Podcast Episode 154: Episode 127: Code Your Email Like It's 1999

Description

When was the last time you got an ugly email? We'd bet it hasn't been very long. Today on Rock Cast, the team discusses strategies for improving emails, ways to leverage templates for personalized content and the importance of reviewing your analytics on a regular basis. HTML email can be hard, but with a few tips, you can be sending beautiful emails like a pro.

Transcribed Content

This episode of Rockcast is brought to you by Rock partner Triumph Tech, a full service specialist partner. Rock partners provide crucial support for Spark Development Network and important services for the Rock community. Connect with Triumph Tech today at rockrms.com/partners. Welcome back to Rockcast. I'm Emily Forman. I have Jon Edmiston and Nick Airdo, and we are here to share all things Rock and Spark Development Network with you in our community. So Nick, we've been hearing a lot of really great stories from the churches we've been in contact with lately. What do you think about the fact that things are shifting again, kind of in this post COVID? Well, it's really great news in that it's perfectly right timed with Jesus' resurrection, good news on So yeah, we're hearing people, the attendance is up and that's just always a good sign for everybody. I think everybody's hopefully motivated by that and ready to get back strong in the game. And I mean, I know personally that that is energizing for me knowing that what we're doing makes a big difference. And in these times, we need to really get our game on and focus on this mission. , we are specifically in this era where as IT professionals and information specialists, never before has this been possible. In the last ten, twenty years, this is very unique, what we can do. So having a tool Rock at our disposal is super critical. I would not wanna try and lead a big church without a good tool. Or lead any church. I mean, any size church. Yeah. Because even a small church can use Rock to do so many things that you just couldn't otherwise do. It's a prosthetic for your game, for your whole operations. And Craig Groeschel has a podcast out for his leadership podcast about when you go back, don't go back the same. You have to do things differently. It's absolutely critical. Admittedly, I haven't listened to the podcast. It just shipped this morning and I got the email. So as of the recording of this podcast, but I read the email and I was , Yeah, definitely. If you go back, you're missing out on all what we've learned and the world is not the same world as it was when we went into it as when we come out of And there's a much higher need for Jesus. There's always been a need for Jesus, but , much higher now. The world's so different and moving in so quickly in different ways. The opportunity is so high And , we're all humans. When things are going along just fine, smashingly well, we don't pay any attention to the details. It's so easy to get complacent, right? And I think everybody has just been kind of off balance from organizations to individuals. What's going on? How do we predict what's next? A lot of our goals that we set are related to predictions, and our predictions are related to what we've seen play out in the past. And so that's all just been off balance, but it's so cool to see how the Rock community and toolset have just been able to adjust and help support the changing needs. And it's really exciting to see that churches are now saying, oh, our attendance is coming back, and people are recognizing that their feeling of off balance is something that the church can help them address. And again, that opportunity and that need is so high right now. So it is that critical tool set, Nick, and it's a great time for it. So that's my 2¢ this morning. Thanks for asking me to share. Yeah, I think it is, you're right, you're exactly right about Easter and seeing just a massive amount of people coming back, which is great. So we've been really busy as a team for sure over the last couple of weeks, and we've been working on a lot of projects that are big and small. And I think that's what's kind of neat. There's some big things that we're working on for version 14 to kind of keep that thing moving and it's moving quite well. So digital signatures is 99.9%. This might be just a few little, small, small, little polished points styling wise, but real excited about that. And already some people are actually using it in pre alpha. So I was just talking to newspring the other day, and they're already using it and, , getting some positive feedback on that. So that's exciting. Still working on the person profile restyling to get that implemented in code, and doing a lot of polish on that. So that's gonna be a major thing. That's gonna move some cheese. Okay? So I'm just gonna call the foul here. , let it be known, the cheese is moving and everybody who's listening to this, please help remind people who maybe don't listen to this, that when they see that feature, the cheese moved. It's a good move. Mean, I think it looks really good. Yeah. And it adds a lot of capabilities, but we know people have done a lot of things to that page. And that moving a cheese is gonna need some adjustments possibly. If you've done some major tweaks on badges or things that, we're probably gonna need to do some, you're probably gonna need to do some refactoring of that. Hope to actually kind of polish out some of the styling for badges to make that a little bit easier for future flexibility. But do know that's, it's a good thing, it's a needed thing, but it's something that's gonna be impactful. We have some plans about how to migrate that in a way that you could still get back to the old way. We'll talk about more about that later as it gets closer. So those are some of the big things. There are actually some big things being worked on for even version 15, just being pre thought out. Putting a lot of time and effort right now into the VNEXT platform, so making some really exciting progress on that, and we're super happy about that. Some stuff in Rock Mobile, for version four, version three is about ready to ship. Version four is new features are being put into that. We have some good traction on that. We have a new hire who's taking on some of that new stuff and doing a fabulous job. So we're excited not only about what's being done, but by the momentum that we're achieving as a resourcing our team. There's a lot of little things though going on too. A lot of micro ideas that people have been throwing our way that are really good and we're quickly being able to innovate and get that out specifically for them, but with the intent that that's gonna be rolled in the court at a soon feature release. And I think it's gonna be some stuff that people are gonna be pretty excited about. So, , that's keeping us very busy. And just a lot of growth on the team and that takes time. So training, processes, coaching. So it's definitely always busy here, but it feels very busy right now. It's interesting when you say things going on that are both big and small, the methods and processes for catching the big things and catching the small things and moving them both through the pipeline is so different. So maintaining both of those, if you really get down into the logistics of it, catching everything that flies by and not losing the John, you to say the gold nuggets, trying to hang on to those and put those into production in between the large things that we're working on. It's really an art form. And so there's a lot more to it than it sounds when you just say we got a lot of things going on. Yeah, you're right. It's probably an art form, but it feels a little bit chaos sometimes because you just , feel you're just catching, playing, juggler so much, but Can I take just a moment off the cuff and request that our listening audience also remember, if you haven't updated your commitment to give, a lot of what we're doing here is doubling down on the fact that we need to catch those gold nuggets? We need to get these large releases out faster. We need to be able to provide these tools in this changing time right now that meet your needs innovatively. And so we are doing that and we really need to to see the commitment levels come to that $3 per attendee per year. And a lot of churches have risen to that and helped us put that into play. But there's still still a good ways to go. And we definitely are counting on that because we aren't able to do what we're doing without it. Definitely. That's definitely true. Well, the the next topic we wanna talk about is features that maybe are used, but maybe not fully used or or some things that there's some low hanging fruit that you could use within your Rock instance. And today's topic is HTML email. So I know you guys are probably saying, yeah, we do that. And and you do. Almost everybody is using that tool in some way or another. And it's a multifaceted tool. There's the wizard capability. There's the workflow able to send nicely polished emails. You can send emails many, many different ways in Rock, but specifically talking about the wizard and a couple other ways that we can use it that maybe aren't as common. And it's it's really super powerful. , you can go in there in the editor and do all kinds of of, , really nice things. I would say the editor is close to par with a lot of other tools, and it makes it feel very simple. But the key is you have to have a good template. A good template can really make or break your email. And a good template is not only good looking, but it's also kind of defensive against all the markup that your administrative staff might put into an email. And so, know, good training is always needed there too. But we do try to say, well, even with, , some bad ideas, we can still, , make this thing happen. But at the same time, to set the perspective right, HTML email is hard. Ask anybody who works in HTML email doing it right, and it is hard. If you're me, you get a lot of bad HTML email even from very big companies. I get emails from even the likes of Apple, Facebook, and most of the time they look great, but occasionally they don't. They look garbage. And it's often said that when you do HTML email, you're coding it's 1999 Because for some reason, the email packages choose different varying technologies for how it's rendered. A couple do very, very good, but unfortunately, it doesn't matter what the couple do. It's a matter what the least common denominator is. And the least common denominator currently right now is is Outlook. , their their HTML renderer is Microsoft Office, not Back in the day, you would think it was IE and it was for a bit and they moved it from IE to Word. And that has some strange markup rendering concepts. And you have to play with that because there's a lot of people who use it. And not just office users, but there's a lot of home users that use it too. So you wanna make sure your HTML email works well with that, which often means you're going back to table layouts. And anybody who does HTML cringes at table layouts, that literally is how you coded HTML back in the nineties, and it hasn't left when it comes to HTML email. So it's hard. So you just wanna spend a lot of time working with those templates. For instance, something as simple as a button, would think would be pretty easy, but it's not. , if you look at the correct markup to make a button in HTML email, it's crazy. So the what I would recommend is use the buttons that that that the wizard creates for you. those, we spent a lot of time making that a very friendly button that works in all the clients. So just, , use that one and don't stray from that. Some other tips though, if you're, , wanting to make new templates. First of all, this is a little technical, if you're making that, first of all, make sure you are technical if you're gonna make those, otherwise use a partner because you can really make a mess. There are some great sites out there that give you some inspiration. There's sites GoodEmails that you can go look at, and you can look at it go, why heck why can't I have these same quality in Rock? And you can't. You can copy and paste that markup in the Rock and use it. The problem is not those templates. It's the stuff that you put in to replace the content of those templates where you're gonna where you're gonna go wrong. So you have to be careful about that. If you're technical, looking at a tool MJML can really simplify the creation of those templates and make it easier, but it's a little technical. Definitely as you go to make new templates using a tool Litmus to test, to make sure that everything's looking right. So you basically send an email to Litmus, and then they have this bot army of all these email editors or email tools, and it'll show you a screenshot of what it looks in every one. And so that just really helps to make sure that everything looks right before you send. It does kind of cost quite a bit of money, but if you're sending it out to thousands of people and this is something you're doing quite often, and you wanna be on the cutting edge of what you're able to do, it might be worth it. Or at the very least, sometimes what we did in the early days before we had any budget, we literally had zero budget, we would just get litmus for a month, do a whole bunch of template creation and then stop paying for it. So we could at least test our templates. It's great if you can test every email that's going out to a big, huge mess, but sometimes you can always. Another thing, if you really wanna make your emails really stand out and really make them exciting is to use animated GIFs. So a lot of times people come to me and say, hey, I wanna put video on my email. It's , well, you could, but only about 60% of the clients can actually render that. And it's basically anything on Apple can do it. But I often find when I ask them about it, but I get it all the time. I'm , well, show me. And it's what they're actually seeing is an animated GIF. And you can actually do some really cool animated GIFs very easily. And I've done some, we have a video actually out there that you can watch about how to do it. But I was working with a church partner and they sent me some couple emails that they were doing, and I just quickly put it into Photoshop and switched out a couple images back and forth. And then using a site easygift.com, you can quickly and easily just take, hey, here's my two images. Just flip it back and forth every four seconds. And it's just the engagement you see is really cool. And it's really, really easy. It's almost sad how easy it is. Actually, I kinda surprised myself when I did it. I was , well, that's actually a lot easier than I thought. So, , there's some tips to get you started, but the other thing I wanna really hit on is look at the analytics of your emails. There is a gold mine of information just sitting inside a Rock. And it's funny because everybody kinda says , well, I wanna use these other email tools because the wizard's great and they get such great analytics. And it's , the wizard and Rock is really great. We've improved it and we keep improving it, but they forget that the analytics are there and often we'll show them that, oh, that's cool. So I'll start using that. But then we always forget to go back and look at those analytics and actually, , see what's working and what's not working. So definitely please use the analytics. If you send an email out to a large audience, put something on your calendar to go back to it in five days, fourteen days, and just see what the analytics are. It's often the case that we want all these flashy tools and then we never use them. I mean, I'm guilty of that too. And so we have to intentionally remind ourselves and force ourselves to go back and get that value. But also don't forget the power of the template. So this now we're getting it to a slightly level up on advancement here, but don't forget the power of these templates. The templates, remember, are lava, right? And who you're sending it to, so you can automate the personalization of those templates. So you could send out an email, for instance, and the top part, you might have the staff person type everything in. And the bottom part is auto personalized. So it could be something very transactional. So at the bottom of all the emails you send out, it automatically puts in one promo image for the next baptism or some event. And even though it's not meant to be an email for sending out promotions, at the bottom of all of your emails, you could have a little promo image. We're even seeing some churches and working with churches, honestly, that we're making these very rich templates that automatically get sent out every week. So every week it just sends out an email to a list of people, but the template is pulling content from content channels, various content channels and event calendars and dynamically assembling the email and then sending it out. That's super powerful. And that does take a little bit of technical skill. that's not something for everybody, but you can work with people who have those skills partners to get that created for you. Now, of the cool features that's coming out probably in '14, well, not probably, probably for sure '14, is there's a new preview on a system communication that lets you kind of look at that template and pick a person and say, hey, show me the template currently as it stands to date with this person. So you can kind of check to make sure it looks right. So a lot times, if you're gonna automate this, you really want your communication staff to go look at it before, the day before or maybe the morning before it goes out just to make sure everything's ship shape. And you can just keep changing the person to see the different personalization happening. And that block also allows you to change the date. So if you wanted to go see it back three weeks, you could. So that's another neat tool just to help you kind of see what those templates would look . But we're really scratching the surface of HTML email today. That said, I don't think even on the easy stuff, there's still a lot of room for people to grow and use more features, but you can take it a lot further. And I think, the kind of the way the world works is we keep building on our skill sets and keep building on our capabilities. And the more we do that, the easier those capabilities get to be to be for us because we've learned new skills, but we also learn to simplify those tools so that they're more approachable for more people. So no matter where you stand with HTML email, just realize there's much more to go with it in the current toolset, and we keep improving that toolset and always open for more feedback on that. But that's what I had. Thanks, John. That's really helpful and interesting information. I the fact that it's both inspiring to what could be done and also helps inform. I've also talked to several churches that say, I'll just copy paste this email from over here and dump it into my Rock template and it will be fine. And then they go to look at it as it's delivered into different email clients and the results are different. And so that can just be challenging and frustrating. And so this helps out a little clarity around that. So thanks for sharing that. Yeah. And sometimes I've heard feedback where I did that and didn't live right in Rock. It's , oh, you said, it's your source, garbage in garbage out. But I've actually taken that and put it into, because we have accounts, play accounts at all the other I've pasted it into there and had the same exact thing. At the end of the day, it is the same markup. There's no magic to the markup. And if you paste it in, paste in poor markup, you're gonna get poor output. Yep. Well, it's interesting to think about what's possible in that area. And in all things Rock, we do the basics and we showcase some of the basics to mid level, but there is so much more that can just be imagined and envisioned and developed. It's exciting to hear about some of the automated emails. Well, sometimes that's the most frustrating part of my job is seeing all the things you could do. Mhmm. And today, but you can't get there with everybody because I think the thing that changes when I worked at CCV for one church, you only had to take one church far. Right? Mhmm. So that wasn't easy, but you could you could do it. Right? But now it's it's a little bit different because now we're trying to pull , , 600 churches and and so sometimes you can't The impact is bigger, right? But you're only moving the whole 600 an inch at a time versus 10 feet at a time. Definitely, especially because it's extensible, right? So you're trying not to break things that people may have done that wasn't part of the initial, original core code. Yeah. , for instance, I had working at one point, the ability in Rock. So this this would be for your regular email that you do every day. Right? Okay. So you're sending email out of Outlook And the template for that, can customize too. Right? So I customize a template that there's an image underneath the signature that would pull from Rock, but it would actually pull up a content channel. So the communication person could adjust with the promotion image on the bottom of all the emails going out for the church. But not only that, it would actually track interactions on the opens and the clicks. So, I mean, but all that was just automated and someone in communications could just It was always a default, right? So if you didn't have some promotion going, it didn't That's a good point. Put a broken image down there, but it always say something , come to church, But you could quickly easily change out that image because a lot of people do that. A lot of vendors will promote their conferences down there and such. But it's just another one of those things that as you're pulling so many things, can't always pull that one. But hey, that's an idea for somebody. It's definitely doable today and it's not rocket science to implement. Very cool. Awesome ideas. I think that'll be really fun for the listening audience to think about the ways that in their church, they might be able to apply some of these and set some short term and long term goals, especially around analytics. how easy is that just to remind yourself, don't forget what's in there, what's playing well, what subject lines are working well, what time of day, what day of the week is working well, what type of content do people revisit? Yeah, and I think we've said it before that, but the analytics, a lot of that comes out of the interactions, which is the gold mine of Rock. And we actually are working on a project right now to actually pull out more interaction data around page views. So you can get a very light Google Analytics kind of capabilities without Google Analytics. And it's really exciting again, that you can have all that data, it's personalized down to the person, which Google Analytics obviously can't do without a lot of help and plug ins to other data sources. But we're continuing to move the ball forward on that. That's exciting. Well, on another community front, I just wanted to mention that our May masterclass is coming up and we have a couple of spots left to hit our class minimums. So please register for that class if you're looking at coming this year. Please make it the May class because we need to hit our minimum counts to hold the class. And if you've already attended, think about who , maybe someone you're mentoring in the community or someone on staff at your organization that would be a good fit for this class and let's get that filled up. So if you could help us fill that, that would be fantastic. Is that in person or online? It is, yeah, it's in person. So it's a great opportunity to interact with, just kind of see how does the core team work, we have a little office tour that happens at the end of one of the days and a chance to connect in one of the hotel lobbies one evening and kind of do some hands on work and hanging out, connecting at a restaurant in the evening. Those are the kinds of things that you can do in person. And so it's always fun for us as well to meet the attendees of the class and get to know them a little bit better as individuals. So really cool, fun time, lot of information. , we have some people that have taken that class more than one time, and that's also been really beneficial. When you're newer to the Rock community and to using Rock, there's a lot to learn from the ground up. And then if you come back in a couple of years, there's a lot you didn't realize you missed when you were getting the basics in place. So it seems to be a class that has a lot of application for various stages of being a part of a Rock admin team. Yeah. I think the unique secret sauce to that class is not only do you get the content, but you're getting the best practices. That's right. Michael, when he does the instruction of that, he's talking about, this is how this church uses the features, this how this other church uses it differently. And we keep hearing that that's what people really enjoy is not just the content, but the real use cases behind that. And it's funny, the micro communities that are built at that class. Definitely. There's still people who are , oh, we always talk to each other because we met at the master class three years ago. It's , that's awesome. There's some little class alum societies going on. So it is a good chance to, it's that face to face connection really, with our team, with each other and that stuff hangs on, it's pretty fun. And you can slide in right before summer hits Phoenix, so. Yes. If you do miss that and you need to go virtual, the virtual masterclass is something we're trying to continue in place about once a year, because we know there are some people that have restrictions around travel, budgetary or other. You might kind of be a one man band at your organization and really not able to get away. If that's true, we don't want you to not be able to participate in master class. So we do have a virtual one coming up in July. Those little elements we talked about with in person, we can't duplicate those so we don't attempt to in the virtual master class. So that would be one difference. But check out those options and see which one works for you. We're also just finishing up a SQL class this week. That's been a great class. There'll be more of those coming up later in the year. So we do have a classes page on the community site and you can find out more about everything there. And we're going to have a pre day at the conference that is going to go deep into things that are just barely touched about in the rest touched on in the rest of our classes. So definitely fly in a day early and in your registration, let us know. There's no fee to attend. Lunch will be open and you'll have a chance. There are a lot of nearby restaurants, but you'll have a chance to get some training on some of the deeper technical skills that we don't really have classes for currently. Alright, so ministry stories. We've been talking about this and Nick alluded to at the very beginning of this podcast that we know some incredible things are happening at Rock Churches right now. And a lot of those are somewhat facilitated and supported by Rock as a technology and some of the processes and things that you've learned in the incorporation of Rock. Please share those with us. Now you might not know what those are off the top of your head, but put a little something on your notepad today. If you're me, I carry a notepad around everywhere to grab all the things all day. Put a little note down to connect with some of your ministry staff leaders and find out those stories. You're in the best place to find those, not us, and they're happening. We are starting to hear those trickling in right now, and we really want to have the ability to help share those out more broadly. They're so encouraging and so exciting. So could you please take a few minutes to connect with your ministry leaders and find out in what ways their ministries are being empowered and people's lives are being impacted because of Rock. And then take just a moment, go to your profile page in the Rock community and send just a really quick little write up over to share that with us so that we can in turn help share that out to the community. Those are really important, we're hoping to gather those this year. And right now seems to be an excellent time based on kind of the feedback that we're hearing. Please do that today or this week, if at all possible. Yeah, I would say, do it for yourself, share it with us. Yes. The first big thing, the reason why you need to do it is for yourself. We're all cars and we don't have But we're a car without a fuel gauge. And when you run out of fuel, just in a car, you don't have a fuel gauge, you don't know until it's too late, literally. You might have a half a block, but those stories are your fuel. You need to fill your tank. And if you don't think you need to, trust me, it'll be too late by the time you realize that you need fuel in your tank. Those stories will give you the fuel that you need to get through the tough days, because there are tough days. I used to tell people when they started work at the church, and they're all excited because they're on mission, and we're gonna be working for Christ, all truth, right? But I tell them, go home tonight and write a letter to future self reminding yourself why you took this job, because there's gonna be days that are hard. I think everybody who's worked for a church for any amount of time can say that, and you need to have that letter to yourself that reminds you why you're doing it, And these stories are another way to just put icing on top of that cake and get you through those. Some of the stories that you guys share have put fuel in our tanks. And there are dark days and those stories make a difference. Yeah. I always pull back , well, what if I wasn't doing this and that, that story wouldn't have happened. That's right. And that person might still be in that situation in their life. And it's , okay, just keep swimming. Yeah, I was just gonna say, yeah, we need those stories too. I know they're for yourself, but we consume those and that helps us quite a bit here. It does, and exponentially we can help cross share those and it's just really powerful. Yeah, and we do share them with our new hires. We have a culture meeting that we go through and we share literally in every one of those part of the agenda is to share some of the top stories that we hear from our church partners. Definitely. So go for that encouragement and share it with us. And especially just after Easter, we have a lot of highs and we don't necessarily recognize that our fuel might be low because we put everything into that. And so this is an excellent time to do that. And how do you share those stories? You can go to your profile on the community page, and there's a spot right there in the upper right section where you can share your ministry story. Just click on the little button link and send it over. You don't have to write an essay. It can be short and sweet. Great. Well, thank you so much to all of our listeners for tuning in. We love being able to spend time with you, tell you about what's going on kind of behind the scenes. There are always so many things happening. We just appreciate the time to sit and chat with you and get you up to speed. Thanks so much for your support. And that's both in listening and in engaging in the community and the financial support to help keep Spark doing what it does through Rock. We hope you have a blessed week, and we will connect with you in our next podcast. Do a church that loves the idea of using Rock but hasn't taken that leap yet? With managed hosting, churches of any size can get access to Rock's amazing technology, hassle free. With just one click, Rock's managed hosting removes the roadblocks that might stop a church from switching to Rock by making the process simple. Churches get the ease of a SaaS church management system without losing any of Rock's powerful features. Are you ready to take the next step or share with another local church? 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