Online Express makes NXT almost worthless

Rob Kudyba:

Our organization feels bamboozled. OLX (the email marketing part) is so rudimentary with zero to no flexibility. No way to control your brand. Not even a way to edit the footer. All of the templates are so basic and look like they're from the 90's. You can't edit any HTML. You can't insert images hosted else where, i.e., outside of OLX. We were using NetCommunity Spark which has its own challeges and weak metrics reporting but if you move to NXT you will be disappointed with OLX, guaranteed and will want to use something like MailChimp, so caveat emptor.

Rob Kudyba:

Our organization feels bamboozled. OLX (the email marketing part) is so rudimentary with zero to no flexibility. No way to control your brand. Not even a way to edit the footer. All of the templates are so basic and look like they're from the 90's. You can't edit any HTML. You can't insert images hosted else where, i.e., outside of OLX. We were using NetCommunity Spark which has its own challeges and weak metrics reporting but if you move to NXT you will be disappointed with OLX, guaranteed and will want to use something like MailChimp, so caveat emptor.

Hi Amanda. We have rolled out this new email capability to nearly all RE NXT customers. I tried to look up your organization by just your name and if I've found the right one, your organization should have access to this new email capability. Feel free to message me directly if you don't see it in RE NXT under Marketing > Email.


That said, this new tool doesn't (yet) allow direct editing of the email HTML. We debated whether to delay shipping this first version of the new email capability but given the number of customers who prefer content authoring via drag and drop, we chose to ship it without HTML editing and will iterate to add that feature.


Would you be comfortable sharing any of the types of things you can't (or can't easily) do via drag and drop and that you prefer to do by editing the HTML directly? We would very much like to continue to expand the flexibility / usability of the drag and drop experience so that users never feel like they're required to be skilled with HTML to produce good-looking, mobile responsive emails across all modern devices and email clients, regardless of the desired visual email visual design.


Are the things you'd like to be able to do mostly limited to the things mentioned in this thread (line spacing, font selection, link metadata, and emojis)? Feel free to message me directly if you prefer.


Thanks!

Hi Amanda. When you're in RE NXT, if you don't see the Marketing menu item with Email as a sub-menu choice, you may need to reach out to whoever administers user permissions in RE NXT at Gilmour and ask that you be granted access to this new email capability. Your organization should have access and by default all of your RE NXT administrators should see the Marketing drop-down. Let me know if your or your admins are seeing something different.


Thanks!

We wrapped up early adopter testing in late spring and begin the rollout process to all customers around late summer / early fall.


On the RE NXT platform, we typically ship new features in much smaller and far more frequent iterations than you may have seen with other software applications...so you won't generally see "major upgrades" but instead you'll see a more continuous stream of iterative addition. The one exception that does feel more "major" is when we ship the first version of an all-new capability that hasn't existed before in RE NXT like email marketing. That's a pretty large feature set. But from this point forward, now that the first version of email is available to most RE NXT customers, email will be like the rest of RE NXT and will continue to see iterative value added, typically every few weeks.


By way of example, even though we've not quite completed rolling out email to the last few RE NXT customers, we have still been iterating. We recently shipped a few dozen all-new email templates that you can use as a starting point for new emails and we're working on the ability for you to save your own designs as templates in the template gallery as well.


There's much, much more to come.

Hi Sarah! Thanks for reaching out on the community. It looks like you are in the UK which means we haven't rolled email out there yet. We are wrapping up the last bit of work to ensure that Next Gen Email makes it easy for a client in the UK to remain GDPR compliant. Sorry for the delay on this one! Thanks for the patience! 

More to come, 

Michele Stender

Next Gen Product Manager

Hi Gloria Litwinowicz‍, 

We are working on the ability to choose specific email types per job and should be shipping in early 2019! Thanks for the valuable feedback! 

Michele Stender

Next Gen Product Manager

Kathleen,

While OLX doesn’t have plans to support category-based communication preferences, we’re hard at work on a solution in RENXT that will leverage the consent functionality that now exists in RE and will support category-based preferences. We're actually currently running discovery calls to vet our next generation of communication preference management functionality. If you'd be interested in participating in a discovery session, let me know what email address would be best, and I'll follow up with an invitation. Thanks, Kathleen!


Travis

Chris Martin:

Hi Amanda. We have rolled out this new email capability to nearly all RE NXT customers. I tried to look up your organization by just your name and if I've found the right one, your organization should have access to this new email capability. Feel free to message me directly if you don't see it in RE NXT under Marketing > Email.


That said, this new tool doesn't (yet) allow direct editing of the email HTML. We debated whether to delay shipping this first version of the new email capability but given the number of customers who prefer content authoring via drag and drop, we chose to ship it without HTML editing and will iterate to add that feature.


Would you be comfortable sharing any of the types of things you can't (or can't easily) do via drag and drop and that you prefer to do by editing the HTML directly? We would very much like to continue to expand the flexibility / usability of the drag and drop experience so that users never feel like they're required to be skilled with HTML to produce good-looking, mobile responsive emails across all modern devices and email clients, regardless of the desired visual email visual design.


Are the things you'd like to be able to do mostly limited to the things mentioned in this thread (line spacing, font selection, link metadata, and emojis)? Feel free to message me directly if you prefer.


Thanks!

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My database has multiple locations in it, all with unique tax IDs, addresses, etc.  The new email feature in RE NXT does not yet have a way for us to have multiple setups.  If you are in the same position, FYI.....

Thanks for the feedback Michael and Heather.

Michael Ragsdale‍ we're hard at work on making sure email data is viewable on the constituent record and also available for use in building constituent lists. Stay tuned...this is planned to ship in the first half of this year.

Heather MacKenzie‍ would love to hear more about the things you'd need in the new email tool for it to fit with your configuration of using one RE instance for multiple operating entities/locations. Would it be sufficient to be able to save different "profiles" for each location...for things like the footer info, default send-from name/email address, etc., that you could apply to each email job? Would you expect opt-outs received from an email sent on behalf of one location to not impact another location's authorization to still email the person who opted out? Anything else you're able to share would be super helpful. 


Thanks!

Chris Martin

Product Management Team Lead - Next Gen Marketing

Thanks Heather MacKenzie‍ we'll reach out next week and set up a time to chat.


- Chris

Couldn't agree more.  While NXT email is a fantastic product, it is definitely missing some important features that are available on Online  Express.  We are in the same boat and transitioned over to Email as soon as it was available and then discovered the shortfalls.  Hoping they roll out fixes soon!

I completely agree. It feels like they've had email marketing in their NXT roadmaps for so long that they felt like they had to release it half finished last year in order check it off their features list, and then update it later to have it at least equal to OLX, but hopefully superior.


Without the ability to track any information at all related to NXT emails on constituent records the feature is not able to be used by our organization. We instead continue to use OLX that while simple and easy to use, lacks many features we would like to have (html editing, etc..)


Not having NXT email marketing at least be on par with OLX will require us to train staff twice, once for OLX when they first start using it, and once for NXT when it becomes operational.