Email Content Editor

What is the purpose of the Email Content Editor plugin?

Email Content Editor has been designed to put you the content manager in control of your system messaging and commerce emails by giving you control over your content and helping you better visualise the emails you send from your Craft CMS site. The result is a reduced need for​​ additional scheduled development time and an overall more efficient and smooth process.

How does the Email Content Editor plugin work?

Email Content Editor is a simple-to-use plugin that enables you to send much more aesthetically pleasing and efficient system messages and emails. This might include a reminder, password reset, order shipped or order confirmation email. Simply install the plugin and your developer can code up a branded template to ensure the best possible user experience on all devices.

Currently, you can only edit plain text content in the Craft system and there is no way to see or test the emails that you are sending to your users. This means that as an author you have very little control over styling without involving a developer who can build a workaround either for Craft CMS or Craft Commerce.

Email Content Editor, however, allows you to create your email content in an entry which instantly gives you access to all the tools available as well as the same authoring experience that you get with Craft CMS. Essentially anything you can do in a Craft CMS or Craft CMS Commerce entry, you can do with Email Content Editor which, we think you’ll agree is a game changer.

So, as with any entry, you will also be able to preview your emails in the browser while you’re writing content for them. This means that you can also view your email in different formats to ensure that it is optimised for mobile, desktop etc. And you’ll be able to send yourself a test email to be sure that it is displaying as it should be.

And, because your message is created in an entry, you can really begin to make an impact on the overall user experience by adding some fantastic additional touches such as seasonal promotions and messaging. For example, you can add a Christmas banner with a defined expiry date alongside an order confirmation email for a defined period of time. After this defined period it will expire so you don’t need to remember to turn it off.

As well as benefitting from the functionality of entries, having greater control over the process as a whole makes troubleshooting much easier. So, in the event that a recipient does get an incoherent message, you will be able to find their order in the system, set it as the test and preview whatever message they may have seen. There are of course ways to do this with the help of a developer - but using the Email Content Editor plugin makes the entire process quicker and much more efficient.

Email Content Editor in action: A case study

Our customer is a nationwide organisation that provides a subscription service to hundreds of users annually.

They have a system email to notify subscribers of their upcoming expiry. Alongside this notification, they will often offer an incentive for subscription renewal which runs for a fixed period of time. This message was hard coded so in order to change any messaging, the client needed to schedule development time.

Email Content Editor has been created to enable content managers and authors to create and edit content quickly themselves rather than relying on hard-coded messages and giving them full flexibility.