What's New

We’re always looking for ways to improve the Emma experience, so we’re excited to announce enhancements to the default email footer. These updates focus on accessibility, mobile responsiveness, and overall user experience, making it easier than ever to create professional-looking emails. Here’s what’s new:

• Improved Color Contrast: We’ve adjusted the text, background, and logo colors to meet AA accessibility standards, ensuring your emails are easy to read for all recipients.
• Consistent Link Colors: The default blue link color will remain consistent even when you customize other link colors within your template settings, maintaining accessibility.
• Modernized Text Box: The footer now utilizes the updated Paragraph block, providing a seamless user experience across different email elements.
• Enhanced Mobile Display: We’ve added padding and aligned the logo to the left for a cleaner and more visually appealing mobile view. 
• Background Color Consistency: We’ve standardized the background color to prevent inconsistencies and ensure a consistent look and feel across your templates.

These updates are designed to streamline your email creation process and help you deliver professional, accessible emails every time.

The updated footer will be applied to all newly created templates going forward.

Remember that handy feature we released last month to move multiple templates into folders? Well, we’re taking it a step further. Now, you can bulk delete templates! No more tedious, one-by-one removal. Now you can quickly clean up your template list and keep your workspace organized. With this update we’ve also added a few more improvements:

• Confirmation Prompt: We’ve added a confirmation step to prevent accidental deletions.
  
• Clearer Labeling: To avoid confusion, the “archive” option for individual templates has been renamed to “delete.”
  

Happy organizing!

Introducing a new, more intuitive navigation and menu options. We’ve updated the navigation so there’s only one main navigation menu. We’ve also replaced our menus with icons to access support, profile settings, account settings, and account pages. For plans with subaccounts, this will simplify your experience and allow you to manage your parent, subaccount, and profile settings all in one place!

With our new in-app virtual support, you can get the help you need without leaving the Emma platform, making it even more convenient! Click the ‘Support’ icon in the new navigation menu, then click ‘Get support.’ This will connect you to our Emma Virtual Assistant, who will help you troubleshoot and contact support if needed.

In-app support is available depending on user permissions and account plans.

Imagine having a central repository for your email templates that automatically updates across your entire organization. With template folder sharing, you can streamline your campaign creation process by quickly sharing entire folders of templates with specific subaccounts. This means less time spent manually sharing individual templates and more time crafting effective messaging that resonates with your audience and aligns with your brand.

We’re offering more flexibility and customization when adding SMS consent options to your signup form. When you add the SMS Mobile Number field to your signup form you will now have the option to add a statement of consent for “promotional purposes” and “informational purposes”. We updated these statements of consent to ensure your contact has a clear indication of the type of communication they are signing up for. You will also have the option to display either or both of the statements of consent and can customize the terms and conditions language.

*This update is reflected on SMS signup forms as of 10/2/24. To update the consent statements on an existing SMS signup form, please edit the form, remove the current SMS Mobile Number Field, and re-add the field.

As your business grows, you may take advantage of using multiple subaccounts to organize your marketing teams and efforts.
We’ve added the ability for you to create and apply custom categories to subaccounts. You define these values, similar to custom fields on contacts or labels on images. You can create categories that are relevant to how you organize your business. Once you’ve created your categories, you can add them to the subaccount grid to filter and find specific subaccounts with ease.

Response data, in particular open and click rates, may not truly reflect how your email performed with a human audience. Many factors can influence these metrics, for example, Apple MPP, which attempts to block email tracking analytic measures. Security scanning software which may be attempting to identify phishing attempts or malware virus scanning can also be interpreted as opens or clicks. These measures may artificially increase these rates.

In the response page, you will now see the impact from these measures, in order to measure true engagement from your audience. A few import details you should know:

• NHI Metrics are not filtered from your reports.
• NHI Metrics are retroactive from June 11th, 2024 (6/11/2024). Any campaigns sent prior to that date will not show NHI data.
• NHI data will not be available via the public API response endpoints, response exports, insights, nor for response based segments.

Searching and identifying subaccounts has become a whole lot easier.
In the subaccounts tab, parent account users can search by name for a specific subaccount.
Parent accounts can also identify a subaccount name by using a subaccount ID. You can find a subaccount ID in the subaccount settings tab.

Webhook management just got a whole lot easier. Webhooks are an easy way to have Emma’s system notify you when certain events occur or pass information to a destination url. For example, when a contact opens a message, you’ll be able to pass along the Subaccount ID, Member ID, Mailing ID, Subject, and timestamp. You can find a complete list of webhooks here. You can also see the type of request (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) in the UI. You can add, edit, and delete webhooks. 

By popular request, you can now easily add tables to your campaigns with our new drag-and-drop table content block! Using this new content type, you can better organize and display data in a visual format, without the need for complex coding or technical knowledge. Plus, using this table content block means you have peace of mind that your formatting will display consistently when sent across various devices and email providers.

You asked, and we’ve answered with our segment descriptions, now available to all users on all plan types. Segments can be an incredible tool to organize and maintain your audience. However, keeping track of the segment you designed for a specific email campaign or for a specific time-period can be challenging. Now you can quickly add or edit a simple description of a segment. This will make it easy to identify its purpose, use for appropriate campaigns, and share the description using Audience Sharing. Sending personalized and targeted email campaigns just got a whole lot easier.

As your organization grows, you’ll want to add more email templates to help manage your marketing programs across subaccounts. To keep you organized, we’ve added the ability for you to create folders for your templates. You can move templates individually or in bulk to any folders as you see fit. 

In October 2023, Google and Yahoo announced new sender requirements to keep inboxes secure and ensure your emails land in the inboxes for which you intend them. While we’ve added several product features to enhance your abilities to authenticate your account and check your status for best-in-class sending, we’ve also implemented fallback measures so you never miss a message. With our new fallback sender email, customers who have not obtained, configured, and verified a domain can continue to send email campaigns with Emma. If you are using a sender email address that uses @gmail.com, @yahoo.com, or @hotmail.com for your campaign sends, we will automatically update the sender email domain for sending, while continuing to deliver replies right to your original email address. This will ensure that your emails will be delivered to your audiences without delay, as you continue to authenticate your domain.

With changes coming from Google and Yahoo to improve email deliverability and reduce spam, there has never been a better time to focus on delivering the right content to the right audience. That’s where sign-up forms come into play. With easy-to-use forms in Emma, you can improve personalization by offering your audience opt-in opportunities in order to deliver the right content. 

For example, perhaps you’re a college or university sending email campaigns out to students, alumni, and prospects. By using a form, you can offer options for your audience to choose the content they want to see, from one alumni newsletter to all three. Plus, take advantage of our built-in integration with Google Analytics, using either the new GA4 codes (new Google from Google) or UA (universal analytics) codes to see improved analytics for those form submissions. 

We know that many of our Emma customers are interested in multichannel marketing strategies to reach every customer. We know you also want these channels to be easy to navigate and simple to operate. Now in addition to SMS campaign data, we’ve added a public API that allows you to view and assess SMS credit usage. Use this feature to review SMS messages delivered over a specific date range, and get easy reporting on SMS messages and usage for each of your subaccounts. 

As you authenticate your domain, you’ll also want to ensure you have records for both SPF and DMARC. We’ve made it easy to ensure your records have been entered and are correctly configured, right within the Emma platform. Now you can use our Checker to see your DMARC and SPF record settings, policies, and status on the updated deliverability tab. These checks happen in real-time and allow you to see or understand any issues with your DNS record implementation.

In our continued efforts to fully support our customers through the new sender requirements announced by Google and Yahoo, we’ve implemented product features for DKIM backfill. As a Parent or Manager user you can now apply your unique sending domain (including DKIM) across all of your subaccounts. 

After setting default text styles within the Brand Manager, you can select the ‘disable changes in editor’ box to prevent users from being able to modify the text styles in their email campaigns. 

When this is selected, users will not see the ability to change the font, weight, size, letter spacing, or line height in the editor.

When sharing a campaign from your parent account, you can check the ‘Disable changes to…’ boxes to prevent subaccounts from modifying the subject line or preheader text on the campaign.

The default text format can now be defined when you use the Header 1, Header 2, Header 3, and Paragraph styles in the editor.

You can add specific colors to appear during color selection in the editor. This is helpful for pre-setting the brand colors, to ensure they are right at the user’s fingertips and are the exact right hexadecimal value.

Our AI Assistant helps you do your job faster by banishing writer’s block and automatically adjusting content based on your preferred tone, length, and overall brand personality.

By entering prompts into our email editor, you can create email content that is reflective of your brand and resonates with your audience.

When purchasing SMS message credits, you can allocate an amount of your choice to each of your subaccounts.

The campaign response overview now displays the Apple MPP open rate for your campaigns.

Here at Emma we understand the importance of branding and style to create a cohesive organizational identity. The Fonts section of the Style Guide allows you to add custom fonts and manage the campaign editor’s default fonts.

We’ve added 6 new templates themed around the holidays are now available for you. Check them out in Brand Manager.

‘Merge tags’ are now named ‘Personalize’ in the drag and drop editor. This better reflects this feature’s end use and is more intuitive for you and your teams, mitigating any confusion.

We’ve also made it easier to add default values when leveraging personalization in your emails. Simply select ‘Personalize’ (renamed from Merge tags) and then type in the default or fallback text you want your subscribers to see.

Sharing up to date and real-time content is essential when creating engaging emails for your subscribers. The drag and drop editor now has RSS feed content blocks, enabling you to automatically import published content into your campaigns.

Having a consistent tone of voice is key to ensuring your customers connect and engage with your business. That’s why you can now create and share on-brand preheader text with your subaccounts before they send their campaign.

As part of our commitment to help keep Emma customers’ accounts more secure, we’ve implemented a new security measure: one-time verification. When Emma customers now login from a device or location that our system doesn’t recognize, we’ll send a one-time verification message containing a unique and time-sensitive code to the email address connected to that specific Emma account. This provides an additional, automated check to ensure that only verified users have access to Emma accounts.

We still recommend enabling two-factor authentication (2FA) as the best way to increase account security. As such, we’ll be making 2FA a mandatory sign in requirement for all Emma users in the coming months.

Cut through the noise with Emma SMS*! SMS is a powerful, yet simple marketing tool that helps you meet your customers where they are, create deeper connections and with your audience. 

And now with Emma SMS* you can easily manage and deploy multi-channel campaigns from one central platform. 

Move at the speed of your customers and leverage SMS to send:

• Limited-time promotions
• Last-minute event changes
• On-the-go event reminders 
• Time-sensitive loyalty rewards
• & so much more!
  

*Emma SMS only available when you sign up to an Emma Essentials, Teams or Corporate contracted plan, and for sending SMS in the USA.

SMS is coming soon to Emma! To make sure you’re ready to add SMS to your marketing mix, we’ve released two new features that will make growing your SMS list easy. 

Mobile Signup Forms and Mobile Contact Fields

You can now capture US-based mobile numbers in both your signup forms and contact fields. And, once customers add their mobile number, they’ll be prompted to consent to SMS marketing messages, ensuring you’re growing a compliant and engaged SMS marketing list.

Mobile Bulk Import

Emma makes it easy to import an already established SMS list, so you don’t have to start from scratch.

All you need is a mobile number, explicit consent to SMS these contacts, and to follow our instructions, and you’re ready to go!

Check out a demo of these new features in action and step-by-step instructions on how you can use them today.

We’ve made contact fields more flexible, to better help you personalize your campaigns with contact field data.

You can now easily add, edit and remove contact fields with multiple values.

We’ve replaced the text content block with three new options:

• Paragraph — The primary content block for the main text of your email.
• Title — Drag and drop a heading section into your design. Includes HTML heading tags (H1, H2, H3), to help those who use screen readers.
• List — Add numbered and bulleted lists.

These new content blocks will automatically include the preset font styles from your email template, helping you reduce the time it takes to customize your campaign.

Our mobile-specific styling controls help you customize email design for mobile without impacting your desktop design. You can now adjust alignment and add padding for subscribers reading emails on the go.

Add padding and borders around sections to make sure your campaigns are consistent and impactful.

We’ve made improvements so that the Gmail app will correctly display buttons, backgrounds and responsive layouts. 

Say hello to flexible, beautiful email designs with the new drag and drop editor – it’s officially available for you and your team today! Here’s what you can expect with the new editor:

• New designs to win the inbox: You wanted new templates that would catch your audience’s attention, so the new drag and drop editor comes with a refreshed, modern template gallery. Craft beautiful messages that fit your brand, connect with your subscribers, and save your team time.
• Make sure your emails look good anywhere: We’ve made it easier for you to build mobile-first campaigns so you can connect with your subscribers, wherever they are. Build and preview your emails in mobile mode to ensure your designs look perfect on any device.
• Familiar features in a modern experience: We’ve brought the editor functions you know and love into a new streamlined, drag and drop experience that makes campaign creation even easier. You can create new email configurations with flexible row and column combinations, giving you even more control over layout style and size.
• Make changes with confidence: One of the top requested features was the ability to undo and redo, and we heard you. In addition to undo and redo buttons, the new editor tracks all changes made in a session so you can revert to a previous version at any time, allowing you to edit with confidence.

We’ve compiled all the resources you need in our drag and drop editor hub, including the Getting to know the editor webinar recording, help articles, and takeaways to share with your team.

We know you love brand consistency, but creating the same campaigns for each subaccount can be time-consuming. You now have the ability  to assign trusted users to share campaigns directly between subaccounts to speed up your team’s creative workflows. Your subaccounts now have more freedom to focus on their localized marketing efforts while ultimate approval control remains with your central marketing team. 

To help you avoid overwhelming your subscribers with overlapping campaigns, we’ve created a new calendar that brings all your subaccounts’ mailings into the Emma HQ dashboard. Now you can easily visualize and adjust your sending schedules to keep your subscribers engaged and reduce potential opt-outs.

Here are some tips to get the most out of the calendar:

• If too many campaigns are scheduled for the same day, you can open your campaign straight from the calendar to adjust the send date.
• Filter by subaccount to see each subaccount’s sending patterns or email volume to ensure they follow best practices.
• Filter by “pending” mailings to quickly approve campaigns directly from the calendar.