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Snippets Overview

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Chris
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Snippets allow you to easily re-use and manage plain text and HTML content across templates and mediums (email, SMS, push, and in-app). With snippets, you can create and insert headers, footers, and any content in between.

Benefits of using snippets:

  • Standardization of content that is repeated across templates
    • Example use cases include for headers, footers and call-to-action blocks
    • This eliminates the work involved in re-creating this content with each new template
  • Greater ease of updating content across templates
    • Any changes made to a snippet will automatically propagate to templates that reference that snippet (including those tied to live campaigns)

Table of contents

Creating snippets

To access the snippets management screen, navigate to Content > Snippets:

Snippets menu item

Here, you'll see a screen like this:

Click on a snippet to edit it, or create a new one by clicking Create New Snippet. Fill in a snippet name and brief description.

NOTE

Your snippet name must be alphanumeric, and may contain spaces, dashes, underscores.

Take note of the {{ snippet "_snippet name_" }} block. This is what you will insert into templates later on to render the content.

Next, enter (or copy and paste) your content into the Markup window.

WARNING

Avoid using HTML markup (use plain text instead) if intending to use a snippet with SMS, push, or in-app templates.

NOTE

The Markup window will appear like below if you have the WYSIWYG editor enabled in the Settings > Project Settings.

Regardless of the editor that you're using, you'll notice as you enter content that a live preview appears and that the Save button becomes selectable in the top-right. Clicking Save will create the snippet, allowing it to be referenced in templates using the aforementioned {{ snippet "snippet name" }} block.

Inserting snippets into templates

Now that you have a snippet, navigate to the template(s) you want to insert it into. This example works with an email template.

Find the Insert Snippet button above the email body editor.

Click this button to view the available snippets and to copy the {{ snippet "snippet name" }} block for insertion into the template.

You'll notice the Render HTML toggle, above. If your snippet contains HTML, wrap the insertion Handlebars in triple curly braces: {{{ snippet "snippet name" }}}. Failure to do so will result in the content being displayed as plain text.

Enter or paste the snippet Handlebars into the desired location in your template:

Notice that the Handlebars appear in the live preview. To see them in a rendered state, click Preview with Data or Preview on Devices.

Here you see the snippet rendered in Preview with data:

Editing snippets

Remember, if you make a change in a snippet, the change will propagate to all templates that reference the snippet (including those tied to live campaigns).

Let's say you want to add an additional graphic to your header snippet. To do this, you'd navigate to Content > Snippets, select the header snippet, insert the image and surrounding code, then Save.

To see the changes reflected in a template, open a template that references the snippet, then open Preview with Data or Preview on Devices.

NOTE

Whenever using Preview on devices, keep in mind that previews do not always reflect the most recent version of the template. Click Regenerate Previews to capture a fresh set of previews.

Special considerations

Email and in-app messages

If your snippet contains CSS styling, the typical rules apply in terms of the styling that takes precedence (between the snippet and the template). Being mindful of where the snippet falls in the greater template:

  1. Inline CSS (HTML style attribute) overrides CSS rules in a style tag.
  2. A more-specific selector takes precedence over a less-specific one.
  3. Rules that appear later in the code override earlier rules if both have the same specificity.
  4. A CSS rule with !important always takes precedence.

Make sure to close all HTML tags that you open (unless you're intentionally leaving a tag open).

SMS and push

Use only plain text for these message mediums, since HTML will not render like it would for email.

Using data feeds in snippets

To access a data feed from a snippet:

  • When creating the snippet, use double curly braces to reference data feed data. For example: {{fieldInDataFeed}}.
  • When editing the template that uses the snippet, open the Advanced Options tab. On this tab:
    • Turn on data feeds for the template by checking Enable Template Generation Using Data Feeds.
    • Check Merge the Data Feed and User Contexts.

Now, the snippet's data feed reference will resolve as expected.

Notes

  • You can insert CSS styles from your snippet into your templates
  • If you change the name of the snippet it will not be changed in your templates and the link will be broken.

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