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Anonymous
November 2, 2015
Solved

Building modular email templates with snippets

  • November 2, 2015
  • 20 replies
  • 6738 views

Our central services provides a set of modular snippets (preheader, header, body, footer) for different mailing/engagement systems (html).

I do not find a way in Marketo to build a basic skeleton where I can insert snippets which are editable. I tried the following approach:

  1. I created a basic html skeleton with html header (media queries etc) and body (with sections "add a headline" etc.) with name <html skeleton template>
  2. I created some snippets (span's with class mkteditable and ids), e.g. <headline>, <intro_text>
  3. I created an email and selected the template <html skeleton template>
  4. I tried to replace the default section "add a headline" (see 1) with a well defined and formatted snippet <headline> (see 2), then I wanted to edit the snippet text without any luck

I assumed that the snippet inheritance will be cut automatically, but I learned that I have to insert the snippet in the email > go to the design studio > clone the snippet and modify the text from the snippet inserted in the email.

Is there any other way of building modular templates?

When I am able to change the snippet default text or image within the email directly, it would be a perfect approach, but switiching to the Design studio and cloning the snippet to me is not a good approach to scale Marketo up within the company with 50+ different persons creating emails.

What is your approach?

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Best answer by Justin_Cooperm2

I am happy with this fruitful discussion and Justin's feedback. But when we will have the new Email Editing experience?

Justin, I do not want to bothering you, this is my last question for now to that very important topic :-) And the answer is very important too.

Thanks @Grégoire Michel for supporting this.


I'm actively working on this project as we speak.

I'm targeting 1H 2016. My guess is sometime around April...

20 replies

Stijn_Heijthuij
Stijn_Heijthuij
Level 6
November 2, 2015

Hi Benjamin,

Take a look at combining Snippets and Tokens.

Your Snippet could load in a block for the hero image. With a {{my.hero-image}} token you could then populate the hero image. Same things goes for a CTA with a {{my.CTA-link}} and {{my.CTA-text}}.

Just make sure your snippets have unique tokens.

A
Anonymous
November 2, 2015

Hello Stijn,

Thank you for sharing this idea and for the very quick response. Isn't it a way to complicated to switch between email view and tokens or snippets while editing the email, just from a user acceptance perspective? What are your experiences?

We are figuring out from a central Headquarter view what is possible with Marketo in regards to the template definiton. To my knowledge it seems very difficult to provide templates just centrally and you need a lot more skills on the user side on working with templates.

Josh_Hill13
Josh_Hill13
Level 10
November 2, 2015

Snippets are supposed to be centrally defined areas that can modify their text based on Segmentations, if desired. I think what you want is an editable template, which is pretty easy to do based on a centrally defined DIV sections per the docs.

Perhaps you can describe more about what you are trying to accomplish so we can give you a better answer.

I agree that Email Templates are pretty rigid and maybe Marketo will add Guided Templates to Email Templates soon.

Dan_Stevens_
Dan_Stevens_
Level 10
November 19, 2015

Benjamin, check out my reply here: Re: Custom unsubscribe email footers in Admin ?

A
Anonymous
November 19, 2015

Thank you Dan, it's a good hint to make use of snippets for almost static contents. I like your screen copies with the red text "REPLACE", it looks very intuitive, loud and user-friendly. I will copy it :-)

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