Knowledge Base

Weather forecasts provide relevant and engaging content for your emails.

Typical uses include:

• Including a forecast for a customers forthcoming holiday in a pre-departure campaign
• Supporting retail and fashion emails with products tailored to the upcoming weather
• Previewing sports teams fixtures with the expected weather for the game
• Enhancing local news with weather forecasts

Weather forecasts can take many forms of location including postcodes/zipcodes, city names, longitude and latitude or simply lookup the customers location from the IP address they are reading the email with.

In this example we are going to create a simple forecast for the next 4 days for the customers home location.

How to create a weather forecast:

Create a New Image

Start from the main menu accessed from the top left of Reignite and select 'NEW IMAGE'.

When creating a new image select the ‘Weather’ data source:

Select whether you want to use our template, upload a background image to work from or start with an empty canvas

In this example we are creating an image using the template showing the next 5 days weather in the recipients home location.

The weather data source requires you to create a design for a single day, and then you can customise the tags to add as many days as required as additional images.

Settings Panel

The first thing to do when creating a new image is to adjust the settings in this panel.

Image Name

This is the name of the image you can change at anytime.

Labels

Labels are handy words you can assign to the image to help you search for it later.  Use the enter key to save each label and add as many as you wish.

Lock

Once you have finished editing the campaign and you are ready to send an email using this image we recommend locking the campaign from further changes to prevent accidental edits as these will show immediately in any images viewed by your customers.

Canvas Panel

Choose canvas size

The width and height of the canvas is set in pixels. You can change this at anytime. Changing the width will add or crop the canvas on the right hand side, while changing the height will add or crop from the bottom of the canvas.

The width of the canvas should be the same as the desired width of the image in your HTML email template.

Background Colour

Choose a hex colour using the picker or by entering a value here. The background colour will now change. If you have a background image covering the entire canvas you won’t see the background colour.

Links & Fallback Panel

Link

Enter the URL where you would like to take anyone clicking on the image. Use the jigsaw piece to add merge tags from the data source into the URL. Here we will simply link to our website.

Fallback Link

If you have added any merge tags to the above link, and in the event these merge fields are all empty then you can specify a fixed URL to take the clicking customer to. This prevents any unwelcome 404’s of broken links in the event your forecast search returns no results.

Fallback Image

In the event the weather data source returns no data you can specify a different image to show or a 1x1 transparent pixel so nothing is visible to recipients.

This is particularly important for forecasts where results may not be found if:

• You have specified the forecast for a date range in the past, or more than 10 days from now
• Our weather forecast doesn’t recognise the location you specified
• If relying on IP address to find the location and the customer opens in an email client that blocks the identification of this (such as Gmail) no results will be returned

Preview Values

In the Preview panel we can add example values to allow us to see what the forecast will look like with a specific set of options.

The Weather data source takes these search terms:

Location: Enter in here any one of these types of location
City or Country name
UK or Canadian Postcode
US Zipcode
IATA Airport code
Longitude & Latitude (Separate these with a comma)

If this is not specified, the IP address of the recipient opening the email will be used.

Default Location: If no other location can be found through the specified location or IP address an optional default location can be added here to ensure a forecast is shown. This is useful for scenarios where you are merging in a location to generate the image, but don't have a full coverage of your database.

IP Lookup Enabled: Leaving this selected will mean an attempt is made to lookup the recipients location based upon the IP address of where they opened the email. This can be disabled by unselecting this.

A note on IP Fallback: If no location is used by default Reignite will search by the recipients IP address. However, as some email clients such as Gmail block this we will not attempt to return any results, and the fallback image will be shown instead.

Units: The weather data source will return a variety of weather related data including temperature. This allows you to choose whether it returns metric, scientific or farhenheit.

Begin & End Date: By default, if you leave these empty then the forecast starts on the current date. If you wish to specify specific start and end dates for the forecast you can enter them here. This is typically used for pre-departure holiday emails to only include the customers holiday dates. Note that only 10 days from the current date is available. If these dates are in the past, or too far in the future results for the affected days will not be returned.

In all of the above data fields can not only be hard coded with fixed values, but also set at individual recipient level by merging data from fields in your email marketing platform into the tags. This is described in greater detail in the later section.

In this example we are going to start by leaving all of the fields empty except location where we will enter ‘London’, just so we can see some real data when designing.

Creating our image in the canvas

Next, we can start creating our image. We created the image from a template so this is already populated with text and images.

This template contains a label for day of the week, an icon for the weather type, a description of the weather, and the maximum temperature.

The full list of available values is:

If we want to add any further elements like extra weather data values, or static images, text or shapes we could add these as per other examples but for now we just want to leave it as it is.

To preview the image with real weather use the switch at the top of the page to move from edit to preview.

Add the tags to your email template

Once you are happy with your image click on ‘Generate Tags’ top right to open up the dialog.

Configuration

On the first open of this dialog you will see it has pulled into the ‘Configuration’ section your preview values.

We are now going to configure this to show the weather in the recipients home location for the next 5 days.

First, in ‘location’ we drop in the syntax provided by our email platform for this. We leave IP Lookup enabled selected but add ‘London’ as the default location as we know all the customers are located in the UK.

We leave begin date empty as we want the weather to show from the time they open the email. End date we also leave empty.

URL Tracking

This option allows you to override any default tracking values on the click-throughs that are set in your account settings page. This allows you to track traffic from these campaigns in your web analytics tools.

Customise Tag

Next, we can customise the tag and specify how many days of weather we want to show to 5, and state we want to start at day 1. This produces tags for 5 images, each one representing 1 day of weather.

Under the ‘Your Tag’ you will now see the HTML to copy and paste to your email template – use the copy button provided to ensure the whole tag is copied correctly.

Depending on how your email template is coded you may need to paste each image into individual areas of your template rather than all in one block or read our detailed guide on adding tags to your email template here.

And that’s it. That is how to add live weather forecasts to your emails.