Link Out To Separate Articles From Within a Main eNewsletter (Advanced 'Read More' Links)

Details

When it comes to eNews style wrap-up emails, they're generally a collection of stories or articles from the week or month - but placing all of your individual articles into one summary email can make that email very long (and it's email design best practice to keep emails fairly short).

Furthermore, placing the full content of your articles into one big email means you have no visibility over what your users are reading or what topics they're interested in - so there's no metrics for your content.

Rather than place all of your articles into your email in full, it's common practice to create a few short sentences as a teaser, then link off to the full version of the article - such as in a separate email (with just that article's content), or even link off to a post on your website or blog.

These will open up as a new tab in the users browser when clicking through to them.

Not only do you then keep your email concise and to the point, but you'll also be able to see who is interested in what topics - as your email report will now have click data for your individual article links. It also means you can begin to tag your contacts based on what they're interested in - allowing you to really personalise their emails in future.

Conceptual Overview

The following diagram shows a conceptual overview of how the process works - with your main (eNews) email being setup to link out to additional emails (the articles) where necessary. The individual article emails also provide users with a method to get back to the main email (the 'Back to main eNews' buttons).

Naming Conventions

You may like to use a naming convention to make it easy to locate your main & individual article emails at a later date (as per the example below);

Things To Be Aware Of

Please be aware that any clicks on links (if any) within the additional emails (the 'articles') are not tracked. Essentially, there is zero reporting data available for any actions taken within these separate 'article' emails. This is because they are not actually being sent out to contacts - they're just being linked to from somewhere else.

How-to Guide

In this guide, we're going to show you how to make separate individual emails for your various articles - then link to them from your main eNewsletter email. Let's take a look...

1. Begin by creating your main eNewsletter email. Create an Email.
2. When building out your articles or sections, instead of placing all of the content for your articles into the newsletter, use short but interesting text summaries to entice the user to click through to read the full story (as per the example shown below).
   
3. Save your message.
4. Now we'll copy the email and redesign it to suit one of our individual articles. In the case of our example, let's say we're creating the full article for our lead story, 'Classic Range Additions!'. Go to the Save button again, but this time select the ▼ (dropdown arrow) next to it and choose the option to Save as new message.
5. Give the new email message a name, but ensure it's obvious to you & other users that this is the full email for one of your articles.
6. As you'd likely want to keep your individual articles fairly simple (so users can focus on the content), now remove the various text, images and other components you no longer need.
7. Add in your full article text & any related content as needed. In our example below, notice we've removed the full-width email banner image that was at the top in order to allow our readers to get straight into the article content... 
   
8. It's likely you'll want to give your readers a way to click back to your main eNews email (as per the purple button in the example above) - so let's give them a method of doing so. Insert a button component into your article email or add a link to some of your text. When setting the link location via the Insert Link dialog, choose Email Message and select your main eNews message, as shown.
   
9. Save your message.
10. Now let's make a copy and work on our second article; in our example this is the article that talks about the launch of our new recipe club. As per before, go to the Save button again, but again select the ▼ (dropdown arrow) next to it and choose the option to Save as new message.
11. Give the new message a name, but again - ensure it's obvious to you & other users that this is the email for your second story or article.
12. Edit the content and imagery to suit your second story.
    
13. Save your message.
14. Repeat this process for any additional articles you need individual messages for.
15. Finally, we need to link the various parts of our main eNews email to all of the individual articles. Open your main eNewsletter email message for editing.
16. Add a link into the text of your article(s), or enable the Call to Action element on your various article text components (as shown) and add the link through there.
    
17. Just as before, when adding the link be sure to link it to an Email Message, then choose the relevant email message for your article (as shown).
    
18. Repeat this process and add links to full articles for any that need it.
19. Once done, Save your message. You can then send yourself a test and check that all of your links work.