You can now notify people via email when certain events happen within your experience!
We support the following events:
- Send a confirmation email when a user enters
e.g. thank them for entering, send them their coupon code, remind them of their terms and conditions. - Send an internal email when a user enters
e.g. inform an internal team about feedback, support, suggestions, lost luggage, etc. - Send an email when a moderator publishes a UGC item
e.g. notify a user when their entry has been published.
Note: This feature is included in your subscription, but there is a monthly fair usage limit in place for sending emails. Should you want to send more than the fair usage limit, please get in contact to discuss subscription add-ons. Please see the 'considerations' section below.
What to do
- Select your experience: Go to the Experiences area of the platform and select an experience that collects entries using a form (e.g. a sign-up, giveaway or contest).
- Go to Advanced > Customize: In the Experience Workspace, open the "Advanced" left-hand menu select "Customize":
- View existing notifications or add new: At the bottom of the Customize screen, you will see the 'Email Notifications' section which lists all of your existing email notifications as well as providing the option to add more.
- Add a notification: To add a new notification, hit the 'Add Notification' button and you will be presented with the different types of notification we support (see introduction section above for a summary of these). For the purposes of this walkthrough, select the 'Entry received notification' which will send an email to the entrant to confirm that we have successfully received their entry. This email is triggered as soon as they enter and will be used for all future entries, once enabled.
- Edit the notification: Your new email notification will be appearing at the top of the list shown above. You can edit the notification, enable and disable it, or delete it if it is no longer needed:
Click on the 'Edit' button to open the Email Notification Editor. - Setup the basics: The editor will open on the 'Settings' tab where you can set up the basic details about the notification:
^ The name is simply used to identify it in the email notification list.
^ The email header fields can contain hard-coded values or dynamic values ('tokens') that are retrieved from the current campaign or form entry. A list of dynamic values and a guide to using them is provided in the help panel of the editor. Note that if you use an invalid token, the system will warn you. You will need to correct or remove the invalid token before you can successfully save the notification.
Let's walk through the fields on this screen:
- Subject: In the screenshot above, we've set the 'Subject' of the email to the name of the campaign but you could use a hardcoded value here (e.g. "Thanks for your entry!").
- From: This is the email address that will be used as the author of the email. Note that the domain drop-down contains authorized domains that you can use to send emails. Please see the 'considerations' section below for details on how to add your own domain to the list.
- To: This is the email address that the notification will be sent to. We're using a dynamic value (or 'token') called ${form.email} which will pick up the email address that was submitted as part of the form entry and will send the notification to that email address (i.e. the email address provided by the user). If you use a hardcoded email address for the 'To' field, then all notifications will be sent to the same place. That's not so useful for our 'thanks for entering' use-case but could be useful for internal email notifications where all entries are sent to a specific person or team to process (e.g. for feedback or support forms).
- Reply To: This is the reply-to address used when the user hits the 'reply' button in their email client or online email service. It can be different to the 'From' address so that replies can be directed to a specific internal team or set to a fake 'no-reply' email address, which most users will interpret as 'replies not processed'.
- Email Format: You can choose to send emails as either plain text (simple content with no formatting except for new-lines) or as HTML (where the content, the HTML and the styling are all included in the email body). In this case, our notification comes with an HTML-based email body that provides a clean and simple layout for emails.
- Customize the email body: We provide a basic template that you can use “as-is”, customize to meet your requirements or simply use as an example before building out a fully custom one. As mentioned above, you can use either plain text or HTML to format the email body. Whichever route your choose, please ensure that you select the relevant option (text or HTML) on the Settings tab to match your content.
^ The email body editor uses syntax highlighting to help you construct valid HTML and to highlight valid dynamic values ('tokens').
^ You can use dynamic values within the email body (e.g. information collected in the form such as the entrant's name, and answers to questions, or information from the campaign itself). A list of dynamic values and a guide to using them is provided in the help panel of the editor. Note that if you use an invalid token, the system will warn you. You will need to correct or remove the invalid token before you can successfully save the notification. - Test the notification: You can send test emails by going to the 'Test' tab of the editor and entering an email address to send the test email to. When you send a test email, we’ll use your latest changes… there is no need to save your changes first.
When you send a test email, it will highlight any dynamic values using a special format. For example, the dynamic value of ${form.email} would appear in the test email as [form.email]* so that you know the value was accepted as a valid dynamic value. Of course, when real notifications are sent, the token will be replaced with the actual value from the entry or campaign, as appropriate.
When making formatting and layout changes, we recommend testing your email across common email clients and web-based email services as there can be quite a difference in how the same email is displayed. Please see the 'considerations' section for further guidance.
Considerations
You should be aware of the following when you add email notifications to your experiences:
Fair Usage
There is a fair usage limit on the number of emails you can send per month across all of your experiences. Should you exceed this amount, we may suspend sending emails and/or ask you to purchase a subscription add-on to increase the number of emails you can send. If you believe your usage will exceed the fair usage limit, you must raise this with your account manager or CSM ahead of usage so they can walk you through the options.
Read more about the fair usage limit for email.
Testing Email Notifications
When you add an email notification to experience, we provide you with an example email template that you can customize. These have been tested against the most common email clients and web-based email services. However, we cannot guarantee the example templates will display correctly across all email clients or services given that there are many thousands available and they range wildly in terms of their support for HTML and CSS/styles especially.
Should you make changes to, or replace, the default template with your own, we recommend testing it across the most commonly used email clients and web-based email services that are likely to be in use by your audience. You can use the 'test email' feature outlined in the walkthrough section of this article to assist you, or you could use one of the many email testing tools and services available commercially.
Email Domains
When you configure email notification, you will be asked to specify the 'from' email address. Notice that you cannot add any email address to this field but have to choose a domain name from a drop-down list:
This is because we have to authorize the platform to send email from each domain to reduce the chances of emails being treated as suspicious or spam. By default, you can use certain Cheetah-provided domains that have been authorized. Users will see this email address as the official sender, so bear this in mind when setting up notifications. For instance, this may be fine for emails you send internally (e.g. a feedback form, or lost baggage claim) but not ideal for emails bound for the general public who participate in your experience.
If you would like to use your own domain for sending emails, we can help you configure this for a small administration fee. Note that you will need to provide us with the domain that you would like to authorize and we will supply some values that need to be added to your domain's DNS record (something that your IT team will likely be able to perform for you). Your Customer Success Manager or our Support Team can guide you on this process and confirm the one-time administration fee.
We hope you found this guide useful. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.