Gametize Academy

Tips & Tricks on using Gametize's Email Editor

Academy Lead
Did you know that you can customize the look & feel of the email templates that Players receive from the platform? Well, you do now 🙂
With our Email Editor, you can customize the notification emails Players receive when there are news activities for them on your Project. For example, you can change the email subject title, body text, change out the Gametize logo, and the social links.
Here’s how the default notification email looks:
Here’s a sample of how just changing the colors of the links & the logo can make enhance your game’s branding:
Email Template Sample

What Email Templates can I customize?

Our Help Center has a very extensive series of articles guiding you on the specifics of each template – be sure to consult those in conjunction with this guide. This article will focus more on a few tips and tricks on making the most out of our Email Editor.
Here are the email templates available for you to edit:

Navigating through our HTML Editor

When you open up our Email Editor, you might feel intimidated by all of the HTML codes, but I recommend to simply focus on the replacing only the elements you want to change, piece by piece.
Just consult each of our Help Center’s articles breaking down the HTML codes and sections, and replace accordingly. For example, if you want to replace the Gametize logo with your own, you can simply replace the URL of our Gametize logo image with your own image filename, like below:
Just replace the URL of the Gametize logo image with your own logo, then click "Preview" to see the change in action!
Still, I recommend to do some reading on HTML to understand what the tags mean – it’ll help you understand the composition of the email. https://www.w3schools.com/html/ is a great place to start.

Recommended Do's

Keep your email customizations as simple as possible. 
These are notification emails, NOT marketing emails, so the purpose of the email is straightforward: to inform users of updates on their activities in the game. Remember that users will be receiving these emails much more frequently, so you won’t want these emails to be overly complicated or lengthy.

Similarly, be careful about complex styling.
There are many factors that might cause complex designs not to render well (such as the browser, email client, and/or device your user is on). For example, users using the Microsoft Outlook email client may end up receiving an email that looks very different from your intended design because of the way Outlook processes HTML-designed emails (in fact, I Googled and found a whole article just highlighting workarounds for designing emails for Outlook…you get the idea). So, just be mindful again to keep your email design as simple as possible.

Be mindful of using emojis & custom fonts.
If an emoji isn’t supported in the email client, the recipient may see a ☐ character instead. Similarly, some more specialized fonts may not be supported by whichever browser/email client/device your players are using, so stick to the more general fonts – here’s a list of email-safe fonts according to Campaign Monitor. At Gametize, we use Helvetica (fun fact for you!)

Ensure your images are optimized.
When images aren’t optimized, your users might have a negative experience with your email – whether it’s because your images are blurry, take too long to load, and/or are not scaled to their browser window. Once again, this Campaign Monitor article outlines best practices for the dimensions of your image to ensure images in your email are top quality. 
If you want a more detailed checklist on best email design practices, check out this article – it’s geared more towards marketing emails, but has some good tips and tricks on email design in general: https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2019/02/the-really-good-guide-to-email-design-bonus-checklist/

More stuff to get you inspired

If you want some inspiration, here’s some further reading:
Share with us your customized email templates – comment below and let us know how you’ve used our Email Editor 🙂
Published on 18 June, 2020

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