Okay, looks like we're good to go. So the purpose of today's workshop is to go over, um, the process of switching out your footer in your templates and your emails in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. So, um, some of you may have already done this for Alumni, donors and Friends. Um, that was a bit of a more urgent need because there were some things, um, that had to do with the Preference Center involved in that. Um, we don't have that issue with university community. These are transactional emails. So there is no opt out or preference center, but there's still been some important changes that, um, we need everyone to adopt in their emails moving forward. So I'll go ahead and explain those changes and then we will go through the process of, um, duplicating the footer, editing it, and um, using it in your email templates.

So let's go ahead and take a look at the footer itself. So if you're here in university community, let's kind of start from the beginning so you can get the full picture. So you get into Salesforce Marketing Cloud and hop into university community, which is our business unit specifically for sending internal emails to students, faculty, and staff. And, um, we wanna go over here into email studio and then email. And then from here you wanna go to the content tab. And then all of our template assets are located here in this shared folder. So you always start out in local and this is where you want to share, uh, save all of your specific email assets. But if you need to access anything, um, that our team has created for you, use, you would go over to the shared folder and then within the shared folder. Um, a lot of times if you haven't accessed this part before, it typically looks like this. So you'll want to expand out these, um, folders. And we wanna be in the branded template assets.

And then within here, um, we want to go to this required footer folder. And then here in the required footer folder, there is a footer specifically for university community emailing. So we wanna ignore these other two footers. Those have different purposes. We just want the one that's for university community or internal. If you're using like the arts and sciences business unit or the Fisher Business Unit, um, but emailing faculty, staff, and students for internal purposes, then this is the footer you want. So go ahead and select this footer and we'll take a look at it. Um, so just a few changes here that are small but important in the long run for our emailing.

Um, one thing that you will notice that was kind of the biggest change at the beginning of the year is we did the good old change from Twitter to X. Um, and that icon actually did change over automatically in all of our email assets. So you may have seen that and thought like, oh, I'm good. It switched over. But, um, while the image did change automatically, there was some things that we had to do on the back end to catch that back up to speed. So, um, we changed the order of the icons to correspond with, um, some of our other, uh, like website assets and things like that. And we also changed the alt text and some of the things behind the scenes for accessibility purposes to align with x.

Um, one of the other things that we did was we added this line here to ensure that our messages are sent straight to your inbox. Please add a return email address to your address book. And the reason that we have done this is because some changes with Gmail and Yahoo that um, are kind of, uh, they're good for the, um, email recipient, but kind of a problem for us, um, helping to prevent spam and things like that, which is great, but that means sometimes our emails may be more likely to, um, land in the spam folder if our email addresses are unknown to the recipient. So, um, that's just to encourage them to save our email address so that, uh, they receive all emails moving forward.

And um, the last line here that we have added is that official messages from the Ohio State University may be sent from email addresses ending in t.osu.edu. And um, that is the sub domain that, uh, all of our emails from Salesforce Marketing Cloud go out under, uh, with that t.osu.eu. And we just wanted to add that little line into the footer because, um, especially with internal emails, you know, we've all gone through the phishing training and things like that and people are very vigilant in checking, um, to make sure that their emails are legitimate. And so there's been like some suspicion in the past about that T but we just wanna let them know that that is a valid email address, um, and official to Ohio State. So those were the changes to the footer, um, and what we wanna make sure gets adopted in email moving forward.

Any questions about any of that? Okay, yeah, it's pretty straightforward. Um, so now we will go into the process of saving this footer as your own and updating the content within it, uh, to correspond to your unit and then using it in your email templates moving forward. So, um, just a reminder, we're back here in this required footer folder. So we wanna click on, um, the university community footer, and then we want to go to this little dropdown carrot here in the corner and hit duplicate. So we're basically making a copy of that asset and you want to, uh, get rid of any of this extra that Salesforce writing Cloud adds onto the end. And then probably just add your unit name onto the front so that you know that this is your footer. And some of you may have subunits. Um, this name is not like the email naming convention. It does not affect any UTM or tracking or anything like that. So you can just add in whatever you need to add, um, to clarify if it's the main unit or the subunit or anything like that.

So I'm gonna do that. And then the next big step that I need to do here is change the location or it's gonna land right back in that shared required footer folder. Um, and for organizational purposes, we don't want that. So I'm gonna go ahead and hit move and then I'm gonna switch over to local and I'm gonna go down here to my OMC folder. And you may wanna put this in your assets folder or you may have a template folder or something like that. Um, I'm just gonna put this in a test folder for now. Um, but yeah, however you really want your folders to be organized is, um, up to you, whatever makes the most sense for your unit. So I'm gonna go ahead and save that and that's all we need to do. So I'm gonna go ahead and save and edit so that I can get to work on customizing this footer for my unit.

So, um, first and foremost, when you are editing a freeform block, which is, um, like a piece of a template that is on its own in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, uh, one thing to note is that there is no auto save here unfortunately. So, um, we're used to auto save in our email messages as we're working on them. It saves about every 20 seconds or something like that, but we do not have that luxury, uh, over here in a free form. So just make sure to save often so you don't lose any of your work. So I'm gonna do that right away.

Um, and then I will just go over here and start editing fields. And this is, um, our typical method of editing fields in the wizzywig here in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Um, you can also expand this to help kind of see the whole picture, just drag that bar over. Um, but we often like to edit in between the first and last, uh, character in, um, the copy here, just so that we're not erasing any of the HTML behind the scenes. So I'm gonna follow that method here and just, um, type in Office of Marketing and Communications and then get rid of that first and last character.

And, um, another option for you here if you, uh, are familiar enough with HTML and comfortable editing an HTML, um, rather than using the wizzywig and needing to do that method of first and last character, you can switch to the HTML editor and edit it there. We just wanna make sure to only edit the, um, office name or unit name, the address and um, email address and URL because we do need this to retain pretty much what it's looking like here for deliverability and accessibility purposes. So, um, I would just go and do that same thing for the address here.

And then when it comes to the email address and the URL, these are already hyperlinked, you just need to edit the hyperlink. So you can just do a quick double click and it will pull up that hyperlink section and you can edit all of the link properties. So for the email address, you wanna make sure that you're selecting link to email address and then you're able to enter your email address. You can even add a subject line, um, like something standard, uh, if you'd like to kind of make it an easier experience for your recipient if they do choose to reach out to that email address. And, um, so let's say I'm just gonna use the OSU email address.

And then the other thing you wanna note is that you wanna include the underline on this hyperlink, um, because that is the universal sign for people to know that that is a clickable hyperlink. Um, we don't need to do that on call to action buttons because the button is sort of that signal for people. But we do wanna do that when it's just inline, hyperlinked text. So I wanna do that. And then if you were to edit these, um, the title and the tracking alias, the title is essentially a Aria label. So this is text that describes a link if you hover your cursor over a link on the web. So, um, you know, if you wanna write the email address or have like a description of what this is like, um, email address for the Office of Marketing and Communications, um, something like that. And then the tracking alias is what you would see on the um, tracking side over here in CINs reports. If you go to that, um, link view that's available there and see your list of links, um, you can kind of change the name of what you see there.

So for right now, you would just see that this is an email address. Um, and actually email addresses aren't available, um, in that tracking report unfortunately. Um, but for the website link you can change the name of that to just say like, uh, osu.edu or you know, something like a easier version of, um, the hyperlink. So that's all you do there.

So that is a nice thing, but if you're doing an email address, it's um, safer just to go ahead and select email address. Any questions with that portion? Okay, I'll go ahead and move on to social media icons because I know that's usually a big one for everyone. So for the social media icons, you can go ahead and edit the college or unit name, um, as usual, uh, like we did over here.

Um, and then when it comes to the icons themselves, uh, if you just want to keep these four here, that's great. You can, all you need to do to edit the links on these images is again, do like a little double click and scroll down here to the bottom and add a link and you can just paste in your Facebook URL and save. And then just go down the line for all of your images here and add in your links.

Um, I know that a lot of times it's not that simple. Um, you know, we might not have all of these social media accounts for our unit or maybe we utilize LinkedIn more than we really utilize YouTube and we'd like to swap out the image. Um, if it gets more complicated and that's something you wanna do, go ahead and reach out to the email team and we can like one-on-one assist you with switching out those icons or, um, taking away some of the icons.

One thing that's not available as of now is we cannot add any additional icons. There's really only space for four. So I would recommend choosing the four social media accounts that are most relevant for your audience and prioritizing those for the footer. Any questions about that?

Okay, so after all that editing, we're gonna go ahead and say that I completely finished this and it's good to go. Um, oh, one other thing I want to mention is that we do want to leave the year looking like this. Um, this is Amps script, it's the proprietary code of Salesforce Marketing Cloud to um, basically create personalization in an email and um, you know, usually personalization has to do with a specific contact, but in this case we can also just auto-populate a field so that it doesn't need to be edited in the future.

So that's the nice thing about this piece right here is, um, it automatically brings in the current year and we no longer have to, uh, have a big campaign in December to say, make sure to update your, um, email footers to 2025. Uh, this will do that automatically. So you don't need to touch this, just leave it exactly as is. And when you're testing your email, um, if you're doing it properly, you'll see that populate with the current year here.

I'm gonna go ahead and save this and then use this arrow to go back to content builder. And now I'm going to, um, update my footer in an email template so you can see what that looks like. So I'm gonna go back to local and I'm going to go to the folder where I want my email to live in the local folders, um, or where I want my template to live in the local folders. And I'm gonna go ahead and create an email template and I'm gonna create that from an existing template. And that's what you'll always wanna do to be able to use our branded email assets that are in Marketing Cloud.

So a lot of times you might see this or um, you know, you might see this, there's a lot going on here. This page we completely ignore. Don't worry about this, this is just Salesforce Marketing Cloud trying to help you out. But uh, we already have all of our template assets in Marketing Cloud and we don't need these blank ones. So we're gonna go to saved. And from here we're gonna go to folders. And this may look similar to, um, what's available when we were in content builder.

So, um, we're kind of doing the same thing that we did when we looked at the footer. We're just gonna go ahead and switch from local to shared and there's all of our lovely template assets. And since we're working on university community, we have a folder specifically for university community email templates. So again, navigate to that. If you haven't done this before, it might look something like this with one folder. So you just want to expand that content to share branded template assets. And then you can see the university community email templates.

So here are all of our blank templates. I'm gonna say that I want to swap out the footer on my newsletter template. So I'm gonna go ahead and grab a newsletter template and select that and I'm gonna go ahead and save right away. Um, so that I can name it. Email templates are very similar to freeform blocks in that they do not auto save. So that is something you wanna do right away is go ahead and save before you work on anything else. Um, make sure that your template has a name, that's how you know that it's saved. And then just make sure to save frequently as you are working on your email template.

So I'm gonna go ahead and call this um, OMC newsletter. Um, there's no naming convention for email templates themselves. Again, the name for this does not affect any tracking or anything like that, um, unlike email messages, but you probably do want to at least lead with your unit code to help keep things organized because, um, it is a shared space. And because I started out in the folder where I wanted my, um, email template to live, I already, uh, have that saved in the right spot, but if I did wanna change that, I could move it to another folder and you can add a description if you'd like. Um, especially if you're on a larger team with lots of pe different people working on email. Um, you might just wanna add a short description, um, to let your colleagues know like specifically what newsletter is this for or, um, if there's been a change or anything like that.

And then that's all you need to do from here. So I'm gonna go ahead and save. And now we have our email template. Um, it looks like some of our placeholders aren't loading right now, but that's okay. Um, you would be replacing those images anyway, um, and you can still do like a double click on that area to add in the image. So I just wanted to call that out.

But, um, specifically if we are wanting to replace the footer, because right now, um, we just have a, uh, templated like plain fill in footer, so we don't want that one. We wanna replace it with our new one that we just created. So I'm gonna go ahead and click on the little carrot here on the side of the footer block and look at the dropdown. And we have delete, so I'm gonna delete this block. Now my email has no footer, so I'll go ahead and save that.

And we want to navigate to where we saved the edited footer that we just created, um, in our local folder. So you do that by going from blocks to content and I'm going to open up these folders here and scroll down to where I saved my footer in my local folder under OMC. So there it is. And then this part is super simple. All you have to do is drag and drop it over. So I'm gonna go ahead and grab it and I'm dragging it in that blue line. Um, that's highlighting right now indicates where the block is gonna fall. So I want it to be down here at the very bottom of my email. Um, if you accidentally drop it somewhere else in the email, that's totally fine, you can still pick it up and drag it from there. So, um, let's say I accidentally put it right there and I have an item below it. That's okay. All I have to do is pick it up again and drag it to the bottom.

So I'm gonna go ahead and save, and then that's it because I would've already filled out everything that I needed to do within the footer. So that's all I would really need to do to update the footer in my template. Um, so I just did a good save and I would back out of this template and go ahead and build my email. Um, does anyone have any questions about updating the footer and the template?

Okay, so I'm gonna go ahead and also take a look at an email made from this template so I can show you kind of how you would make sure that you're testing the footer properly, um, especially to be able to see the year and the copyright and that sort of thing. So we're gonna go ahead and test my newsletter template here. So I wanna create an email message and my creation option would be template. And I'm gonna go into, um, because I was just working on this and this would be the same for any of you. Anything you're just working on will be already right here, um, kind of in this, uh, like feed. But if you haven't worked on it in a little while, you will need to navigate to the folder that you saved your template in.

So I'm gonna go ahead and go to folders and I saved my template in the local folders. And so I'm gonna scroll down here and go to my folder. And there's my template. So I'll go ahead and select that and go ahead and name my template. Um, following the naming convention. So OMC, let's say this is a student awareness newsletter. It's fiscal year 24. And then I went to name this, um, test footer and that's all that I need to do there so I can save and hit next.

And I happen to be on the code view, uh, of my email, but yours would be on the default, so don't mind that. Um, it would be on the default, so it would look like this. And so this is what you're used to seeing when you edit your email. So you can do everything as usual. Um, add in all of your email edits. I'm going to act like I have some personalization in this email. Um, just for the purposes of being able to see better, how it is important to edit both for the footer and for the copy inside your email. Um, and test that properly.

So I'm gonna go here and I'm just going to use this data extension. So, um, if you are doing personalization, kind of a, a fun little tidbit is that you would, um, need your data extension or your list already populated, um, in the subscriber side so that you can use it for your testing in your emails. So I'm just gonna do that and add in, um, a first name so that we can see some personalization when we do our testing. So there we go. That's all good to go.

And I'm gonna say I already completed my email and I'm ready to go ahead to the preview and test stage. So this is a part that I know a lot of us tend to overlook as we're going on to testing. We're excited to just get the email out, um, into inboxes so it can be reviewed, but this is an very important tab right here, this subscriber preview and attributes. Um, you need to select the data extension that you're going to be sending your email to at this step so that you can make sure that your email works with the data.

So I'm gonna go ahead and select this little blue folder and navigate to my data extension in my OMC folder. And so that data extension is right here, so I'm gonna grab that. And then you can see here all of the, um, contacts that are in my data extension. So I'm gonna go ahead and select someone. It can be anyone, um, if it's the data extension you're planning to send to and select.

And if you're planning to send to multiple data extensions, I would do this with all of the data extensions that you're planning on using, um, to make sure that the data is working with your email. So now I can see that I have Leslie's name in my first name, spot it populated from the first name field. And then the other thing that populated, because I have a contact selected is the year in the footer. So we know that everything's working well and we're good to move on to actually sending a test to someone's inbox.

So that's just our typical process of typing in any email addresses that you're planning to send your test to and selecting your sender profile for your email and sending your test. Um, one thing I wanna note about this is that you would leave this person here. Um, this is basically just a preview of what this person would see. So the email when you send the test will say Test Leslie. Um, but Leslie is not involved in the testing process. We're just viewing the email as if we were her. Um, but you know, we don't have to worry about her getting a test message.

Anyone have any questions about that? Okay, I think that that is everything. Um, I really appreciate you all for attending today. Um, and if you do have any questions, uh, feel free to reach out to the team at email marketing@osu.edu. Um, I will also have the recording ready for you in the chat, um, right after this. So if you need to go back and review it as you're going through this process, uh, completely understand, that's a lot of steps. Um, so go ahead and do that. Um, but yeah, thank you again everyone and have a good rest of your Tuesday.