Building efficient templates are crucial for notices to your customers for marketing and notification of services. This article is to provide you with an understanding of the two categories of email templates in Service Minder and provide some basic information on editing them. The use of these is covered in the Communications FAQ.
Organization of Email and Text Templates in Service Minder
In the Control Panel of Service Minder three places to see all of the options for communication templates: Automated Emails, Ad Hoc Emails (which includes Ad Hoc Texting) and Automated Text/Voice:
Automated Emails and Texts:
Automated emails are required by Service Minder to function and may not be re-named. To adjust which Automated emails are sent out, you may visit the Control Panel>Notifications section and check/uncheck the various options on the tabs listed there. Automated emails may not be made inactive, but must simply be edited to change them. They also do not have a Type like Ad Hoc's, but the type is implied by it's use in the system.
Automated emails texting code is not in the Automated Email section of the Control Panel, but is in the Automated Voice/Text section. It is here you will want to maintain any the text version of most Automated emails.
The character limit for a single SMS message is technically 160 characters. However, most modern phones and networks support message concatenation: they split large messages into individual SMS messages (called "segments") and then re-create the large message at the receiving end. The 160-character limit is for messages encoded using the GSM-7 character set. Messages not encoded with GSM-7 are limited to 70 characters.
Our platform supports long messages up to 1600 characters across all Programmable Messaging channels, including SMS. However, for SMS messaging, we recommend sending messages that are no more than 320 characters to ensure the best deliverability and user experience.
Ad Hoc Emails and Texting:
Ad Hoc emails are designed for use either manually, with drips, or as part of a marketing campaign. When you are finished using an Ad Hoc email template, make it inactive by un clicking the Active button. Ad Hoc emails have a Type which determines both where it can be used, and which shortcodes will work inside of it.
Ad Hoc emails also have the code to use if the email is sent as a text at the bottom of the editing screen.
Both types of templates have a 'code view' button that will allow you to edit the html directly. If you do not understand html avoid this.
Editing Emails
Editing emails works much the way editing a Word document works. Place the cursor where you want the edit, click on the edit icon from the bar, and edit. Note it is possible to select the "white" text color whereby if the document is also white it will appear invisible. Simply paste this text and select the "droplet" icon to change the text to a visible color.
Mosquito Squad brand manager will put into your Ad Hoc account from time-to-time new templates for various uses. Code view can be used to cut and paste the body of these into Automated emails when necessary. Here are the steps:
- Click edit on the Ad Hoc email you wish to copy into an Automated.
- Click the Code view icon </>.
- Select and copy the entire code form the body.
- Switch to the Automated email you wish to copy into.
- Click the Code view icon.
- Select and paste the entire code copied earlier into the body of the Automated.
- Click the Code view icon.
- Make any changes you need in the body and subject line.
Notes on HTML Formatting
First, if you don't already know html skip this section.
Eliminate any widthless <img> tags. That means that if there isn't something like width="600", add it. I usually try to copy the CSS width (something that looks like "width: 600px;") unless it's a relative (percentage) width. You have to put an HTML width attribute on the <img> tag or else Outlook and a few other clients won't understand how wide you want it to be and will make it huge.
-Keep table widths consistent for the body of the email. Just general style advice, but helpful for maintaining consistency (and avoiding headaches). Pick a general width and stick to it. If the width of all the other tables is 100%, make the footer 100%. Even better is to have everything 100% wide at first, with the exception of a fixed width for an outermost all-encompassing table (e.g. "width: 600px;" and width="600"). Once everything is the same width, go in and make changes to your inner tables to get it looking right.
-Destroy calculated margins. Anytime you see stuff like "margin-left: calc(25%);" or something, delete all existing margin attributes. That means that if there are any margin-left/right/top/bottom, they need to be replaced by a single "margin: 0 auto;" tag that will put no margin on top & bottom and automatically center the item for the left & right.
-Be on the look out for sneaky padding style tags that eat up your horizontal space.
-If something needs to be aligned to the center, make sure it and/or its parent element have align="center" attributes.
Bulk Proposals Emails in ServiceMinder:
NOTES FROM 12/2023 ON TEXTING FROM SERVICE MINDER
Contact text templates can be selected from the texting hub or on the contact details page in their texting tab. No other text templates are available there, or are available to select in this way anywhere.
Custom proposal text templates can be used in place of regular proposal notifications by following these steps:
- create a proposal type ad hoc email template with a text template in it
- edit your service(s) and select that template for proposals
- any customers opted in to receive text notifications will receive the text template instead of the email (or in addition to, if they're set up for both)
For your example, I was thinking doing a drip trigger might make the most sense. You could set up a trigger for Proposal Sent, filter on that service, and do an action of Send Text > fill out your proposal text there. But I also think using the above option where you set the default confirmations up on your individual services would work, too. You can adjust the default proposal text in Control Panel > Automated Text/Voice, but that'd be for all services.
(reviewed for updates 12/24/24)