Blasts in a nutshell

Blasts are very simple to create and execute. With a little knowledge and planning, Blasts can perform very sophisticated email campaigns. When speaking of Blasts, there are a few basic concepts:

1. Who  - your contact list or a subset of your contacts by choosing Tags to include and not include.
2. What  - the email content which can be anything from a simple message to a visually stunning presentation of you and your properties including event based feedback and tracking.
3. When  - a one time Blast or a periodic recurring Blast.
4. Wow  - a summary of the Blast's performance over time.

1. Refresh the list.
2. + Add a new Blast.
3. Search the Blasts, this will filter the list based on the search term or phrase.                     
4. Filter the list e.g. show or don't show Blasts that are turned Off.
5. Sort the list by one of the attributes and in what direction.
6. Open it , this will open up an popup form.
7. Save the Blast, only enabled if you made any changes and all requirements are met. You must give your Blast a name, a subject and a start date;
8. Cancel the new/edit Blast. All changes will be discarded.
9. Trash (Delete) the Blast. This is permanent!
10. Toggle the Blast On/Off. If Off then the Blast will not execute, no emails will be sent. 
    

The best approach to Blasts is to start with a simple example and then work up to the power-user stuff.
The first thing you will do is create a new Blast, configure a few things, design the email content and send yourself a test email.

1. Create a new Blast - click or tap on the  + button. The new Blast popup form will appear.
2. There is a  Cancel  button and  Save  button. The Save button will be disabled until you have completed all required information.
3. On/Off  switch. On means the Blast is live. Off means the Blast will not send any emails. Leave your new Blast turned Off until you are finished and ready to execute it.
4. Name  and  Description -  these are for you to identify the Blast. Make the Name something brief but descriptive, you can be more verbose with the Description.
5. who -  to send the email to. Remember the notion of Tags in Contacts? This is where those tags come in handy. You use the Contact Tags to select who. There are two boxes where you can enter Tags. One box includes and the other excludes. You can use one or both to select who. You can also choose to treat multiple Tags as either AND or OR i.e. (Tag1 AND Tag2) or (Tag1 OR Tag2).
6. what -  is your RZ Designer, a wysiwyg email builder that raises the bar for ease of use and results. Create professional emails that look fabulous on any device. Brand your emails with your colors, logos, and images. Provide a  Subject  and then click on on the RZ Designer button to create the email. See below for more information on using RZ Designer.
7. when -  to send an email. Click or tap on the  Start on...  box. Choose a date and a time. Optionally, you can check the  repeat  box and pick a interval and a stop date.  
8. Save  button is now enabled. Click on it to save your Blast.  The Blast form closes and you see your Blast in the list. If you do not see your Blast then it may be filtered out. Click on the filter  dropdown in the toolbar and make sure show off   is checked.
9.   Open it  (>)  button allows you edit an already existing Blast from your list of Blasts. The popup edit form will open allowing you to make changes to the Blast.
10. Don't forget to click on the  Save  button to save your changes.

Read on to learn about all of the features and how to build more sophisticated Blasts.

Who

• Create a new Blast.
• Go the Who tag boxes and enter "Office" into the  with these tags...  box.
• Next, enter "Investor" into the  and   these tags...  box.
• This means that you want any Contact who is tagged with "Office" AND NOT tagged with "Investor".

When

You get to control when your Blast will execute. You also get to configure exactly what events to track as it executes.

• start on...  - select a date and then a time from the dropdown. This sets when your Blast will execute (provided the Blast is turned On).
• repeat  - if you want your Blast to execute periodically, then check this box and choose a frequency from the dropdown ranging from daily to monthly.
•  end on...  - choose a date to stop the Blast.

Now we are going perform some magic. The   magic tag boxes provide the ability to Add or Remove Tags from the Contact based upon events (what goes on when and after the email is sent). You can assign Tags to the Sent, Opened, Clicked and Non-Deliverable events...

•  Sent - when the email is sent.  
•  Opened - when the recipient opens the email an event is registered back to RealtyZapp.
•  Clicked - this is where it gets really cool. Every time the recipient clicks on any link in the email (except unsubscribe etc.), an event is registered. Also note that each link can be tracked individually, more about that later.
•  Non-Deliverable*  - the email was not delivered for any reason including Bad Address, Blocked, Unsubscribed, etc.

For example, in the  Opened - Add Tags  box, enter  Warm.  In the  Clicked - Add Tags  box enter  Hot  and in the in the  Clicked - Remove Tags  box, enter  Warm .  What this means is that if someone opens the email, you want to tag them as Warm and if they click on a link you want to tag them as Hot. 

• Link
• Button
• Image
• Icon
• Navbar Link

Think about how using the Who tags in combination with the Magic tags affords the ability to build pretty sophisticated target, trickle, drip and branching email campaigns.

What

See below for more information about using the RZ Designer.

Wow

Wow is a pretty straight forward summary chart of the Blast's performance over time. For more information on interacting with the wow chart, see the Dashboard page's Help.

Wow shows you the actual, raw count of events per day. It doesn't attempt to do anything fancy like rolling up unique opens or clicks. We think it best to show you the numbers regardless of who or how much.

You can achieve the fancy stuff by making use of the magic tags and Tag+/- features. For example, let us say you used magic tags for Open and Click. As recipients open the email and click links, their Contact record will be tagged accordingly. If you want to know how many distinct recipients opened the email, you can do a search for the tag in Contacts.

Deeper into RZ Designer

Let us take a deeper look at some of RZ Designer's features...

At first glance the RZ Designer (designer) may appear to be too technical. In all reality it is technical but only if you need it to be. Let us explain it like this. Imagine going to the store and buying a Lego set with lots of parts. What do you do with it? You build things with the lego parts right? The RZ Designer is like a Lego set, there are all kinds of parts you can use to build things. But now imagine that you could go to the store and buy a Lego set already assembled. That is the notion of the RZ Gallery, a store of Lego sets  "no assembly required" and they are all free.                     

So, if you start out by picking one of the pre-made templates from the gallery, then designer is quite simple. The vast majority of gallery templates are designed to automagically morph into your brand i.e. colors, logo, etc. All you may want to do is make a few little tweeks. On the other hand, if you want to design your own email from scratch, then you are afforded all the parts needed to do so.

Intelligent  Blok  - it is worth mentioning that some parts, called intelligent bloks, have special powers. These bloks include...

• Listing
• Agent
• Company

Think of intelligent bloks like wrappers. Everything inside the blok is considered to belong to the respective thing i.e. a Listing, the Agent, or the Company. These bloks may have special properties that will appear in the right sidebar.

The Listing blok has another special power. It can be one or more listings meaning it can repeat in the case of multiple listings. When you drag a listing blok from the right sidebar and drop it on the canvas, a popup will appear where you can pick one or more of your Listings. You can change the listing selection at any time by selecting the Listing blok and then clicking on the (house/building) icon.

Under the hood

HTML emails must follow some pretty strict guidelines for structure and content. Still today, so many emails clients lack support for certain HTML features, making it difficult to compose a email that will look good in all email clients and especially on mobile devices. Here comes RZ Designer to the rescue by taking care of the complex technical stuff for you. RZ Designer lets you build an email in a simple drag-n-drop and wysiwyg manner. Under the hood, the designer is composing a specialized language for emails called MJML which is then transformed into HTML for the final email. MJML does the heavy lifting while keeping to all the best practices for HTML emails. Visit  mjml.io  for more information about MJML.

All you really need to know is that by employing MJML as the heavy lifter, the RZ Designer affords you the ability build not only visually stunning emails but highly technically correct emails, all of which greatly improves the impression and results of your emails.

There is so much power in the RZ Designer and we can't describe it all here but we do have two resources where you can learn about the RZ Designer...

• Dashboard - Designs . This same RZ Designer is behind many things in RealtyZapp i.e. Blasts, Flyers, Web Pages, all of which are created in Designs. Check out the Designs' help for more information about RZ Designer.
• talk.realtyzapp.com  where you will find many great resources.

What makes a good email?

HTML emails are intended to look fabulous but you have to stick to some best practices else your email will look like garbage to your recipients. We have incorporated the best practices into all of the ready made templates, blocks, components, etc. in hopes of not only making ease of your work but also producing a quality result. Here are some of those best practices... 

• Clean and simple HTML and styling that is highly compatible with a vast majority of email programs.
• No attachments - it is not cool to Blast attachments. It is better to provide links to resources that can be opened or downloaded.
• No embedded images - all images are links to files hosted on the RealtyZapp servers. This really helps your email not end up in the Junk folder. So please take full advantage of designer's image gallery.
• RealtyZapp automatically appends Unsubscribe links to all emails for your convenience. That's a polite way of saying we enforce it. This is truly for everyone's benefit.
• Send the right message to the right people. RealtyZapp gives you the tools to compose targeted messages and send those messages to the right people.
• Last but not least, practice the KISS principle (Keep It Super Simple). It has been proven that a simple email is as effective, if not more, than over the top fancy, verbose emails. The RealtyZapp templates are designed to be visually appealing yet simple and clear in their message. 

Tips and Tricks

Here some pointers to help make your email blasts top notch...

• Legacy blast email templates - The new RZ Designer was introduced in 4th quarter 2019. Blast templates created prior the RZ Designer can still be executed just fine but editing is very limited. It it strongly suggested that you build any/all new blasts using the new RZ Designer. Should you decide to open up a legacy blast template in the new RZ Designer, you will only be able to make very, very basic tweeks.
• Copy/Paste - It is tempting to work up some good looking verbiage in another program e.g. MS Word and then just copy/paste it into your blast. Don't do this. This typically pollutes your content with invisible HTML stuff that can mess up your blast. It might look good but it will probably not look so good in the actual email.
• More work space - If you need more workspace while in the designer, you can full screen the web browser window and the designer will enlarge accordingly.
• Email width - While the design allows you enlarge the width of the email to between 600px and 800px, it is not recommended to go wider than 600px. Should you decide to go wider, the email width can be adjusted by clicking on the designer's settings button. Then use the slider to increase/decrease the width.
• Mobile 1st - Most emails are viewed on a mobile device e.g. smart phone. Therefore, when designing emails, mobile viewing should be the first consideration. Make sure you check how the email will look on a mobile device by using the designer's device buttons. There are three such buttons, one for Desktop, one for Tablet and one for mobile.
• Templates - As mentioned above, the RZ Gallery has many pre-made templates ready for you to use. However, you will no doubt want to make some tweaks of your own or maybe even create your own templates. One approach is to just duplicate one of your Blasts and customize it as needed. BUt another option is to build all of your blast templates in Dashboard - Designs, then those templates will always be available for you choose when building a new blast.
• Import/Export - The RZ Designer has both import and export capabilities. When designing a blast (email), the import feature cannot be used to import code from other email designers. That is unless the code is MJML. When exporting, you can choose to export either HTML, MJML, or JSON code. The JSON code is intended that you will import it back into RZ Designer e.g. another design. The MJML code is intended to do the same but you could use it anywhere that supports MJML. The HTML code is intended to be used outside of RealtyZapp and will be compatible with most email services. Keep in mind that most RZ Designer designs are chock full of data merge tokens and these tokens are present in the exported code. When exporting HTML, you do have the option to merge all the data into the output.