being used in email should be 200kb or less and total images no more than 1mb.
You can use tools like https://pixlr.com/x/ to reduce the size of images you want to use for email.