We offer the ability to create custom wrappers for your mass emails as a feature available to partners who make a recurring monthly donation to support our toolset. Contact us here to ask about a partnership and request access.
See here for our video tutorial on email wrappers.
Once you are a partner, you can access custom email wrappers in the menu in the Details tab of the Start Organizing menu by clicking the Email Wrappers link.
On the custom email wrappers page, first choose the list you want to edit the wrapper for from the dropdown in the upper right. Each list can have multiple different wrappers. You can choose your individual account's list or any group you are an administrator of.
Once you've chosen your list, click the "Add New Wrapper" button in the upper left to start making a wrapper.
Making A Wrapper
Next, give your wrapper a name, and choose your own suffix to be appended to the from line of all your emails to replace our default "via ActionNetwork.org", or leave it blank for no suffix.
Then either enter the HTML code for your wrapper head and foot in the boxes below, or use the auto-generate button to upload your logo and have us create a very simple wrapper for you with your logo.
Note: Auto-generating a wrapper will overwrite your current wrapper. Any customizations you have made will be lost. You can edit your auto-generated wrapper after it's made to customize it further.
Coding Wrapper HTML
If you write your own, you'll see on the page that we split the wrapper into two inputs -- the header and the footer -- with your email's content in the center. The default HTML that is there is a very basic, stripped down, mobile-responsive, tested-in-all-email-clients wrapper. It is even more basic than the default wrapper that comes with non-partner accounts. Feel free to customize this HTML to add your own logos to fit your needs while keeping the features that we've implemented (such as working well on phones and in all email clients).
You do not have to (and should not) start your wrapper HTML with html, head, or body tags, just start right in. We wrap you wrapper code in a boilerplate HTML document that provides some standard behavior for good performance across email clients. Click here for a look at that code.
Additionally, CSS in style tags that you add will automatically be inlined. See here for more details.
However, you must put your style tags within other tags in your email wrapper. So instead of this:
<style type="text/css">
h1 { color: red; }
</style>
<center>My header code!</center>You'd put this:
<center>
<style type="text/css">
h1 { color: red; }
</style>
My header code!
</center>You can also use clips in email wrappers to personalize email content. See here for more information. A list of clips available is at the bottom of the email wrapper interface.
Our files system can be used for storing images or other files if you'd like for your wrappers. After you upload a file, you'll be able to get a link that you can use here.
Remember to write email-capable HTML, which is different from normal HTML. Here are some good tips from MailChimp. You must include some HTML in both the header and footer box.
Note: We automatically add an unsubscribe link at the bottom of all emails, including custom wrappers. This section is not editable, and you don't have to worry about adding an unsubscribe link to your wrapper. Please do not try to hide this section, it must be present to handle unsubscribes. However, we do have the ability to hide it for you in special situations. Contact us to find out more. We also support list-unsubscribe, which will display a one-click unsubscribe link in some recipient's email readers.
Saving, Previewing, Managing, Deleting, & Duplicating
You can preview your wrapper in your inbox using the "Save & Send Test" section below. Once you're done, click save to return to your list of email wrappers.
In the list you can quickly edit and preview any custom wrappers you have made, and set a default to be used for your list's mass emails and autoresponses. You can always pick a different wrapper for each email and autoresponse, this simply sets the default.
You can also delete wrappers, though note that deleting a wrapper is permanent and cannot be undone. If you don't want to permanently delete a wrapper, you can hide it so it's no longer in view. You'll be able to restore hidden wrappers by hovering over your list of wrappers and clicking the red View Hidden Items link that appears at the bottom right of this list.
You can duplicate wrappers as well with the duplicate button. If your group is in a network, you can optionally duplicate the wrapper to child groups as well, giving you a way to easily share wrappers with children.
If you have a network and want to share a wrapper with all child groups, you can click the Send button. Note that if you do this, your child groups will not be able to edit the wrapper on their end. However, any changes made in the parent group will automatically apply to the child groups.