If you're planning an event with your customers or prospects as guests, this article is for you.

Whatever the nature of the event (open house, webinar, seminar, exhibition, etc.), if you want them to take part, you're going to have to invite them.

You can do this by sending them a letter to their home address, announcing it on your networks, sending them an e-mail, etc.

We prefer e-mail for several reasons:

  • It's economical
  • It can be personalized
  • It's a channel taken seriously by users

Nevertheless, to increase the rate of positive responses to your invitations, it's important to personalize your message.

In this tutorial, we'll help you send an invitation with a personalized JPEG image from ActivCampaign..

Step 1: Create an Abyssale template

Before sending anything to your guests, you need to create the template that will host your invitation.

To do this, go to your Abyssale dashboard and create a new template.

To illustrate what we mean, let's give you an example. Let's imagine we're a car dealership holding an open house.

We invite our customers by e-mail and send them a personalized image. To do this, we create a template on Abyssale in 580x400 - Netboard format.

Here's what our template looks like:

Please note that all the elements in this image are fixed, except for the guest's name. We therefore take care to name this element "firstname" in the settings section of the builder's right-hand column.

Create your template too. Take care to name text elements that are to be customized. This can include name, gender, city, etc.

Depending on usage, customize the text elements you want to appear.

Once your template is ready, click on "Save & Continue".

You'll be redirected to a new pane. Here you can choose the method you'd like to use to generate your image. Click on "Create new dynamic image".

Select "base url" and your image format. Then continue. You will be redirected to this page:

Click on "Build URL".

In the content customization column, select the elements you wish to customize. In our example, we'll activate the "firstname" element of the template we've just created.

Be sure to enable payload for this element.

Once this is done, at the top of the page, the url in the black box has changed. Copy it and keep it on a notepad.

Here's what ours looks like : https://img.abyssale.com/1daf6539-ec8b-465f-b986-13d8173e2a58?firstname=Firstname%2C

Step 2: Prepare to send your invitation from Activ Campaign

Go to Activ Campaign and log in to your account or create a new one if you haven't already done so.

Enter a list of contacts you'd like to invite to your event.

Once your contact list is ready, go to the campaign tab and create a new campaign.

Select an e-mail template if that helps, or start from scratch.

You'll need to choose a subject line right from the start. Make sure it arouses the curiosity of your senders For our example, we'll opt for "We invite you to test our new SUV".

You'll then be redirected to your e-mail builder. Build it as you wish. When you insert your image, add an HTML block.

Then, in this block's code editor, delete all lines before adding a new image tag..

Between these two tags, paste the url link you saved earlier in your notepad.

As a reminder, here's ours: https://img.abyssale.com/1daf6539-ec8b-465f-b986-13d8173e2a58?firstname=Firstname%2C

The image is still not personalized. You'll need to introduce the Activ Campaign-specific tag elements into your url.

Locate each variable linked to each element on your url and modify them with the corresponding Activ Campaign tag.

In our example, our url contains fristname=Firstname%2C.

If we break down this part of the url, here's what it looks like:

  • firstname= corresponds to the element to be modified. We therefore leave it untouched.
  • %2C corresponds to the comma that appears in our template after the first name. It remains intact.
  • Firstname corresponds to the person's first name. We'll replace it with Activ Campaign's %FIRSTNAME% tag.

Here's what our new url looks like: https://img.abyssale.com/1daf6539-ec8b-465f-b986-13d8173e2a58?firstname=%FIRSTNAME%%2C

And here's what the Activ Campaign code editor should look like:

When customizing your url, make sure you enter the ActivCampaign-specific tag. If you make a character error, the personalization won't work.

Step 3: Send your invitation

Your e-mail is ready to be sent.

Before launching the invitation, remember to test that everything's working properly. Send a test e-mail to your own e-mail address.

If everything seems to be working well, and every element is customized to your image, you can send the e-mail to your entire guest list..

For our example, this is how the e-mail received by our contact list looks:

Now you're ready to send a personalized e-mail invitation to all your guests. The JPEG image will display each of the personalization elements you've set, giving your guests even more reasons to join your event.

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