HTML Newsletter

Though Levitate's mantra is personal keep-in-touch, and we know statistically speaking, a plain email has much higher open and reply rates than a fancy HTML newsletter -— we still recognize that at the end of the day, some of our users actually do have a real use-case for HTML newsletters.

By allowing graphic-rich email content, our HTML Newsletter feature is another way for you to keep in touch with your clients and prospects more efficiently. At a high level, here's how our HTML Newsletter feature works:

1. You can use our pre-built template, or create your own using an easy-to-use drag and drop email template builder.
2. Rather than using your email provider to send HTML newsletters, we will use our email sending capabilities, through a custom HTML domain that's associated with your company, instead (but recipients can still reply back to your email). This applies to all of our customers with the exception of the ones in the financial industry. For our financial customers, we still deliver using your email server for FINRA compliance purposes.
3. Like our regular campaigns, you can track open, view, and click rates (the last one is new!)

As of July 2024, all HTML newsletter sends will show on each recipient's contact profile! Just like plain text emails, text messages, and other activities, this send will write back to any integrated softwares.

Now, let's take a deeper dive and see how you can send out your first HTML newsletter step by step.

Building a Template

First, you can find the HTML Newsletter feature in the Campaign section (left nav).

Please note that if you are an admin, you can automatically activate this feature after you enter your business' physical address. If you are not an admin of your Levitate account but would like to have this feature turned on, please reach out to your success manager or support@levitateapp.com.

You can start by building your own HTML template, or start with the one we've provided for you and go from there.

On the right-hand side of the panel, you will see many tools to help you create the layout of your newsletter.

One cool feature to highlight here — just like our regular campaigns, you can insert the "first name" of the recipient into the body of your newsletter, along with some other fields (however, be careful with these to make sure you actually have all of the fields correctly in Levitate).

No doubt, building out your template to your heart's desire is the hardest part. Feel free to save it and work on it later. You can also take the same template you've built and save it as another template. When you feel like you are getting closer, you can preview how the email will look on someone else's desktop or on the mobile phone:

Sending the Newsletter

When you a ready, you can test out the newsletter first by sending a test. You'll receive a copy of the newsletter, so you can see how it looks before sending it for real.

Once you are ready to send, you can just click on the green Send out HTML Newsletter on the top right. The rest of the experience should feel very familiar to the regular campaign send flow. You select the tag groups you want to receive the newsletter, and go from there!

One thing to note is that by default, Levitate will include an unsubscribe link at the bottom of your newsletter to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act. Recipients would see this link and unsubscribe on their own (which is a little different from how our regular email campaigns work). There's nothing to do on your end to make sure it works. Once a user is unsubscribed, they will inherit the "unsubscribe" tag and will also stop receiving other email campaigns from you (even the non-HTML ones).

When sending a HTML Newsletter, we will use our email server to deliver rather than yours (unless you are in the financial industry). This is meant to protect your email server being spotted as spammy.

Reporting

Once your HTML Newsletter has gone out, you can start seeing the open and reply rates as usual, but we've also added the click rate in case you've embedded any links or buttons into the HTML Newsletter!

HTML sends to contacts will also show on their contact profile's timeline. These sends will write back to your source system if integrated. Write back for HTML sends began in July 2024, so moving forward from then, all HTML sends will be logged on contact profiles and written back to integrated source systems.

Happy sending!