Adding templates to Mediafly for Outlook Add-In

Mediafly for Outlook allows sales users to utilize predefined templates, create share links to Collections, and track activity back to Mediafly Insights - all within Outlook. Templates are optional additions to the Outlook Add-In capability to provide predefined messages to sales users. Use this guide to create and customize templates.

Keys to Success

• Templates can be simple text or HTML
• Custom placeholders can be used to dynamically populate information
• Share link placeholder can be used to populate Collections or content share links
• Once you have your template file or text ready, send to support.mediafly.com to configure

Adding placeholders to templates

Placeholders can be added to templates so the sales user can customize specific areas of the template. Placeholders are indicated by text wrapped in double curly brackets.  The example below allows the sales users to customize the recipient name, company name and sender name in the template.

Hello {{ Customer Name }}, Thank you for spending time with today to learn more about your company, {{ Company Name }}. Talk soon, {{ Your Name }}

Text placeholders may be labelled with any word or phrase that is appropriate to give a hint to what text the sales users would want to customize.

To include a Share link placeholder, using the specific placeholder text {{ sharelink }}. When the Share link placeholder is used, the sales user will be able to select the desired content or Collection.

Using placeholders in an HTML template

In an HTML template, in addition to the double-curly-quotes, placeholders are wrapped in a span tag with the “is-placeholder” class. Example:

<span class="is-placeholder">{{ Your Name }}</span>

In an HTML template, the section of the template that contains placeholders should be wrapped with the following tag

<div id="emailTemplateBody"> ... </div>

The primary purpose is for an HTML email template that might have a complicated table structure with header images, footer copyrights, etc. That div tag would be used to isolate the "body" of the template with the text of the message in which placeholders have been included.

When the user is filling in the placeholders, the UI will then only display what was inside the div with the "emailTemplateBody" id. This is because the pane where the add-in gets loaded is rather narrow and the entirety of most HTML email templates would be too much. So, we pare it down by isolating the most important part to be able to read the flow of the message when filling in the placeholders. When it's inserted into the actual Outlook email compose message, the entire template is then shown.