Email Newsletter Template and Using Snippets

[Danielle_Wong]

I'm curious of anyone's experience using snippets in an email newsletter. Would you put the styling within snippet or would the styling be part of the template?

If you have implemented this, could you let me know the steps you took and any concerns with the idea of using snippets in a newsletter?

Thanks!

[Josh_Hill13 · Accepted solution]

What exactly do you want to do here? What is "styling" to you in this situation?

CSS?

Template design?

PSD?

Snippets are used for universal content that you might want to update periodically, such as a content banner in an email or page, or a footer for an email or a page. Using Segmentations+Dynamic Content can powerup Snippets too.

I've heard of examples of doing this in a newsletter where each News Section is a snippet that you update in the Snippet section and just send out the same Newsletter Email Asset every time, or a new one. Not sure I would do that, but possible. There are some reasons if you use Language dynamic content and there have been other examples on the forum and the Summit.

Better use of Snippets is scaling up mass changes.

[Josh_Hill13]

Now, if you want to update CSS more often, you can use a Program or Folder Token to do this with a text token. Some examples exist here or with Jeff Shearer and Ed Unthank.

[Danielle_Wong]

Hi Josh,

Thank you for taking the time to respond. Basically, this newsletter will be sent on a monthly basis and is what you mentioned in your response. The overall html/css styling is going to stay exactly the same every month. But monthly we want to be able to swap out the headline, description, and image in each section with new content. And when we have segment-specific articles to include in the newsletter, the snippets will have dynamic content based on pre-determined segments.

You mentioned you weren't sure you would do it this way. Do you mind elaborating as to why? Or another approach you think would work better?

[Dan_Stevens_]

I would use regular program tokens here (not snippets).  Although, you can't use segmentation with program tokens.  Unless you use velocity/email script tokens.  Otherwise, over time, using snippets will become unmanageable since you need to define the segmentation/dynamic content directly within the snippet.  Like Josh said, snippets are mainly used for common content that exists across many/all emails (e..g, country based email footer) - for example:

[Danielle_Wong]

Thank you Dan. I decided to try out the Program Tokens and it seems to do everything I needed the snippet to do. But how would dynamic content work with the tokens?

[Dan_Stevens_]

If you don't want to take the velocity approach, then why not just use dynamic content/image regions/modules within your email template?  And then for each newsletter issue, you simply define the new content/image per your segmentation rules. 

[Danielle_Wong]

I'll test that route as well. It looks like we don't have any segmentations currently set up. So I have to go create one to test out using dynamic content in my newsletter. Appreciate your insights!

[Josh_Hill13]

A combination of an Email 2.0 Template and tokens would help you speed this up. But you can just clone out the whole program and update the email pretty easily.

[Danielle_Wong]

Yeah, I think I'll just stick with this process.

Thanks again Josh!