Broadcast Message - Questions & Suggestions

[Phil Williams]

Hi,

I absolutely love the fact that we can now send HTML broadcast message - thank you so much for enabling this!

I have a few questions and suggestions about it:

Questions

1) When I send a list of links using html code, when it arrives in my inbox some of them are underlined and others are not. They are all clickable but i'm just not sure why some are underlined and others aren't? (I use the usual ahref tags for all of them).

2) How would I go about changing the colour of the network title and description - the part that appears on the top of the html message when it comes through? Is this a language editor change?


Suggestions

1) I think it would be good to have tools in the broadcast message box so I can easily add links without needing to code - the same ones as in this box that i'm typing in now would be fine.

2) I think we definitely need a way of previewing the message before it gets sent. I've already had to send correction messages twice due to me missing a quote or similar mistake.

That's all - thanks!

[Charlotte]

Just a thought, but can you send your prospective broadcast message to yourself first via the regular messages in order to proof it? Then when it comes out how you like, copy the code and paste it into your broadcast message to everyone. That's what I would do until a better solution is found...

[Evan]

Hey Charlotte!

I think that's actually exactly what we're going to do as the next step :)

/Evan
Ning Product Manager

[Evan]

Hey all!

Our latest release — which includes WYSIWYG for broadcast messages - is now live. You can check out the discussion we've posted about the release for more details:
http://creators.ning.com/forum/topics/mondays-release-is-now-live-on

I'm going to close this discussion, so we can centralize our conversations in the new thread.

/Evan
Ning Product Manager

[Bill Larsen]

A preview option is something we need. Is there a work around for this right now? If I were to create my broadcast message as a note and proof it there would I be able to copy that note and carry it over to the broadcast message area? Hmmm, I think I may test this.

[Laura]

Hi Bill,

I know a preview option is something we have in the plans. Short term, I test send broadcasts on my test network prior to sending them out here.

Cheers,
Laura

[Rick Bradford]

I think it should save the messages and the source code.

An excellent suggestion. It would save time for corrections and (I guess?) would also make it easier to duplicate the formatting for the next message (either by editing/copying/pasting into a new message or by some kind of "copy message" feature).

And, of course, a way to preview would be really great.

[Evan]

Hey Phil!

Thanks for flaggint the missing scroll bars issue. That's a bug. I've assigned it to a developer, and we should have a fix for that soon.

Additionally, you can now preview broadcast messages by clicking "Send me a preview" on the Broadcast Message page :)

/Evan
Ning Product Manager

[Robert]

Agree.

It would also be helpful to have the ability to specify an email address when sending the test message, so that we can see how different email clients render the message.

[Andrew Spiering]

Great topic, Phil.

Here are my suggestions:
1) Sample templates
2) Statistics on who actually opens and clicks the emails. I have no idea who actually receives my messages, who opens them, or clicks.

[Evan]

Hey Andrew!

Do you use Google Analytics? As of today, every single link in a broadcast message will have ?xg_source=msg_mes_network appended to the URL, so you can track clicks to those URLs.

We don't have data on how many people have opened the messages, though.

/Evan
Ning Product Manager

[Bill Larsen]

that is great. Thanks for that addition. My guess is just like other HTML emails it is only trackable if the reader clicks on the display images option in the message.

[Almir]

It would also be helpful to have the ability to specify an email address when sending the test message, so that we can see how different email clients render the message.

Evan, this is very good suggestion. Not only we could see how it looks in different clients but we could test inboxing too. I have a feeling that my inboxing is not so great so it would be cool if i could test and tweak message so it could inbox Yahoo.

Any spammer would say - if you know how to inbox Yahoo, then you're a rich man :)

PS. while I'm here - can you please check this thread, it somehow stayed unnoticed. Thanks