Add JSON to head tag of email?

Eric Jonas 3 · December 2018

Gmail announced that as part of an update to their promotions tab, high-ranking promotional emails will be given a kind of enhanced preview, including a brand logo, an image, information on how much longer a promotion lasts, etc. According to Gmail's documentation (https://developers.google.com/gmail/promotab/overview), in order to feed Gmail the information it needs to populate these enhanced preview fields, you need to insert a bit of JSON-LD inside a script tag within the head tag of your email (they provide a template for this).

My question: how do I add a script tag to the head tag of an email in LO? I am pretty sure that when editing an individual email, you can only edit the HTML within the body tag of that email. Within the stationary editor, you can add CSS in the styles tab, but I don't see any place where I can insert a script tag.

Is there any way to access/manipulate the contents of the head tag in in LO email beyond adding CSS to a stationary? It would be ideal to have a method that would allow users to easily edit the contents on a per-message basis, since you would probably want to alter the contents of the JSON for the promotions tab to fit each individual message.

Thanks, all.

Daryl Bunker · December 2018

You can modify the HTML of an email stationery, it should appear as the 3rd step right after your CSS tab. The way we do our stationery, the html starts out with the <head> which contains mostly css and then ends and goes into the <body>. I haven't tried adding JSON into this portion but that's where it would go. If that works, then you could probably modify the JSON for specific emails by using the S63 and U0 tags.

Eric Jonas 3 · December 2018

Thank you, Daryl. I will try this out.

Jeremy Reynolds · December 2018

Let us know if it works for ya, Eric! I've been thinking about implementing JSON, but haven't really had the time to futz with it yet. I'm interested in anything you find out and could pass along.

Eric Jonas 3 · December 2018

Wil do, Jeremy. With year-end upon us, I don’t
really have time to try this out just yet, but I will give it a
shot ASAP. The difficult thing will be getting an example of it
live, since it appears that Gmail will only display the images/text
listed in the header JSON for certain emails that it selects.

Eric Jonas 3 · January 2019

I have finally carved out the time to work on this a bit. I think I have figured out how to correctly add the relevant JSON according to the template Gmail provides to make the enhanced promotions preview pane display the way I want it to.

However, it still doesn't seem that I can edit the head tag of emails in Luminate. The HTML content you put in on the third tab in the stationary tool goes into the body tag. When I view the source of emails I send, it looks like Luminate opens and closes the head tag:

<html><head>

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

<title>ORGANIZATION NAME</title>

</head>

<body>

<style type="text/css">

*** CSS FROM SECOND TAB GOES HERE ***

*** HTML CONTENT FROM EMAIL TOOL GOES HERE ***

Anything I add on that third tab is added to the body. Likewise anything I add in the email tool.

In case it ever becomes relevant (thankfully in this case it is not), is there any way to add content to the head tag of an email in Luminate? It doesn't look like the method suggested above allows me to do this.

Thanks,

Eric

Jeremy Reynolds · January 2019

I think there's a way to have support do it, but it's probably custom/paid services. But you're saying it's working even when the JSON is in the body instead of the head?

Eric Jonas 3 · January 2019

Thanks, Jeremy. Putting the JSON in the body seems to be working at least. One difficult thing about this new service from Gmail is that you can only see this enhanced preview in the promotions tab, and only on select messages at that. As a result, I can't actually get a live test. However, both Gmail and Email on Acid have tools you can use to input your email code and have it display what the enhanced preview pane is supposed to look like (with disclaimers that there is no guarantee that the preview will be entirely accurate). In both tools, I plopped the entire email code -- HTML, CSS, JSON, and all -- into the preview tool, and in both cases the tools were able to parse the JSON and render the preview pane the way I wanted them to, even with the JSON in the body.

For those who are interested, here are the preview tools:

https://developers.google.com/gmail/promotab/overview

https://www.emailonacid.com/resource/gmail-promotions-optimization/?utm_campaign=Engagement_2018&utm_source=hs_email&utm_medium=email&utm_content=68089934&_hsenc=p2ANqtz--J7VPGQ0fXaFx-HZoFBDyxtKAVcHXzTtuXfehP289QbDrG6wPeCshmoOav1WEb3RUV9bdMAoRlluh4zpyi7U3rbbLo2A&_hsmi=68090383

The Google page includes a template for the preview pane JSON.

Add JSON to head tag of email?

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