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Heading • Text • Images • Button • Divider • HTML • Menu • Social • Timer • Video • Unsubscribe and Preferences
Heading
Headings in Activity Stream are large-format text blocks that normally denote the beginning of a section or a title of importance. Once you’ve dragged the heading block into your campaign, you can click on the text “Heading” to edit it.
Clicking on the block will move your cursor into the block, allowing you to edit the text right inside the campaign.
From here, you can type and edit your content. Additionally, you can select individual characters and words, and adjust their formatting using the box that appears below your text:
Remember that these formatting options will only apply to the text that you select. If you want to format all of the text in the box, read on to learn about the Content Menu
Content Menu
As with all content blocks, clicking on your content in the campaign will also open the left-hand Content menu, where you’ll see all of the different options for editing the block.
You can delete or copy the selected block, as well as close the content menu using the icons in the upper right-hand corner. Additionally, you can use the “Desktop” and “Mobile” buttons to toggle the editor between desktop and mobile view:
Note that not all editing options are available in the mobile editor view
The TEXT section allows you to make adjustments to all of the text in the box, as opposed to the pop-up editor which will adjust selected text:
The last three sections (LINKS, GENERAL, and RESPONSIVE DESIGN) allow you to make more detailed changes to the way that text appears.
In the LINKS section, you can choose to have links styled in a different fashion than the standard body formatting (which can be set in the main “Body” menu.
GENERAL will allow you to adjust the padding around your text. By default, you can adjust all sides to be the same size. If you want to edit each side independently, just toggle on “More Options”.
RESPONSIVE DESIGN contains the “Hide on Desktop/Mobile” toggle, depending on which view you’re editing in. If you’d like a content block to only be visible on one type of device, toggle this on/off!
Text
Text blocks in Activity Stream are very similar to Heading blocks, though they’re more customizable in formatting (and generally don’t denote the titles or beginnings of sections).
The major differences inside the editor between Heading blocks and Text blocks can be found in the pop-up styling editor when you click on your text block.
The items circled above should look pretty familiar - they’re the same editing options from the Heading section. But, you’ll also see that we have many more editing options, as text is more flexible than headings!
Fonts & Sizing
With over 50 fonts included, there’s no reason your text can’t look great. All of the fonts included in Activity Stream are designed to be properly rendered on most major email clients, so you shouldn’t run into the issues you may have with custom fonts where certain devices or platforms will revert to Arial or Times.
Please note that in order to maintain this high standard of quality, we are unable to upload custom fonts.
Paragraphs
Adjust your alignment and add bulleted or numbered lists
Text & Highlight Coloring
Set your text or highlight colors.
What’s up with Smart Text?
Smart Text is one of several AI features included in the Activity Stream email builder. Any block that has some sort of AI component is denoted with the icon that you’ve seen on the “Heading” and “Text” content block icons (as well as “Image” and “Button”). To learn more about the AI capabilities included with Activity Stream, head over to our in depth AI guide.
Images
Images can be shared in your Activity Stream emails from a number of different sources. After dragging in an image block, click on it to open the Content Menu on the left:
If you have the image you want to use, you can either click “Upload Image” or drag and drop an image right in to upload it to your Activity Stream editor. Additionally, if the image is hosted elsewhere (like on your website), you can just copy-and-paste the URL right into the “Image URL” box and it’ll pop right into your campaign.
If you’re trying to find the perfect image to use, you can click on “More Images” and browse through a massive Creative Commons library of images powered by Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay. Feel free to use any images here without worrying about licensing or copyright issues!
And lastly, you can use our Magic Image generator to let AI do the work for you! Read more about how Activity Stream uses AI in our email builder.
To adjust the size of your image, untoggle the “Auto Width” toggle - this will display a slider that lets you determine exactly how wide your image is, without distorting its proportions.
And to adjust the alignment of your image, just use the “Align” buttons right below:
Lastly, Alternate Text allows your email campaigns to be more easily accessible by anyone using a screen reader or other similar program. It’s important to fill in Alternate Text for all of your images to that everyone who receives your emails gets as much information as possible!
Once you’ve got your image all set, there are a few more things you can do in your Content menu. The GENERAL and RESPONSIVE DESIGN sections should look pretty familiar from before, but now you can also use the ACTION section to link your image out to something. Remember, that all links are tracked inside the Activity Stream email builder, so there’s no need to UTM tag them (though you can feel free to if that’s your process!)
Button
Buttons are a great, visible Call-to-Action (CTA) for your email campaigns. All customers have seen a button on the internet, so it’s a clear indicator for them to “click here”. Activity Stream’s Email Builder makes buttons easy to set up and customize!
Once you’ve dragged your Button content block into the location you want in your campaign, click on it to open the Content menu. First up, you’ll see your ACTION and OPTIONS menus.
What would button be if it didn’t link anywhere? Just like with images, the ACTION menu is where you choose where to link your button to. Just enter the target URL, specify a target type (New or Same Tab) and you’re all set.
You can also use the ACTION menu to select whether this link will open a website, send an email, or call a phone number. Just use the Open Website dropdown in the upper right-hand corner.
The BUTTON OPTIONS menu lets you manage the designed elements inside the button. Most of these will look pretty familiar from the Text content block earlier, with the main difference bing the “Text Color” and “Background Color” options up top.
The SPACING menu allows you adjust the Line Height (how tall your button is), Padding (how much space is between the button text and the edge of the button), Border (a second-color border around your button), and the Rounded Border (how round vs. squared the corners/edges of your button are.
Divider
Dividers add vertical space between sections of your emails. They can be solid, dotted, or dashed lines of any width, thickness, and color, and they can be left-, center-, or right-aligned. Additionally, their width can be set to ‘0’ if you’re just looking to create some space.
HTML
The HTML content block allows you to add custom HTML right into the body of your email. When you click on the block you drop in, an HTML editor will open up in your Content menu.
Menu
A Menu in Activity Stream is simply a collection of links that are all displayed together in one block. They’re easy to add, edit, and remove, and have some helpful display options.
To add a new link to your menu, click “Add New Item” in the MENU ITEMS section of the Content Menu. A menu item block will appear in the Content Menu for you to enter some info.
Text: This is the text that will be displayed in your menu
URL: This is where the menu link will send to
Target: This is how the link will open (in a new tab or the same tab)
As you fill these in, they’ll populate right into your campaign in real time:
You’ll find a lot of the standard styling items in the STYLES menu, along with a few that are specific to menus:
Text Color: This is the color of menu items without a link
Link Color: This is the color of menus items with a link
Layout: This will determine whether or not your menu displays horizontally or vertically (see below)
Separator: This is where you can indicate a character (such as ‘/‘ ‘|’ or ‘•’, for example) to appear between menu items (see below). Note that separators are only visible when the menu is in a Horizontal layout.
Social
Gone are the days of searching the internet for “small Facebook logo black and white rounded corners”! Activity Stream’s email builder includes a whole host of social icons in various styles right in the campaign builder. Just drag and drop the Social block into your campaign to get stated.
When you drop the block in, you’ll see greyed out icons for Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These are just placeholders, so be sure to click on the block to open up the content menu.
The Icon Type dropdown will let you select between 7 different icon styles.
Once you’ve selected the style you want, just click on the icons to add them into your Social Content Block. As you add icons to your campaign, a new menu item will appear called “Social Links”. This is where you’ll need to complete the URL for the given social channel with your handle.
Timer
What better way to build excitement and suspense than by adding a timer! This is great to use when counting down days to an on-sale or a big announcement! Just drag the timer block into your campaign and it’ll start counting down right away. By default, the time counts down to one week from today, but you can easily adjust this from the content menu:
From here, you can set the End Time (the time your countdown is aiming towards), as well as the timezone and language. The Labels toggle turns on/off the “Days”, “Hours”, “Minutes” and “Seconds” labels on your timer. The Color and Font items allow you to adjust the color and font of the given components.
The IMAGE and ACTION menus gives you access to the same settings you have for images, except applied to your Countdown Timer. These include width, alignment, alt text, and links.
An important note on countdown timers: When a campaign with a countdown timer is duplicated, we’ve seen some issues with the countdown timer component staying stuck at 00:00:00:00. To avoid this, be sure to delete and re-add countdown timers whenever you’re duplicating a old campaign.
Video
The Video content block allows you to embed a link to a YouTube or Vimeo video right into your email campaign. Just paste the URL into the Video URL item in the Content Menu, select some display options, and you’re set to go!
Unsubscribe and Preferences
We all get too many emails, and sometimes folks will want to unsubscribe - it happens! To make sure people have that option, be sure to include Unsubscribe and Preferences content blocks to your email. These are very simple text links that all recipients to either manage their email preferences (through your Preference Center) or unsubscribe completely. You can adjust the text of these from the Link Text Item in the Content Menu
You Made It!
Now you know everything there is to know about the Content Blocks available to you inside of Activity Stream’s Email Builder. We always love seeing clever ways that our clients use these blocks, so please feel free to share your campaign content with us.
And as always, if you have any questions or want to talk through some ideas, be sure to drop us a line at support@activitystream.com - we’re here to help!