This article refers to legacy email template management. These templates are still used for transactional emails such as the registration confirmation email and application emails. Learn about the latest email template management here.
Throughout the course of an event, most communication with your audience will be conducted over email (though Attendease also supports SMS and push notifications). You are able configure 4 distinct email templates you can deploy for your messaging needs. This simple guide will give cover the basics of setting up email templates in Attendease.
Step 1
Navigate to the Messaging tab, then select the Email Templates menu item. The four templates you can configure and customize are Default, Registration, Announcement, and General. The Default template is the simplest with only a header, body, and footer. The other three templates have a number of different elements you can display, hide, and configure. For a closer look at what each of the templates look like see our Email Templates article.
Note that your account may have a different selection of templates than the 4 shown here.
Step 2
Duplicate your browser tab so you have two tabs open with the Attendease dashboard. We are going to be toggling back and forth between these two tabs so we can see our changes. Keep one tab open to the Email Templates screen and from the other open the Messages screen. Then select the Email button under New Blast.
After you've created a new email you'll need to decide which email template you want to build first. For this example I'm going to build out the Announcement template.
On the Message tab of the email you just created scroll down to the Template dropdown and select the template you want to edit (I'm going to select Announcement).
Next, add any text you want into the Body of the email. I'll add "Hello" and then the Attendease placeholder ###{{recipient_first_name}}. You must have something in the Body to save the email. This will also allow us to see where the body text will show up on the email template.
Note: Use ###{{recipient_first_name}} when you are sending an email to non-registered attendees (it will pull the first name from the CSV upload or whatever source you are using). Use ###{{first_name}} when you are sending an email to registered attendees—this placeholder will query the attendee's profile and input the correct first name.
Finally, save your changes. Now we are ready to edit the email template.
Step 3
Toggle back to the original browser tab where you've loaded the Email Templates screen and select the template you selected for the sample email (I'm going to select Announcement). In this next step, we're going to simply toggle on all of the available elements so we can see what the template will look like—then we'll toggle off any elements we don't want and configure the ones we do. We will see these changes in the email we just created.
So for each of the elements (ie. Header Background Color, Header Height, etc.) select the edit icon and enable it. Note that some of the elements are already enabled (ie. Event Logo) so be careful not to disable them.
Note! This step is super important. Every time you edit one of the elements in an email template you must publish/republish your event website via the Event Website dropdown in the dashboard navigation.
Step 4
Now that I've published my event website I can toggle back to the other tab (with the email I created) and preview it. Toggle the view from Compose to Preview.
From the preview I can see that my Announcement email template looks like this:
Step 5
The final step is to identify a) elements you want to remove or b) elements you want to configure/edit. If you want to remove the social icons in the footer for example, toggle back to the tab with the email template settings, find "Include Social Media Links in Footer?" and disable it. Remember that each change you make will require you to REPUBLISH your event website to see the change.
Note that you will not be able to change the layout of the email template only enable, disable, or edit/configure the existing elements. Good luck!