Creating Content Overview

Overview

From multi-channel templates to reusable snippets and dynamic content, MessageGears provides a variety of methods for creating content for use in your marketing campaigns. In addition to email and SMS, we now support more enhanced options in our push campaign templates. Explore our new in-app message campaign type to learn how to create native, on brand in-app messages that reach users while they're in the app. Use MessageGears' powerful personalization capabilities to build dynamic content from either hosted or external sources.

Campaign templates

Use templates to create the content for your email, push notification, and SMS channels. To view your templates in the navigation, select Content > Templates. MessageGears currently supports multi-channel templates for Email, Push, and SMS.

• Email - Use the drag-and-drop editor or build your email directly in HTML. For more information, see Creating and Managing Templates.
• Push - Use our enhanced push notification editor to build rich, platform-agnostic push notifications. For more information, see Creating Push Content.
• SMS - Use the SMS editor to add your message body and select a short code. For more information, see SMS Messaging.

In-app message content

For our new in-app message campaigns, you create your content as part of the campaign workflow. Create messages for both mobile and TV devices, across multiple platforms, with any combination of images, buttons, and pages. For more information, see In-app Message Campaigns.

Dynamic content

MessageGears supports several options for including dynamic, personalized content in your messages:

• Global snippets - reusable templating elements that you can use across templates, for example, email headers and footers. 
• Local snippets - template-level snippets used to handle data management or advanced properties specific to one template.

Both global snippets and local snippets are written in HTML and FreeMarker. For more information on how to use them in your templates, see Using Dynamic Content.

Contextual content

MessageGears' supplemental data (formerly called Context Data in Accelerator) is a feature that allows you to pull contextual data or content from an external source outside of your audience or recipient data. Supplemental data is a way of combining auxiliary data with personal Recipient data for dynamic Templates and can be used anywhere FreeMarker is supported. Supplemental data is processed and used when an email is sent out. For more information, see our Supplemental Data guide.

Additionally, MessageGears supports pulling in personalized content when it is opened, via Hosted or External data. For more details on how to use the different types of contextual content, see Supplemental Data vs Hosted and External Data.

Common use cases

The following articles cover how to create content for some common use cases.

• Abandoned Cart Automation - trigger a message after a customer leaves unpurchased items in their cart.
• End-to-end Newsletter Creation - walk through all the steps involved in creating an email newsletter, from audience creation, to defining and personalizing your content, to creating and scheduling your campaign.
• Link tracking - track clickable links within emails to report on and better understand recipient engagement to mailings.
• Localized content - learn about how to use our Smartling integration to localize your email content.