Overview

As the marketer, you have your hands full, working with most (if not all) areas of the platform. You're responsible for getting contacts and associated data into the system, creating and sending batch and automated messages, and building reports and analytics. Your role most likely crosses over into the designer and developer roles as well—so it's good to become acquainted with their responsibilities, too.

Below are some links to helpful articles to get you up to speed. You can also check out our Cordial basics article for an overview of all things Cordial. We've included a list of external links at the bottom of this page for additional guidance.

Available data

While it's probably not necessary for you to know all the API calls and JavaScript methods, it's a good idea to know what data is available to you. This knowledge will facilitate interactions with your developer and ensure that all of your visitor data is passed to your Cordial account.

Cordial can store data about contacts, products, orders, and supplements. The more data you have, the better you can segment and personalize your messages.

Import contacts

Before you can send messages to contacts, you'll need to get them in your account. You can either import them one by one (might take a while) or import a CSV of all of them.

Learn how to import contacts here.

List hygiene

Before importing contacts for the first time, it's always a good idea to do some list hygiene. Sending to bad addresses can affect your reputation or get you caught in SPAM traps. Check out the following deliverability articles for more information.

• Data validation vendors and tips
• Learn about SPAM traps

Search and segment your data

Once data is flowing into your account, you can search and segment it using audience rules. The audience builder is a feature that you'll see throughout the platform when creating, saving, and recalling audiences for use in sending messages and filtering reports.

• Learn more about segmentation and the Audience Builder.

Build and send messages

Once your contacts are in your account, you can start sending messages. There are two main message types: batch messages and automated messages.

Batch messages

Batch messages are used for one-time sends—either immediately or scheduled for a future date. Check out the following articles to learn more about batch messages.

• Batch message overview
• Build an audience
• Schedule and throttle a batch message
• Batch message performance

Automated messages

Automated messages are used for triggered message sends. They can be triggered by an event, an API call, or a recurring schedule. Check out the following links to learn more about automated messages.

• Automated message overview
• Content versioning
• Sending methods
• Automated message performance

Create messages using the Sculpt editor

When creating message content for both batch and automated messages, you can use either the HTML editor and work with the raw HTML code—or you can use Sculpt, a no-code editor that allows you to drag content blocks into templates and edit using intuitive form controls.

In order to use the Sculpt editor for message creation, you must have at least one Sculpt template and some associated Sculpt blocks present in your account. Once these templates and blocks are created by either you or your designer, you can select the Sculpt editor as an option during message creation.

Learn more about creating Sculpt templates and Sculpt blocks in your account.

Use Podium to orchestrate campaigns

Podium orchestrations provide an easy way to create, visualize, and monitor cross-channel triggered campaigns for each customer touch point. You can launch multiple automations using a single trigger, making welcome, abandon, and re-engagement campaigns a breeze to set up.

• Learn more about creating Podium orchestrations here.

Personalization

Personalization is a powerful tool within Cordial. It's often used for simple tasks such as rendering a name or an address, but using Cordial's template syntax (Smarty), you can access all of your data and render it using conditional logic—all within a message.

When a message is sent, Cordial processes the code and uniquely personalizes content for each contact. This makes it possible to display content in different languages, products recently purchased or browsed, items currently in a cart, or even external content such as blog articles or Instagram feeds.

As the marketer, it's good to know the basics of variable replacement, link functions, and conditional logic—and leave the heavy lifting to your designer or developer.

The following articles will get you started with personalization using Smarty.

• Smarty primer
• Variables overview
• Link functions
• Conditional logic

Reporting and analytics

After you get some messages out the door, you can build analytics reports to check their performance. You can view and build custom dashboards filled with charts, track audience populations over time, or download message performance reports. Visit the following articles to learn more.

• Event Dashboards
• Audience Trends
• Message reports

You should have a good start on using the Cordial platform after reading the recommended articles above. Our support team is always here to help, so if you get stuck, feel free to reach out by submitting a ticket or sending an email to support@cordial.com.

Helpful resources

The following resources can be useful when creating and testing your messages.

• Email boilerplate: The folks at Litmus have put together several responsive email templates to get you started building email code.
• CSS inliner tool: To make sure your HTML and CSS are email friendly, use this CSS inliner tool from Zurb.
• Character converter: If you use special characters in your messages, they may need to be converted to their respective HTML entities. This HTML Character Converter will do it for you.
• Rendering tests: Both Litmus and Email on Acid provide great tools to test email rendering.
• Smarty documentation: smarty.net/docs/en is the official guide for Smarty. Keep in mind that not all functions and modifiers are supported in Cordial.  Check out our full list of supported functions and modifiers here.
• JSON validator: JSONLint is an awesome tool for checking your JSON for errors when making API calls. (Sometimes it's something as small as one comma causing the problem.)
• HTML, JS, and JSON beautifier: jsbeautifier.org will beautify your code and make it easier to read.