This is an Enterprise feature, consult your Customer Success Manager or our Support team for further information on how to get it.
The Newsletter tool allows you to quickly build and send on-brand newsletters directly from within the Frontify platform to your teams. Why is this an important tool to add to your branding toolkit? To make your brand the best it can be, you need to engage your whole organization in its growth. This tool gives you a chance to get different teams excited about your brand by targeting them with relevant messages that share key branding updates, breaking internal news, and teasers about your brand’s future. Using a simple interface with easy-to-use custom blocks and the assets that already live within your Frontify environment, you’ll keep your users informed about brand-related updates or important internal communications messages all from one place.
Features
Email Builder: Build on-brand newsletters, every time. Use our easy interface with all your assets and contacts in one place.
Newsletter Series: Inspire everyone with tailored newsletter series. Send different brand messages to different teams.
Team Collaboration: Brands are better shaped together. Enable others to create and send emails without acting as account owners.
Performance Insights: Discover your brand's impact on your team. Track open rates to assess engagement and improve your emails as you go.
Roles and Permissions
Account Admins can decide who can create newsletters by accessing their Account Settings(User menu) > Required permissions > Create newsletters/series.
Collaborators
As with any project within the backend, these newsletter projects can be shared and edited by different team members using the Team Invitation icon on the Powerbar, where you can add individual members using different roles and also teams as Collaborators.
Let’s Start Creating!
To start creating newsletters, go to the Newsletters tab in the backend of the platform.
From there, you can start creating newsletters by clicking on the New button at the top right-hand corner of the page. Simple!
Create a Newsletter Series
For organizational purposes we have created Newsletter Series, which act as the different projects or campaigns within your Newsletter dashboard, helping you to keep track of the effectiveness of different newsletters sent to different groups in your organization.
Once you have created a Series, you’ll have the opportunity to start a new newsletter by either clicking on the middle of the blank Series project (in case no other newsletters have been created already) or through the ‘New’ button at the top right-hand side of the window.
If you want to get even more targeted and specific, there is also the option to create Folders. You can use this to start organizing different newsletters within each Series.
Let’s Start Designing
Once you’ve opened a new blank newsletter, you’ll have the chance to name it and use the design styles from a specific guideline. (Note: it’s important this is the correct guideline as it can’t be changed later.
UI Tour
1. Ui Tour: Edit Mode Capabilities
Selecting the edit mode icon on the Powerbar to start editing. This will give you the power to start adding visuals and text to the new blank canvas.
You can start adding different visuals and text by clicking on the purple blocks on the left side of the canvas giving block options. Like this:
There are 4 types of blocks:
Asset Block
Insert an image with the help of an asset chooser. Users will only see images when your permission settings allow this.
Text Block
Display text and make use of text styles defined in the style guide on which that newsletter is based.
Divider Block
Separate content with a horizontal line to create breaks for clarity.
Text & Image Block
Display text and a visual side-by-side. You’ll have three tabs of settings for the whole block (General), for text half (Text), and for asset half (Asset).
Duplicate Newsletters
When creating recurring newsletter series having identical designs as previously sent newsletters is essential, keeping them consistent and on-brand. You can create one newsletter as a template and duplicate it or duplicate the previously sent one.
Duplication can be done by clicking on the three dots of any newsletter done, regardless of whether it has been sent or not the duplicate functionality always works.
An exact copy will be generated with (Duplicate) on the title
2. Ui Tour: Sender/Recipient Information Panel
Once you have created your newsletter, the next part of the process is to fill in the sender/reply information to make sure your newsletter reaches the right people and provides the best brand experience to recipients.
All the fields on the right side of the screen are necessary to send the newsletter.
Subject and Sender Information
These fields are important as they will be the first touchpoint and impression of the newsletter.
You can define the following settings for the email:
Subject (required) - obviously, this will be sent as a subject of the emails;
Preview Text (optional) - a hidden text that will be visible in the emails list view right after the subject text, but will not appear when opening the email;
Sender Name (required) - the name that will be displayed from whom the email was received;
Sender Email (optional) - emails that will be used as a "reply-to" email.
By default, emails from Frontify are sent from the sender: support@frontify.com. If you would like to change the sender email to an email address you own, please reach out to your Customer Success Manager.
Please ensure with your IT that the email addresses are put on the whitelist of your spam protection solution.
Recipients
At the moment recipients of Newsletters can only be Frontify users who have access to any project within the brand where the Newsletter was created. The functionality of the tool allows you to select users individually or as groups.
Note! If the users have access to the brand as a part of a Group, you can’t choose them individually in the "Select Users" tab when choosing Recipients for the Newsletter. You can only choose users individually from the list if they have been invited individually to the Style Guide/ Project/Library in this brand. If they belong to Style Guide/ Project/Library as a part of the Group, they won't show up in the "Select Users" tab.
Subscription
Let your team keep control of their own inbox. Follow a subscription set-up so they can leave any time they want. By default, you can send a newsletter to your logged-in users and groups in Frontify. However, these users can opt out of receiving these emails.
3. Ui Tour: Newsletter Status
At the point of creating a newsletter, the status is always set by default to Draft until the newsletter is sent completely. After this point, the status changes to Sent and displays the date that it was sent.
4. Ui Tour: Test and Send Newsletter Buttons
By clicking on the Send button on the top right-hand corner of the window, you will be sending the newsletter to the chosen recipients and there is no way of reversing the action. The newsletter is then set to Sent and the newsletter is then blocked from any new edits.
Using the Test button also at the top right-hand side of the screen, you have the option to test the newsletter by sending it to a group or to individuals. This action will send an exact replica of the newsletter and allow you to go back to the newsletter and make changes accordingly before actually sending out the final version.
Further Information
Analytics
After newsletters have been sent, you’ll see email open rates. This will appear as the thumbnails of the sent newsletters and allow you to analyze the amount of sent emails versus the opening rate for each newsletter or newsletter series.
Special Configuration Options
Configure the number of users that you can send to by deciding whether to set up a custom email address for your newsletters or not. Users who have a custom "sender from" address are allowed to send to more than 300 recipients.
Configure whether subscribers have to opt in to receive a newsletter (default: opt-out)
Configure a send throttle (seconds to wait between each newsletter send to not flood email servers)
Custom Fonts
The Email HTML Standard is very inconsistent and not reliable when it comes to rendering custom fonts. This is an industry problem and not specific to Frontify's Newsletters.
There are only a few email clients (Apple Mail, iOS Mail, Google Android, Samsung Mail, Outlook for Mac, Outlook App) that support the rendering of custom fonts that are attached to emails.
Are you not receiving emails?
If you are not receiving email notifications from Frontify, check your spam folder. The email is likely to end up in your spam folder due to the settings in your email client. Notifications will come from support@frontify.com.
If you use Gmail, you can add this email to your contacts and it will stop going to spam.
Alternatively, you can whitelist the @frontify domain for your organization as a whole.
In case you have any further questions, please don't hesitate to contact our support team.