ClickDimensions Email Templates

ClickDimensions offers a very powerful email template editor that can be a sale generator on the hands of a good email marketing team or specialist. One advantage over Dynamics Marketing is that ClickDimensions features are added inside CRM while Dynamics marketing is a separate application that synchronises with CRM.

This post covers only how to create and test a basic dynamic email. If you know HTML quite well you be able to make better use of ClickDimensions email templates. What may be tricky, but not much, is getting used to FreeMarker, the mark-up\script that ClickDimensions uses for dynamic templates.

There are two ways you could test. This approach (using the test button) will not send a real email but will present a sample of what the user will get plus info about SPAM:

You can also create a Marketing list with your email only to avoid emailing real customers. This is also good if you have how to open your email in different email clients. Not long ago I had a client having problem opening html email with image maps in Outlook.

To get started with a simple test, we need first to create a marketing List:

To make sure you can safely test it as much as you need, create a marketing list with only one recipient with your email address or an email address that you can access

Next, Go to Marketing > Email Templates and create a New email template. Under Editor Type, Select “Free style”.

Notice you can’t access the editor before saving the template.

ClickDimensions offers a powerful editor that allow you to select and insert value fields for entities like Lead, Contact and Account.

When you select a field, it will insert the mark-up between brackets ${Recipient.[entity].[fieldname]}.

On this case ${Recipient.contact.city} will pick a value for the city field on the contacts inside of the marketing list. Since I am on the marketing list and my record has Auckland, ${Recipient.contact.city} will be replaced with Auckland.

Now let’s say you have different text or html for different locations. You can use FreeMarker to create an “IF” statement and send customised content to each region.

Use <#assign variablename = ${Recipient.[entity].[fieldname]} > to create a variable that will hold the City value

Now you can use <#if></#if> to separate content specific to each region.

Make sure you hit the editor’s save button. Templates are saved to the ClickDimensions server, not to the local CRM Database.

Now that we have a template, let’s test it. Go to Marketing > Email templates >Email Sends

Make sure that you enter the mandatory fields but most important, select the email template that you just created under “Email Template” and the Marketing list with your email address.

Now Click “SEND”. You should receive the email with content specific to the city\location.  

Once you open the email, The ClickDimensions server gets updated and you can start to see statistics for your email campaign.   For more info, check their site here.