*** NOTE: ALL INFORMATION IS ACCURATE AT DATE OF PUBLISHING ***
This one has been a long time coming, and was a missing feature in Realtime Marketing that could be used in Outbound Marketing long ago. That’s the simple feature of providing a view in browser for realtime emails link so those you send emails to can open them online. This means, even if the email doesn’t display or there are issues with the person’s email client, they still have a way to see them as intended when you sent them. Let’s take a look!
At time of publishing this post, this is a preview feature, so the initial steps might have changed by the time you start using this. After making sure you are on the latest version of Customer Insights -Journeys, go to the Settings area an then the feature switches. Make sure to turn on the View in browser switch and save.
Now on your emails, simply add in the link where you want someone to access the option to view the email in their browser. Type the words you want to use, then highlight it.
Then click the hyperlink option that should be a part of the text control, and instead of link to URL, you can now select View in browser.
After selecting the link option, you can also click on More options. This allows you to turn tracking off should you want to. This means you won’t see any analytics for anyone that clicks on this link. Tracking is turned on by default.
You could add this option to view online at the top and/or bottom of the email. This is typically what I have most commonly seen. Now when the email is received, someone can click the link and it will open in their default browser.
Any personalisation in the subject or main body of the email will be visible in the browser too, so the same personal experience will be there for the recipient.
Finally, if you left the tracking on, you will be able to see which Contacts have clicked to view the email online via the email analytics.
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One thing I realised you couldn’t do was view in Browser via a test send of the email. You have to actually do a real send to a test segment to get a email with the view in browser link actually working. Not sure if there’s a way around it?
For us this feature is mainly for sharing draft emails across the business for approval so having to actually send it to have the link live is a bit annoying but acceptable I guess.
Hi Michael, I think it makes sense it doesn’t work until it’s live. It’s creating a version of your email to view online. Not much point in doing that until it is actually sent for real I guess!
Hi Megan, I hope you are well. 🙂 I guess the link is generated for each email per recipient as it is sent within the Real-Time Journey. Do you know if it is possible to capture that link value and pass it to a subsequent step in the Journey? I’m trying to think of a way to send an SMS with a link to the QR Code for the user’s Event Registration. I’m possibly thinking about this the wrong way but had the idea that maybe the email ‘view online’ might be possible.
Maybe I need to use Power Pages? I want to avoid any authentication other than what could be passed through the URL. Would love your thoughts or even a topic for your next blog? 🙂
Hi Peter…. then that is a slightly more achievable requirement I would think. 😄 the QR code gets generated when someone registers, and that has a link to be able to open the image online. So in theory you should be able to do a text and pull from the QR code on the related Event Registration. I actually have a couple of blog posts coming up in the next few weeks about Events and one on QR codes. I will see if I can add this where you use a text message instead of an email in the Journey. But should be possible!