New Email Campaigns Experience: Pros and Cons?

Megan McMahon

My team has been asking about switching over to the new email experience for a few weeks now and I'm weighing the pros and cons of “officially” making this switch for my org. I've reviewed alot of Blackbaud's documentation (in particular the Comparison Chart - which is quite helpful) but I would love some insight from the community here since you're the everyday users!

Have you been using the new email campaigns experience? What are the pros/cons in your org?

An important note: my organization leans heavily on custom HTML and CSS coding (in fact, my team does not use the WYSIWYG at all). This is where my main concern is with switching to the new experience… I'm particularly interested in hearing if this concern is warranted.

Thanks y'all!?

Elizabeth Favre

@Megan McMahon

Good morning!
I am a tech writer on Luminate Online so I don't have the same insight as everyday users. Still I'd like to share a few tidbits.

Pro: The new experience includes syntax highlighting in the HTML editor. I doubt that many people actually write their code in the email HTML editor. Most probably copy and paste from a robust IDE. But this can help you identify missing tags or other common errors.

Pro: The workflow is so much nicer. It looks nicer. It is more intuitive. There are no hidden menus to find. It is just a straight forward path that will make it much easier to get new hires and volunteers onboarded and functional. Given the high rate of turn-over in the non-profit sector, this can be significant.

Cons: The new experience does not support A/B testing or recurring emails. Those can be created with the new experience but must be sent via legacy. Converting your emails created in the new experience to the legacy file format rarely can alter the formatting. I think that is only true if the email was created with the WYSIWYG builder though.

Of course there is so much more to the comparison but I hope this helps. I'd recommend checking out the Show me sections in the following pages.
HTML editor
Create campaign
emojis
Personalization
Conditionals
S-tags

Have a great day!