Note: This article only applies to Content Publishers, Community Admins, Brand Super Admins, or applicable custom roles. For more details on Creator Studio access, please refer to the Defining Roles and Permissions article.

All customers should test for email success as outlined here. Firstup emails are relevant to all communities, regardless of deployment and content strategy. Successful email delivery and rendering will help drive maximum adoption, engagement, and supportability. Here is a sample of the emails that are sent to both your Members and Creator Studio users:

• Campaigns
• Newsletters
• User submission notifications to Creator Studio users
• Invitations for Members
• Invitations to Creator Studio for new Creator Studio users
• Password resets for users that sign in via email
• Direct emails from Firstup staff including Support, Customer Success Managers, Strategic Advisors, and others

How to Test for Email Delivery & Rendering Success

This email delivery and rendering test can be completed at any time, all you need for this test is publishing access to Creator Studio and a technical contact at your company that can help review how the email is received.

The following instructions are intended to reveal a range of email issues that can impact both Creator Studio users and end-users. By conducting this test, you do not need to individually test every email the community might send to users.

1. Sign in to Creator Studio.
2. Navigate to the Configure page and then the Email alias tab and create a custom from address. Use your company's domain. For example, if your work email is joansmith@acme.com, create a custom from address such as marketing@acme.com 
3. Create an email campaign in Creator Studio that contains content, such as a newsletter. 
4. Change the sender of the campaign to the custom sender that you configured earlier.
5. Send the email campaign to a test user/s on the Review page. Test emails can be sent to any user, including Members.
   
   Note: A test email can be sent without saving the campaign. Take care to ensure your campaign is saved if you are happy with the appearance of the test campaign.
6. Confirm that the email is received and that all images render.
7. Confirm that clicking on a link in the email will open the correct content in the member experience.
• If testing iOS link behavior, access the email via Apple Mail or Safari.

Issue with Email Delivery

If the test emails are NOT received:

• Consider the following solutions:
  • Allowlist Emails from Firstup
  • Make Firstup a Trusted Sender

• This can happen if there is an issue with the Email Alias being used and not being able to send outbound emails for any reason. This can be verified by saving another Email Alias and resending.

• If you need to confirm that the email was sent by Firstup, please contact Support and let them know the following:
• the email of the test user
• which email was sent to them (a link to the campaign in Creator Studio is greatly appreciated)
• how did you trigger the email - did you activate the campaign or use "Test in email"?
• when was the email sent to your test user
• Once Firstup confirms that the test email was sent, further investigation will need to be completed by your internal technology team. We are not able to detect security interventions such as email quarantine, routing to a spam folder, etc. We are happy to confirm that our system sent any additional test emails and provide email header information to assist with tracking the emails.

Issue with Email Rendering

If the emails ARE received by your test user, but there is still an issue with the email:

• If you are using Outlook and have an image rendering issue, please review the following:
  • Allowlist Images in Email
• Outlook for Windows does not support round button corners. Round corners will render correctly in all other supported email clients.
• Attempting to download an attachment or watch a video in a test email will result in an error. The download and video playback will no longer result in an error once the campaign has been published.
• All Creator Studio campaign font sizes are in pixels, px (not points, pt).
• For additional troubleshooting, contact Firstup Support. Information to consider providing:
  • description of the issue behavior with a screenshot (if possible)
  • device information - what is the computer OS information, what email software are you using (including version), etc.
  • a copy of the issue email if possible (download or save as EML or MSG)
  • how did you trigger the email - did you schedule a smart campaign, did you activate an email campaign, did you use "create test email"?
  • a link to the campaign in Creator Studio

Issue with Email Forwarding

Forwarding an email causes the HTML code to be partially rewritten by the email program doing the forwarding, as well as adding a section on where the email originated from. Forwarding emails will commonly result in sporadic changes since forwarding an email causes its code to be partially rewritten by the email program doing the forwarding. This is unfortunately not something we can control since it’s being forced upon the emails by the forwarding email program(s).

We are unable to guarantee results when Campaigns are not sent from Studio and it is not supported to forward Campaign emails as the users receiving the communications should be targeted within the Campaign's Audience. We have found that the image issues when forwarding the email are due specifically to the way forwarding affects emails. Forwarding emails often change their format, so it's generally not recommended that Campaigns be forwarded as we cannot guarantee the results when campaigns are not sent directly from Studio.

To avoid this, please continue to send test emails directly to yourself through Studio to ensure the formatting is as intended. If you need to send the email to another individual, you can also send a test email directly in the system to anyone who has a profile in Studio, including members. 

Issue with Link Behavior

If you are experiencing an issue with how the link opens in the iOS mobile app, please refer to Why Don't Links Open in the iOS Mobile App?