Update to email templates

[Carrie_Thomas]

true. if you are in partitions and use multiple folders (inbound, outbound, events, etc) there would still be a lot of folders to update but not unmanageable. 

[SanfordWhiteman]

Best practice is to have one top-level folder. Hence one update in each partition.

[SanfordWhiteman · Accepted solution]

I use a {{my.Year}} token in my designs.

A Velocity token I hope. Then you really never need to touch it.

$date.format( 
  "yyyy", 
  $date, 
  $date.getLocale(), 
  $date.getTimeZone().getTimeZone("Australia/Canberra") 
)

The timezone is only important during one day of the year; if you don't care about that (I am always a stickler for that) you just need:

$date.getYear()

[Sarah_White1]

Hi all -

To clarify, should the {{my.Year}} token be placed within the original template so that when a new local email asset is created from it, the token is already present? Or is the{{my.Year}} token added at the email asset creation stage?

[Grégoire_Miche2]

You can do both.

Adding the token directly in the template has a risk though, as if someone use the template to create an email in the design studio, the token will be empty. So make sure to set the default value for the token.

You can also consider adding the token in the template within an editable section.

-Greg

[Anna_Leary3]

Sarah - are you emails mostly living within Marketing Activities? If so then I don't see an issue in putting this token within the email template itself. If it's a template used to build emails within the design studio then I would be cautious as to even using tokens with default values because you would always have to remember to go edit the email template if the default value ever changed. Just a head's up.

[Sarah_White1]

Hi Anna - we are just starting to launch our Marketo instance, so we are a bit of a blank slate. We have a custom email template that was built by an agency for us that lives in the design studio, but I imagine that most of our emails will be created or cloned within Marketing Activities. Being at the very beginning stages of our build, I was hoping to be strategic about setting up copyright dates, logos, and addresses in the footer (we will be moving campuses in 2 years) so that we can update them in one place once a year (or less frequently for logos and addresses) across all live emails instead of needing to manually update each email individually as we need to in our current system.

From what you're saying, it sounds like copyright year, logo, and address could live as tokens within the email template in design studio since we would be updating very infrequently while other more variable tokens should be added at the asset level within marketing activities?

[SanfordWhiteman]

You'll be able to create a self-updating Email Script {{my.token}} (for emails) and a self-updating Text {{my.token}} (with the equivalent JavaScript for landing pages) at the uppermost level of Marketing Activities. Neither of these will ever need to be touched.

[Anna_Leary3]

Hi Sarah - yes, that is definitely the way to go for things such as copyright year, logo, and address in the footer since it will be the same across all email templates used in Marketing Activities. And then create program level tokens within marketing activities for anything else that you want to tokenize that might change more often. I'm not sure if the template you had created allows for snippets, but snippets are also another way to create a footer that sits within an email and can also contain tokens. Snippets are used if you have more than one footer that will be used in emails (example: different office locations or compliance verbiage). Here is more on snippets in Marketo docs: Add a Snippet to an Email - Marketo Docs - Product Documentation

While Sanford is correct in that you can create self-updating email script that will update the tokens, for those that are less technical or do not have technical resources then the above is a great approach!

[Sarah_White1]

Thank you! I will see if our template allows for that.