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 versions
There are two versions of Message Designer:
- Mailing Designer (MD1)
- Message Designer (MD2)
NOTE: Message Designer (MD2) is newer and more streamlined, and is the default designer that is part of all new Thrive Marketing Professional accounts.
Refer to the section below appropriate for the designer your organization uses. Included are links to additional articles to learn more.
Learn about MD1
The MD1 interface is shown below.
- Refer to the Mailing Designer 1 section of our knowledge base to learn about creating and managing mailings with MD1.
Learn about MD2
The MD2 interface is shown below.
- Refer to Messages section of our knowledge base to learn about creating and managing mailings with MD2.
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