Overview

We recognize that marketers have a huge role, working with most (if not all) areas of your messaging 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.

Below are some links to articles to help get you going in Cordial. You can also check out our Welcome to Cordial article for a platform overview. We've included a list of external resources 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, you need to import contacts into your account. We offer powerful no-code solutions for importing any number of contacts.

• Learn how to import contacts here.

List hygiene

We recommend that you do some list hygiene before importing contacts. Sending messages to bad addresses, for example, can affect your reputation or get you caught in spam traps. Visit the following deliverability articles for our recommended best practices.

• Learn about 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 that information using audience rules. The Audience Builder is a powerful tool for creating, saving, and recalling audiences you can use when sending messages and filtering reports.

• Learn more about segmentation and the Audience Builder.

Build and send messages

Once you have contacts 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 communications, and they're either sent immediately or scheduled for a future date. Visit 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 articles to learn more about automated messages.

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

Sculpt editor

When creating message content to use in 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 message layouts using intuitive controls.

In order to use the Sculpt editor to create messages, you need to have at least one Sculpt template and some associated Sculpt blocks built in your account. Once these templates and blocks are created, you can use the Sculpt editor to craft messages.

• Learn more about the Sculpt editor.

Podium orchestrations

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 it easy to set up welcome, abandon, and re-engagement campaigns.

• 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 any desired data and render it using conditional logic, all within a single message.

When each 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.

For marketers, 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 start sending messages, you can build analytics reports to evaluate 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

Here to help

Our support team is always here to help. 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.
• 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.