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Create your email campaign using templates

The most important part of your campaign is the email you will send to your contact list. Let's now look at how to create a simple email campaign by choose a professionally pre-designed email template from those included in the system. 

Move your mouse over the "Email Campaigns" tab and click the "Create Email Campaign" menu option: 

 
Creating a simple email campaign in the system.


Complete the "Create Email Campaign form". Choose "HTML" for the format. In this example we will create a basic HTML-only newsletter with graphics and formatted text. Finally, choose one of the professionally pre-designed email templates from the "Email Template" box. Use the preview link to view all of the templates. Click the "Next >>" button when you're done. 


Creating an email campaign using one of the many included professionally designed email templates in the system.

When the next page loads, type in a subject line for your email campaign. This is the text contacts will see when they look at the emails in their inbox, so make it short and to the point. Scroll down the page and you will see the email editor. You can type in text content for your email here. In this example we'll just copy and paste a few paragraphs of text from Microsoft Word using the editor's "Paste From Word" function: 


Creating the content of your email using the built-in WYSIWYG editor. 


Under the email editor you will see two links: Insert Custom Fields and Insert Unsubscribe Link. You should always include an unsubscribe link in your email, and if you don't the system will warn you when it saves. 

To insert the value of a custom field in your newsletter just click the "Insert Custom Fields" link: 


Inserting a custom field into your email campaign's content.

Choose the custom field you want to add and click the "Insert" button next to it. The custom field will be added to your content and will be represented by a placeholder varaible, such as %%Email%% or %%First Name%%. When the email is sent, these values will be replaced with real values from your contact contact list. For example, %%Email%% might be replaced with user1@somesite.com and %%First Name%% might be replaced with John. 

Complete the "Attachments" section of the form if you want to include file attachments with your email campaign. Before clicking the "Save And Exit" button to move on, send a preview of your email using the "Send Preview" section of the form. 

Congratulations, you've just created your first email campaign! Let's now move on to send it to your contact list of contacts.