How To Customise Email And Newsletter Templates With Member Jungle

1971 was a busy year; the first ever One Day International (ODI) cricket match was played, Louis Armstrong and Jim Morrison died only three days apart, Ali and Frazer had the first of their legendary three-fight series, and the world's first email was sent. 

That's right. Ray Tomilson, the inventor of the email, sent the world's first email in 1971. Its content? QWERTYUIOP. That's right; the message in the first email contained just all the letters on the top row of the keyboard.  

Emails have come a long way since their humble beginnings; they are now essential for modern human communication as well as for marketing and spreading information about your club.

Sure, there were some brief dark days when every email had a subject line like "Fwd: Fwd: Fwd: Send this email to 7 people or the wardrobe witch will eat you!!!" But we just don't talk about those days anymore because, to be honest, those were pretty dark days. We lost a lot of good people to that witch. 

Anyway, the point is that emails are a crucial part of communicating with your members and keeping them informed about what is going on at your club. So, I thought I'd take this opportunity to look at how you can customise and create new email templates for your club communications and newsletters. 

How To Edit Email Templates In Member Jungle

Emails and newsletters are a super useful way to communicate with your members en masse easily and effectively. Whether that’s alerting everyone to an upcoming event or change or just a monthly newsletter loping them into what’s been happening at your club so they stay engaged.

As I’m sure you know, we have a monthly newsletter here at Member Jungle that I send out at the end of every month in hopes of keeping people up to date with the latest changes to the system and to the world of membership management. The point is that emails and newsletters are an easy and effective way of communicating with your members. 

The first step in customising your email templates is to log in to your Member Jungle site as an admin and go to your Email & SMS Campaign. Here, you can add, edit, and manage email campaigns for your members. 

 

 

This is where you can add a new email campaign or edit an existing one. Once you go into editing an email campaign, you will see a few pre-made email templates that you can fully customise to ensure they perfectly represent your club’s unique style. 

I will not go into too much detail on this part because Renee has already covered this perfectly in a video. And I think we can all agree that this sort of thing translates much better in video. So check out the video below and then come back because I’ve got more to tell you about. 

 

 

 

See? That video explained all of that much better than I could have. But we're not done yet. Let's talk about how you can create and import brand-new email and newsletter templates into the Member Jungle system. 

How To Create Your Own Email Templates For Your Club

As you've seen, the Member Jungle system offers a few templates you can clone and customise, but what if you want something more? Well, that's where we turn to Litmus and Befree. 

Both Litmus and Befree are services that allow you to create and customise email templates. You can import them into the Member Jungle email by copying and pasting the HTML code. Both services offer free and paid versions. For today's demonstration, I will use Befree's free version. 

Befree will allow you to choose from a wide range of pre-made email templates, which you can customise to your heart's content. 

 

 

So, let’s say I choose a template to be the basis for my newsletter. It will then open in the email editor, where I can change the layout, text images, videos, buttons, page breaks, and a lot more. It also lets you preview your email in desktop and mobile views, which is super important. 

 

After about five minutes of mucking about, I turned this email into something much more representative of my imaginary club. 

 

 

I adjusted my images, club logo, text and which URLs the buttons link to. Now, I'm ready to export my email back into Member Jungle. 

I know I'm having some fun with old creepy chain emails here, but I remember being genuinely terrified at about 11 that I would be murdered by a ghost that lived in wardrobes because I got a chain email about it. So, I guess you could say I'm exercising some (wardrobe) demons by joking about it. 

To export your newly created email, click export in the top right corner of the page, select the "Copy HMTL" option, and copy the HMTL Code on the next screen. Then, jump back into Member Jungle and either create or manage an email campaign. Then, you just need to add a New Email Template, which will bring up the editor below. 

 

 

From here, you just need to click the Source button at the top left of the editor. It’s on the menu's far left, just under the Images button and above the Bold and Italics buttons. Once you’ve clicked the source button, paste the HTML code we got earlier into the main body of the email editor.  

You will then be greeted by this chaotic-looking nonsense. But don’t panic; nothing’s broken; this is just what HTML looks like. 

 

 

Then, just click the Source button again, and everything should start looking good. 

 

 

Just like with the templates Renee went through in the video above, you can still edit and change the text and images of your new template as usual. Now you just have a swanky new format to use.

How Else Can You Improve Your Club’s Emails?   

That’s how you can edit email templates in Member Jungle and create new templates and add them to the system. If you didn’t watch it at the time, definitely go back up and watch the video; it is super helpful. 

If you want to know more about how to create awesome emails for your club members, please read 5 Steps To Write A Club Newsletter Your Members Will Love To Read.

For more on how to ensure all your emails find their mark and don’t get marked as spam, read Email Delivery Best Practice.