Customizing Emails with HTML and Variables

When it comes to email communications, there is no "one size fits all". Depending on your needs, you might want to customize your CTA, personalize your content, or create templates from scratch with HTML. Livestorm's new emailing system was updated to reflect these needs. In this article we dive into a few use cases to show you how to get the most out of your communications.

Getting Started

There are two different types of emails that you can choose to edit. Email invites and Webinar emails

Email invites

Email invites are the first point of contact you have with your target audience. This email spreads the word about your webinar, and includes a CTA that links to the registration page. Email invites can not be customized with custom html, but you can edit the text, subject line, and include variables.

Webinar Emails

Webinar emails are a series of communications that help to inform your registrants, encourage attendance and follow up with attendees. These emails are what registrants will see after they have registered for your webinar. You can choose to use the email sequence that we designed for you, or just create one of your own.

These emails can be edited in the "webinar settings" section of your dashboard. For more detail on this process you can look at our email template help doc on customizing and editing webinar emails.

To personalize your emails with HTML, select "Custom HTML" from the template options, and click "Source" in the text editor to add your HTML.

There are a few different use cases for customizing Webinar emails:

1. Using your own design
2. Personalizing your email with variables
3. Customizing your CTA
4. Creating Private webinars
5. Embedding Polls and NPS ratings

Using your own design

Sometimes it’s necessary to implement specific attributes within your emails. Maintaining your brand image within your messaging is easy with HTML styling. In this example, we entered a few lines of code to create a text box and our own CTA. The options are limited only by what you can create (or find somewhere on the internet).

Customizing your CTA

You can make simple adjustments to your CTA by adapting the button to match your content. For example, if you are hosting a sales demo you can modify your text to say “Access Demo.” Or, if you are onboarding a new member of your team the CTA could say “Start Training.”

Advanced changes

You can use variables to dynamically adapt your CTA's content and UTM tracking according to each of your events. You use these Variables to fill in UTM terms. You can change the phrasing, adjust the color as needed and add custom links.

Adding a custom URL to your CTA gives you maximum flexibility for your webinars. There are a few popular use cases for this feature. You could add a discount link to your CTA at the end of your next sales demo, or send your clients to a survey page to get feedback about your product.

You can also use this feature to add UTMs to your link. A UTM is a special code that you can add to the end of your URL that tracks the clicks and performance of marketing activities. For example, if we wanted to see how many times our CTA was clicked, we would add a UTM to the end of our custom link. This UTM would record the activity of the button, and report it to google analytics. We can then access our data when reviewing our account at a later date.

In this example, (utm_source=livestorm&utm_medium=email) will show up in google analytics within source = livestorm and medium = email. We also want to take note of which campaign we are referencing, so to the end we added (utm_campaign={{webinar.title}}).

Creating Private Webinars

Sometimes you want to show your webinars to a specific group of people. Whether you are hosting a company training, an internal event, or an educational seminar, it’s important to maintain gated access to these events. To do so with Livestorm is simple.

Our advanced settings let you hide your webinar from your company page within Livestorm, so that your members can access it only using the link that you provide. Disabling registrations lets you run paid events by hiding your registration form from everyone. You can then use Zapier to register your attendees. Another option to maintain privacy for your webinars is to disable the sharing buttons. This stops your attendees from linking to your webinar on social media.

Webinars are an excellent communication channel for sharing internal knowledge. For example, at advertising and public relations agency WPP webinars are held to share achievements, present ideas and to train new employees. WPP schedules their private webinars weekly, and sees a high ROI in terms of time and effort.

Embedding Polls and NPS ratings

Adding Polls

Polls are a great way to track customer satisfaction, or to measure feedback about the webinar itself. You can use the results to modify your offering, increase customer happiness, or test new features. To implement a poll into a Livestorm webinar email, you should go with a pure CSS/HTML implementation. Livestorm won't allow embedding Iframe polls within your emails for compatibility reasons. These “star” ratings have the benefit of being easy to implement and can be adapted to your branding. A good starting point for a star rating CSS can be found on the following example on Codepen.

Once you have your CSS, you simply embed it into your custom HTML email. Respondents will be prompted to click on a star in your email, and then confirm their selection in a prefilled form without having to fill out any heavy forms.

Adding NPS rating

A NPS, or Net Promoter Score, measures the likelihood that someone would recommend your product or service to others. Similar to star ratings, NPS consist of only one question that rates satisfaction on a scale of one to ten. To include a NPS in your webinar email you should first configure your desired NPS tool. We like using SatisMeter to get both a performance metric and text feedback.

It is important to streamline the feedback process as much as possible. Says Jan Kužel, Head of Growth at SatisMeter, “We could have done some email with a button redirecting to a survey, but that's not really a best practice thing to do. We wanted to have the rating scale in the body of the email itself, as this has a better response rate. It’s one less step in terms of what you ask from the user.”

“Luckily, Livestorm had the HTML template option. We just plugged it in, and then sent the email after the webinar. The response then showed up in our dashboard. Obviously there was also no asking again for name/email in the survey, the links were pre-filled with variables from Livestorm.”

To implement their survey in the emails, SatisMeter creates an HTML template within their software. This template can be copied and pasted into Livestorm’s Custom HTML emails. The answers are stored within SatisMeter’s dashboard

Personalizing your emails with variables

Variables are another excellent way to customize your emails. If the voice of your brand is generally warm and friendly, you can use variables to personalize your messages. Insert the name of your registrant in the beginning of your emails to catch their attention. With Livestorm you can automatically implement the following variables:

• {{ registrant.first_name }}
• {{ registrant.last_name }}
• {{ registrant.email }}
• {{ webinar.title }}
• {{ organization.name }}
• {{ organization.email }}

Here we’ve used several variables to speak directly to our registrant, and referenced the webinar title to save ourselves time.

You can even add the session date to your emails with our webinar date variable.

Simply insert the variable to add the date and time of your webinar session. If you want to find out more about this variable you can visit our help docs.

Take your Emails to the Next Level

Email is one of the most versatile tools you can use, and for good reason. It can help to build relationships with your clients and motivate your prospects. Finding the right formula for compelling email can be tricky, but by trial and error you are sure to find the customization that works best for your brand.