Messages are the driving force of Higher Logic Thrive Marketing Professional (Thrive Marketing Professional). And Message Designer is the tool you'll use to create your Messages.

Before you start creating Messages, though, it is important that you make sure that Thrive Marketing Professional is optimized for use in your account. You can do this by considering two important initial steps: planning and coordinating.

Planning

While the process of creating, testing, and sending a mailing is easy, a little bit of planning goes a long way in your overall email marketing approach.

The amount of planning you need may vary from mailing to mailing (e.g., a small, daily update likely needs less planning than a quarterly newsletter with a variety of stories, authors, and reviewers). The takeaway here is to develop a planning process that ensures that everyone involved in the production process understands his or her role, the mailing timelines, and expected conversions or goals to attain.

Coordinating

If multiple people in your organization are sending mailings, you should ensure adequate coordination is built in to the process so that everyone understands the publication schedule. Many organizations use spreadsheets, SharePoint sites, and web-based project-management applications to facilitate this communication.

Thrive Marketing Professional includes tools like the tentative send date and the mailing calendar to help everyone stay organized and on track. Additionally, if you have multiple Thrive Marketing Professional accounts, you can use a rolled-up view of all your child accounts in the parent account.

Message Designer

Message Designer (MD2) is the streamlined designer in Thrive Marketing Professional accounts.

Below is an image of the MD2 interface.

• See the Messages section of our knowledge base to learn about creating and managing messages with MD2.

Watch the video