Instant, scheduled and automated email messages are available in enKod.

On this page you can view a list of existing messages and create a new one, as well as find a message through a quick search, including tagging. Messages can be sorted by ID or by type and filtering can be used

We use a special alert to mark messages that were sent with errors in dynamic content. You will see this information if you hover over a message with a yellow mark on the left edge.

If you click on the subject of a message in the list, you will see the details of that message - preview, information and statistics. You can also edit a message from the details (if it is available in its status).

In the “Message details” section you can view clicks map or download the message as an image.

Through the “Actions” button you can export the message information and statistics in .csv format.

In the “Information” section, you can see the following data:

• Segments - all selected segments to which the message is set up
• Subscribers - number of contacts from the selected segments who are subscribed to at least one mailing group (the message will be sent to this number of contacts). This number is displayed only for one-time messages, as for trigger and regular messages this number dynamically changes over time due to the change of segments.
• Sent - the number of messages that have been sent at the current moment of time (gradually growing, it will become maximum when the sending is finished).
• Not sent - number of messages that have not been sent from enKod at the current moment due to an error in the dynamic content or “abort” function, as well as if the contact is blacklisted. You can open the details by clicking on the number.
• Clicked on the “Spam” button - the number of contacts who have currently received the message and complained about it
• Unsubscribed - the number of contacts who have currently received the message and unsubscribed from the mailing list.

Statistics is displayed in the form of a dashboard, graph or standard table.

On the message list page, you can delete, copy or send a copy of an existing message or create a new one from scratch.

For messages of all channels in the “In Progress” statuses (+ for split-test emails in the “Testing in progress” and “Pick a winner” statuses), the function of cancelling the message sending is available. In this case it cannot be resumed, it will go to the “Cancelled” status.

All steps of the email message creation wizard are described below, as well as all settings and parameters you need to know to create an email message in the service.

The first step of creating a message is selecting a communication channel

The next step is to select the conditions for sending the message

An email message can be sent instantly or postponed for a specified day and time. Besides, there are 3 types of automatic message sending available - regular, by API, by event.

• Instant e-mail message - will be sent immediately after configuration
• Scheduled email - the date and time of sending is set manually.
• Regular message - manually set the start and end date of sending, as well as regularity: every hour (every hour in the selected time period), every day (every day at the selected time), every week (selected days of the week in the selected time period), by month (either by selected days of the week or by selected dates monthly)
• Email message via API - sending of transactional messages via API is available. A transactional message can be sent only to recipients who are in mailing groups or to any email address that is not in the database. If you need to send your transactional message to subscribers, you should press “Next” after selecting the message type without ticking the checkboxes. If you need the message to be sent to recipients who are not subscribed to mailing groups, you should select two checkboxes.
• Automatic email message on event - * event date - send to recipients.
  • occurrence of event date - sending is bound to the custom field of “date” and “date-time” types, if the custom field of “date” type is selected, the countdown starts from 00:00.
  • changing the value of the custom field
  • opening a message
  • clicking in a message
  • subscribing to a mailing group

Message editor

In this step you need to specify the subject of the message, the sender's name that is displayed to the recipient in the mail interface, and the sender's email address.

By default, the mail specified in the Sender email field will be used as the reply address. If you want to use a different mail as the reply address to handle feedback from users, select the corresponding item and specify the actual email for feedback.

In addition to the subject line, you can also set up a preheader. Fill it with the necessary text that will be displayed in the mail client next to the subject. In order to leave the preheader empty, but not to allow substitution of the message content after the subject, use   characters in the field for entering the preheader text.

Dynamic content is allowed in the subject and preheader of the email.

Next, customise the content of the message. There are 3 options available:

• HTML editor
• Stripo block editor
• Copying an existing message
• Uploading an archive
• Template (you can use ready-made enKod templates or custom ones you created in advance in the platform).

If you have an HTML file with a layout, select the HTML editor option and paste or drag the layout into the window.

When uploading an archive, you should follow the following rules:

• ZIP format
• Up to 5MB in size
• HTML file with any name and extension .html
• A folder with images (.jpg, .png, .gif) with the name “img”

Make sure that the relative path of the images in the HTML file is correct, otherwise the images will not be displayed in the email. I.e. if the archive contains a file with layout and img folder with images, the path in the layout should be written as “img/picture.png”, not just “picture.png”.

An email uploaded in any way can be edited in our HTML editor. In it you can see how the layout will be displayed for device widths from 100px to 600px, as well as format the HTML code. Use the dynamic content manager to add methods or variables to the layout. The email code can be moved word by word for easy editing using the corresponding button at the bottom of the screen.

As a block editor, we use an external solution - block editor Stripo. It allows you to create adaptive templates by drag&drop principle, without involving technical specialists. You can read more about how to set up emails in the editor in the block "Questions and answers" on the Stripo website.

After you have created a message template, click “Apply” to exit the editor.

Any message you create can be saved as a custom template. To do this, at the message editor stage, put the cursor over the message content display window and click the save icon. In this way the layout of the message body will be saved into the template, without sending settings (subject, preheader, etc.).

Custom templates are only available in the account in which they were created.

At the same step you can send a test email In order to check whether the message is displayed correctly and, if necessary, to correct it before sending it to users. To do this, click on the “Test” button and then “Send test email” and in the window that appears specify the emails to which you want to send the message (each new email is added with the Enter button and deleted by clicking on the cross). Click “Send” and check the test emails.

In addition to test sending, you can also preview the message. Preview allows you to generate all dynamic content in the message for a certain email address without sending the message itself to the mail. Click “Test” and then “Preview”. Enter the required email address from the enKod database and generate HTML. You can test the email on any email address from the database, we will store up to 20 versions of the generated message (you can clear unnecessary ones if necessary). Message versions are stored only within the current editing session.

In the message creation wizard and preview, you can check the message display on desktop and mobile devices.

Selecting recipients

After creating a message, you need to specify the recipients. To do this, select segments or mailing groups by clicking on the “+” to the right of the name. Here you can also count the selected segments and check the number of recipients of the message. Please note that the “Recipients” does not just count all unique contacts from the selected segments, but only those that have the necessary identifier (email address for email messages or phone number for SMS).

Here you can also upload a list of contacts in .csv format to send a message to it. Note that the list cannot be uploaded at the same time as selecting groups or segments.

You can import .csv files and archives (with .csv file) up to 50MB in UTF-8 encoding. The first column of the file must contain the e-mail address.

At each step, you can go back to the previous ones by clicking on the “Back” button or on the ticked title of any step. You can also save a message as a draft. It will then appear in the list of messages, where you can copy, edit or delete it.

Summary report

The last step is to view the details of the message: message preview, content details, sending details and recipients. After you check them and click the “Send” button, the message will be created and sent if the send condition is “now”.

When working with messages, you can use tags. They help to visually distinguish messages in the list and logically unite them. You can assign several tags to a message at once. Tags can be added at the stage of message content customisation. After you have written the name of the tag, press Enter and it will be added.

You can change tags in a message without editing. Go to the email details by clicking on the name and edit the tags in the “Info” section.

When working with messages, you can use UTM-tags that will help you to track link clicks in analytics services (Yandex.Metrika, Google Analytics).

At the “Message Editor” step, specify the UTM tags you plan to use in the corresponding fields, and the values will be automatically assigned to all links in the message.

If you want to add dynamic variables to links, use URL parameters. To do this, specify a parameter name and value - these will be assigned to all links in the message. If you plan to use several parameters, click on the “Add Parameter” button - you can create up to 10 parameters at a time. To delete a parameter, click on the bin icon to the right of it.

You can set the values of labels and parameters in the settings. In this case they will be automatically assigned to all messages. For more information, see this section of the manual.

In UTM tags and URL parameters you can use personalisation tags.

Split-testing functionality is available for instant and scheduled emails in the “Message Editor” step.

You can add up to 5 variants of emails, for each of which you can individually configure the subject, sender email, sender name, email content (layout, UTM tags and URL parameters). Reply tags and email address are common for all versions.

When adding a new version, the content of the previous version is copied for convenience, but you can edit it if necessary.

After all version templates have been configured, you need to set the split testing settings.

Selecting a winner

Three options are available to determine the winner:

• by clicks
• by opens
• manually

When selecting the clicks or opens options, you should set the duration of testing in hours (minimum value - 1 hour, maximum - 1000 hours). During this time, the mailing will be analysed, and at the end of this period, based on the statistics of the selected indicator, the sending of the winning mailing will start.

The testing period is not configurable for manual determination.

Sampling for testing

After setting up the conversion rate you want to test against, you need to configure the size of the test and control groups. You can assign a test group size from 5% to 100% of the total number of recipients. The test group will be equally divided by the number of versions of the test.

The remaining subscribers who are not in the test group will automatically be sent the winning version after the test is complete. If you have chosen to determine the winner manually, you will need to analyse the statistics by version in the message details (after you have finished sending to the test group and changed the message status to “Select a winner”), select the desired test version yourself and send it to the remaining recipients.

In the email details you can use the split test version toggle to see all templates and content of the messages participating in the test.

All split tests are automatically tagged with an A/B tag to make them easier to find in the list of messages.

In emails of all sending conditions and scripted emails, except drafts, you can change links even after sending.

To do this, go to Messages ➔ Message Details. When you click on the “Edit links” button in the message map, blue frames will highlight the links that can be changed. After clicking on the frame you can change the link in the pop-up window that opens.

If the link has already been edited, a pop-up window will display by whom it was edited.

This functionality has a number of limitations. It is not possible to:

• change links with phone (tel:) and e-mail (mailto:)
• change links with dynamic content inside
• change links to links with dynamic content (adding texts with

   {{some_text}} 

  is not allowed).

After making changes, the new link will be displayed in the click map.

At the same time click statistics:

• displays the total number of clicks on the original and new links
• takes into account the uniqueness of a click (if the same contact clicked on both the original and new links, only 1 unique click will be recorded in the statistics).

When sending email messages, there may be a situation when the receiving mail server does not have time to send a part of messages from large mailings. We process this response and try to send the same email several times. After 30 sec, 1 min, 5 min, 10 min. Because of this mechanism, sending one email can take up to 16 minutes and 30 seconds of pure time, without taking into account the overall speed and load of enKod.

Use the dynamic content method to generate a link to the web version of the post:

{{link_view_in_browser}}

In the wizard you can specify a title for the message. The title will be displayed only in the service instead of the subject in all message lists, segments and reports. The customer will not be able to see it, so the title can be used for internal navigation in enKod.

For split tests of messages, the title is common to all versions.

Exported statistics files will always show the subject of the message, not the title.

If you check the “Send images as attachments” checkbox, all images in the email will be automatically converted to attachments: both for test sending and for actual sending.

This feature is necessary for sending emails on Outlook, because this email client application does not display images sent as a link.

We do not recommend using this feature to send emails to any other email client, as the result can be unpredictable.