How to create an email template to help your social media followers flood politicians with messages about the protests
- Nick Wolny is a writer and messaging strategist for entrepreneurs.
- Right now, millions of people are looking for ways to take action online — and that's something you can easily provide your followers.
- You can create a link that will automatically draft an email template for your followers to send, helping them send out emails to public officials and to other relevant causes.
- Here's how to create that template.
In our current social landscape, one-click activism is red-hot. Millions of consumers are now actively sharing and retweeting resources, influencer commentary, and ways to contact local politicians and public servants.
Urging your followers to take action is important. But why not go a step further and create a plug-and-play experience? Good content marketing solves problems; when you take away the friction and and help consumers act on something they care about, you'll win their allegiance and help forward an important cause.
Many entrepreneurs now interface with their audiences entirely online. That's why activism efforts in your email and social media marketing should consider incorporating a snippet of HTML called "mailto" that will automatically upload a recipient email address, subject line, and prewritten email template with a single click.
Create a link that automatically drafts an email template
We'll go through the elements of the mailto HTML below; If you know you're completely allergic to code, RapidTables.com has a user-friendly mailto code generator here. You just want the hyperlink for use in email and social campaigns, so take the finished generator code, highlight just the section that is in quotation marks, and you'll be good to go.
The mailto HTML will activate a user's default email client, which will vary depending on the device being used and user settings, and we can create parameters for the recipient email address, carbon copy and blind carbon copy recipients, a subject line, and the body text.
Let's start with just a URL that populates the recipient's email address into a draft email for our user. Your hyperlink URL will look like this: mailto:name@website.com. See that link in action here.
After typing your recipient email address or addresses, you'll add a question mark as your first parameter delimiter; for all other sections, we'll be separating with an ampersand. To send to multiple email addresses in any section, separate with a comma and do not leave space between addresses. If you want to send a carbon copy or blind carbon copy, however, you need to indicate those parameters separately.
Let's show this to make it easy. Here's the same URL that was shared above, but addressed now to two recipients, two carbon copy recipients, and two blind carbon copy recipients:
The subject line and body text are where things start to look crazy if you're new to code, but it's more grunt work and you'll get the hang of it quickly. Use this cheat sheet to create spaces and formatting in your text:
- %20 represents the space character and needs to go between each word.
- %0D%0A will give you a line break (Keep in mind you'll need to put it in twice in a row to double-space).
- When using a comma in your text, your HTML will need to use %2C. A semicolon is represented by %3B, a colon is represented by %3A, and a quotation mark is %22.
Don't want to remember any of that? Me either! Here's a page that has the ASCII shortcodes for all the most common symbols for easy reference. Let's use the same code above addressed to six recipients, add the subject line "An Important Message," and add body text that reads "To Whom It May Concern:". Our URL now reads as:
See how this link looks in practice by clicking here. You now have everything you need to create a plug-and-play, one-click email template that will wow your audience.
If you became allergic to code after reading the section above, just bookmark the RapidTables.com generator page instead, and remember to copy only the section of the generated code that rests between the quotation marks.
With just a few quick clicks, you can empower your audience to leverage pre-written templates, send far more written correspondence to public officials, and help move the needle on important social issues that matter to you.
Nick Wolny is a writer and messaging strategist for entrepreneurs. He's given over 40 live TV interviews for NBC and FOX commenting on marketing and technology, writes articles for Business Insider, and Social Media Examiner, and has been featured with Reader's Digest, Mens' Health, VICE, the Houston Chronicle, and USA Today. LeadPages describes him as "a creative thinker whose marketing strategy converts big," and the Houston Business Journal declared him a top LGBTQ-owned business personality in 2019. Grab his free article template he uses to rapidly write articles at nickwolny.com/template.