To begin an email distribution in Agility, go to Amplify > Email distributions. If you have previous distributions or drafts they will be shown on the left hand panel. To begin a new distribution, click the blue button at the top of the panel.
There are currently four templates, blank and three samples which suggest ways of organising your content. You can also save your own templates and access them from here, or copy from past distributions.
You can switch PR CoPilot on if you want to use Agility's AI-powered writing tool to help you draft your email. Full instructions on using PR CoPilot are here.
When you create a new email, you will be presented with three simple steps - Compose / Edit Recipients and Review/Schedule.
The Compose step presents you with a choice of components that enable you to build and customize your email. Most of these are optional, only the Distribution Details at the top and the Footer at the bottom are mandatory.
Distribution Details
Subject of your email
Any preview text you wish recipients to see prior to opening your email
The name of the person or organisation sending the email
The address that any replies will go to
Agility's Quick Tips will help you to complete these fields, and by selecting the refinement tools shown below you can make use of PR CoPilot, which will suggest an email subject or preview text based on the content of your email. (Note, you must have content in a text component within the body of your email before PR CoPilot will suggest a Subject or Preview Text.)
Email components
The other components are available to help you create exactly the design you are looking for. Each of these is heavily customizable.
Key points to note are:
Title components can be used if you have several sections within your email and want to include a heading for each.
Text: This field will be used to display the majority of your written content. We recommend creating content directly within the text field, which allows for a wide range of formatting choices. Copying and pasting from Word generally works fine, albeit with some minor tidying up and reformatting required. It is important to be wary of using Word, as it uses non-standard HTML which isn’t supported by many email clients.
Again, PR CoPilot can be used to draft the text of your email for you.
Images: Any multimedia content such as photos or logos should either be sent as attachments or included in the email using an image box. Images should not be included in a text field.
Dividers allow you to clearly separate and define sections of your email.
Buttons allow you to create calls to action within your emails, and are customizable by colour, size and shape
Social Links enable users to further customise and brand their email communications, and open up further channels with the media.
There is an option to include an invitation to “View in Browser” in Agility’s email distribution tool. The “View in Browser” link points to the web-hosted version of your email, which is kept on our servers. This helps recipients who either can’t view HTML emails, or have image downloading switched off, to view the full version of your email.
Footer Settings
Every email must contain a footer with the contact information of the sender. You can edit the content either within the section itself or under Footer Settings.
This brief video will talk you through editing a footer.
When you are happy with the composition of your email, you can click Next or simply click on 'Edit Recipients' or 'Review Schedule'.
Edit Recipients allows you to send to several targeted lists and/or save searches at once, and also to add any other recipients ad-hoc (e.g. contacts not on a targeted list or colleagues of yours).
We have also added the ability to exclude contacts that are on the list from a particular email distribution. So if you have a media list that you wish to use, but want to exclude certain contacts from receiving the email, you can!
Once you move to Review/Schedule, an email with the essential components completed correctly and at least one recipient specificied will be almos ready to go and the summary page will be full of blue ticks. A red flag will show up against details that need changing.
How do I send a Test email?
By clicking on content validation, indicated below, you are able to preview your content on a variety of devices, and to send a test email to several addresses. This should enable you to ensure that your email looks exactly as you want it before you distribute.
Once you are happy with your content, you may wish to Click Save as Draft and then Save As Template. This means that you can create, save and re-use as many formats as you need, depending on the kind of email you are sending.
If you prefer to track and measure link clicks and email opens yourself, or simply not to collect that information from your audience at all, you can now switch off click tracking and open tracking within Agility. Click and Open Tracking will be enabled by default, and if you switch either off you must be aware that you won’t see these metrics in your distribution report.
The confirmation notification will inform the specified person once the email has gone out.
The combined file size limit for each email is 5MB. This includes the email text, all images, and attachments. Please note that the more files you add, the more SPAM-like your communications appear to email clients. Any attachments over 600KB may be marked as SPAM by a recipient server.
You can schedule your email for immediate distribution or for any date in the future. If the release is scheduled for a future date, you can cancel it before it goes out if you need to. This will revert the email distribution to a draft status.
Once your email is delivered to your recipients, you will be able to see the available reporting, which is explained here.