SAS Customer Intelligence 360: Email View on Web

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Have you received a promotional email that for some reason did not render properly? Some content was missing? But you were still able to view the content of the email thanks to a “view on web” link that you selected to alternatively view the email content on a web browser? I’ve had to do this myself a few times. There is a feature available in SAS Customer Intelligence 360 that is very easy to set up and use to provide this alternative viewing. Some organizations have a policy to always provide this email feature as a backup for the occasion where their email recipients have an issue with rendering the email using whatever email application or device they are using at the time.

When setting up the content using an Email task, there is an Element Type aptly titled “View-on-Web Text” that can be used to enable this feature. This feature is available using the Layout Manager within the Content tab of the Email task.

View-on-Web Text

Drag a View-on-Web Text element onto the Layout Manager. Typically, these view-on-web links are provided in the very top of the email body itself or on the very bottom near other information such as an unsubscribe link. I’ve seen them both ways. The link may be more noticeable on top of the email for recipients if there is a major issue rendering the email content.

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Pictured is the default content of the element. You can use the View-on-Web Text Settings to customize. Here is the very convenient part of this setup: the link to the web-based view of this email is automatically provided! When an email is published, SAS Customer Intelligence 360 automatically creates and houses the web page copy of the email. By default, the system automatically keeps this web page up for 90 days and then it gets deleted (typically if it’s not read within 90 days, they’re probably not going to read it anyways). The link itself gets created by using a default merge tag generated by the system.

If you place a View-on-Web Text at the top of an email, make sure to add pre-header text so that the View-on-Web Text content does not appear next to the subject line in email previews.

You can change the font, font size, font color, background color, the text words, among other things using the View-on-Web text Settings (similar to the Text Element settings).

The default text is “To view this email in your web browser, click here.” You can change this as you wish. Some more common ones I’ve seen in emails lately:

“Having trouble viewing this email? Click here.”

“View this email as a web page.”

“View in browser”.

If you want to change the wording and apply the link to another word(s), simply click the linked word “here” and then select the Link button in the editor, and you can copy the merge tag as pictured here:

There’s a lot more features to customize and change the defaults. For example, you can use the Target tab to change the target on the link from the default New window (opens a new browser window) to a popup window. You can even change the color of the underline in the linked word(s) using the Advanced tab.

For more information on View-on-Web Text and how to set up and deliver emails using SAS Customer Intelligence 360, please visit these sites below:

• SAS Customer Intelligence 360 User Guide
• SAS Customer Intelligence Learning Subscription

Course:

• Email Development and Delivery with SAS Customer Intelligence 360

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