Messages
Designing a message in MailSauce can be fun, but also complex, because we offer a lot of customization options. We know some people often get confused by what exactly the difference is betwen a message and a campaign so here's the general gist:
A Campaign is the actual process of the email being sent out. final product, all combined. A campaign is made up of a contact list, a message/email, and a subject.
A Message is the email part. Your message can be made one of three ways; through the text editor, HTML editor, or the builder/drag-and-drop editor.
Messsage type
As mentioned above, there are 3 types of message that you can create. Each one has a very specific purpose so you'll want to use the one that best applies to your situation. They're all quite self-explanatory but to ellaborate:
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Text editor - This is a plain text editor. It's very similar to the kind of thing you'd use in Gmail or Outlook so if you're wanting to just send text with very limited styling, this is the one for you!
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HTML editor - This is for the more advanced users that know how to create HTML emails. This will also be the option you'd want to use if you've downloaded a HTML template file off the internet.
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Builder/drag-and-drop editor - For most users, this is most-likely the editor that you'll want to use. It's a drag and drop editor with a very simple interface that allows you to create beautiful and responsive emails fairly quickly. We also have a wide array of templates available to start from.
Variables
If you already have a contact list with some contacts subscribed, you're ready to get started on learning how to work with variables!
Variables are used to make emails more personalised and less generic. Instead of saying 'Hi there', using variables will allow you to say something like 'Hi John'. From our experience, we've found that using variables can increase your clicks and traffic by about 45%.
MailSauce has two kinds of variables, we have default variables and custom variables. We'll first touch on custom variables.
Custom Variables
If you go to your contact list, you'll notice there is a "variables" tab. This is where you can update your current variables for that contact list. Each variable is unique and corresponds to a column of your imported data. This is why you'll see the variables list update when you import contacts from a new file that has different column names to those that already exist in your contact list.
Each variable can be inserted into any of your messages by referencing it. To reference a variable you have to wrap it in curled brackets. Like this:
| Variable name | How it should be referenced |
|---|---|
| first_name | {first_name} |
| {email} |
When you reference a variable in one of your messages, you won't notice anything change immediately. However, when you've finished editting your message and you go to create a campaign, we'll swap out each referenced variable with the content stored in the corresponding contact list field.
For example, to include your contacts' email address in your email, you would place the variable that corresponds to that column, in this case let's say that's {email}, in the place that you want the contact's email address to appear in your message. When your contact receives the campaign, they'll see their own email address where the variable reference was placed.
Default Variables
As mentioned before, MailSauce has two kinds of variables, we have default variables and custom variables. We've already touched on custom variables, so now we'll explain how default variables work.
Default variables work in a very similar way to the custom variables explained above. To use them, you still have to reference them by wrapping the name in curled brackets, the only difference is that you don't create default variables, they already exist.
Default variables are snippets of information that we've created for users to insert in their messages. We've created these to hopefully make it easier for you to insert more dynamic data into your emails without having to do it yourself.
For example, some MailSauce users post newletters to their contacts every week. The newsletter message might contain the current date, well instead of the user having to manually input this each work, they can just use one of the data variables below and we'll automatically insert todays date for them.
Here's a complete list of all MailSauce default variables:
| Name | Description |
|---|---|
| {ms_date} | Displays todays date in the format '14th June 2019' |
| {ms_date[2]} | Displays todays date in the format 'June 14th 2019' |
| {ms_date[3]} | Displays todays date in the format 'Thursday 14th June 2019' |
| {ms_unsubscribe} | Displays a link that users can click to unsubscribe. |
| {ms_subscrbe_message} | Displays the reason the user is subscribed to your list. |
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