Email layouts and sending identity

Every email your emails and workflows send is wrapped in a layout, comes from a sending address, and has its links tracked. This page shows you how to design your layouts, how to send from your own address instead of Supporter Club's, and exactly what each email carries.

Both settings are on the same screen: select Settings in the admin sidebar, then the Email tab.

Email layouts

A layout is the frame around an email's content: for example the masthead, the footer, and the area the content sits in. Many emails share one layout.

The Layouts panel shows each of your organisation's layouts with a preview, its title and its description ("There is no description for this layout." if it has none).

Design a layout

1. Go to Settings, then Email.
2. On the Layouts panel, select Design on the layout. It opens in the email builder.
3. Change the layout. The builder works like the page builder: sections on the left, the email in the middle, and the selected item's settings on the right. See Pages.
4. Select Send test to email yourself a copy (see below).
5. Select Publish when you're happy. Publish appears only on a draft.
6. Select Close to leave.

If your organisation has more than one layout, use Switch layout at the top of the builder to move between them.

Under More:

• Mailer settings lets you change the layout's title and description. Select Save changes.
• Edit layout appears when you're editing an email's content rather than a layout. It opens the layout that email is wrapped in.

The same builder inside an email or workflow

Select Design in a Send an email step to open that email's content in the same builder. There, there is no Publish and no Mailer settings: the content goes live when you send the email or publish the workflow. See Emails and Workflows and their steps.

Send yourself a test

Send test emails the version you're looking at to your own address, using sample details where the email has merge tags. The screen says "Sending a test to" followed by your address. The subject starts with "[Test · Draft]" or "[Test · Published]", so you can tell which version you received. Inside a Send an email step, the test uses that step's subject and preview text.

If the test can't be sent, the builder says "The test to" followed by your address and "could not be sent." You can send up to 10 tests a minute; after that you see "You're sending tests too quickly. Please wait a moment and try again."

Sending identity

By default, emails come from Supporter Club's own address. The Identity panel says: "You are using Supporter Club's identity when sending email, which means recipients will receive email from the supporter.club domain. To send email from your own domain, you can use your own Amazon Web Services SES identity."

You can send from your own address instead, using your own Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) identity.

Before you start

Setting up the identity is a job for whoever runs your organisation's Amazon Web Services (AWS) account, not something you do in Supporter Club. Send them this section. They need to set up, in your AWS account:

• An SES identity in the Europe (Ireland) region (eu-west-1). Supporter Club sends through SES in that region only.
• An identity that covers your organisation's email address, the Email in Settings, Account, Contact. Emails will come from exactly that address. The identity can be that address, or the domain it belongs to, and it must be verified in SES.
• A sending authorisation policy on that identity that lets Supporter Club's AWS account send email with it. Supporter Club sends through SES's SMTP interface and names your identity as both the source and the "From" identity of each email, so the policy must allow the SendRawEmail action for Supporter Club's account.
• The identity's ARN (its Amazon Resource Name, which starts "arn:aws:ses:eu-west-1:"). You enter this in Supporter Club below.

The admin doesn't show Supporter Club's AWS account ID, which the policy has to name. To get it, contact Supporter Club through the person or email address you dealt with when your organisation's account was set up. There is no support form in the admin.

Check your representative's name too. When you use your own identity, emails show the representative's first and last name as the sender. You set it in Settings, Account, Representative. See Organisation settings.

Use your own identity

1. Go to Settings, then Email.
2. On the Identity panel, select Edit.
3. In ARN, enter your SES identity's ARN ("The AWS SES Identity ARN you want to use").
4. Select Save changes.

The panel then says "You have allowed Supporter Club to send email on your behalf as" your representative's name "with" your organisation's email address "using your own AWS Simple Email Service identity."

From then on, emails from your emails and workflows are sent from your organisation's email address, with your representative's first and last name as the sender name.

Only emails sent by your emails and workflows use your identity. Sign-in emails, export emails and messages from your contact form still come from Supporter Club's own address.

If the identity or the grant is wrong

Supporter Club does not check the ARN or the grant when you save. As the panel warns: "Any misconfiguration will result in email delivery errors." The Identity panel shows the same "You have allowed Supporter Club to send email on your behalf…" note whether or not your identity is set up correctly, so it doesn't tell you the grant is missing.

What you see instead is on the runs. Open the email or workflow, select More, then View dashboard, and open a run under Runs. Its Send an email step says "We weren't able to send to" a number of recipients, followed by "The rest of your emails went out as expected." even when no email went out. The step and the run still show as complete, not as an error. See Runs and batches.

To check your setup, run Test email or Test workflow from More on an email or workflow: the test sends to your own address through your identity, and the run shows the same message if the send fails. Send test in the email builder is not a check: it comes from your organisation's address but isn't sent through your identity, so it may fail with "The test to … could not be sent." even when your identity is set up correctly.

Fixing the identity doesn't re-send emails that already failed. Retrying a run skips a Send an email step that has already completed, including one where every send failed, so those people never receive that email from that run. Only emails sent after the fix use the corrected identity. See Retry a failed run.

To go back to Supporter Club's identity, select Edit, clear ARN, and select Save changes.

What every email carries

Every email sent by an email or a workflow:

• Is wrapped in a layout. See Email layouts.
• Comes from your sending identity, as described above.
• Has its own subject and preview text, with merge tags filled in for each recipient. See Merge tags.
• Carries the attachments set on its step: uploaded files, assets, documents, and files generated by earlier steps.
• Has its links tracked. Each link goes first to a Supporter Club address that records the click, then redirects the reader to the address you entered. Clicks are what the Perform an engagement check step looks at. Opens are not tracked. Tests sent with Send test are not tracked.
• Loses any link whose web address contains "session", "token" or "key" (in lower case, anywhere in the address, even inside a longer word such as "keynote"). Supporter Club doesn't track these links, and removes the web address from them, so the text still shows but can't be selected. Check the addresses of your links before you send.
• Has no unsubscribe link unless you add one. No layout or built-in email includes one. See Opt-in and opt-out.

An email is not sent to a donor whose address can't receive email, for example after a permanent bounce. Emails from Emails are also not sent to a donor whose consent is Revoked; emails from Workflows are. See Contacts.