So now that you know the basics of the different types of emails from the previous section of the course, we'll go in and make these various types of emails. As always, I've got a link to the Bento docs here on this page where you're seeing the video, so click in there for more info on emails and email templates if needed, and we'll just dive in. So basically, Bento has three editors, and you're only likely to use two of them. Bento has Stripo, which is like a drag-and-drop editor.

It's what I personally like to use for my newsletters. It has Shoji, which is a plain text editor, which Jess uses for all of his emails. I use them personally for a message from a friend vibe emails. And then there's the raw HTML editor, which you would only use if you had the HTML already prepared from some other email-building tool, and you were able to just paste in that HTML.

So we will take a look at Stripo first, I think. Let's see what I was planning. Yeah, we'll do Stripo first. But before we build it, I'll walk you through some of the features.

So one thing about Stripo that's cool is it has this templates feature. I'll walk you more slowly in a moment through how to actually create these, but I just want to show you real quick the template. So when you're in the Stripo editor, which is what this is, and Stripo's just literally a tool that creates this editor. So that's why it's called Stripo.

That's the name of the tool. You can go to the library here, and you can browse both templates that Jesse/Stripo made in general to help you kind of get started, and you can also browse your own saved layouts. So within my main account for Double Your Freelancing, my main business, I have saved templates for my normal newsletter, my promo emails, [lip smack] probably more. I've got six, and a podcast announcement email, things like that.

So it's really useful for the use cases you know you're using all the time. You can save those as layouts, which we'll do in a minute. Actually, I'm going to just go into the DYF account so I can show you how I use some of these things in there, because I think that'll be pretty useful. So if I were to go in here and create a new broadcast, I can show you my different layouts and different modules to illustrate this.

So this here is my default layout. I like to put the subject and preview text here, have some general text there. And if I were to go to my library, to my saved layouts, I can show you the main ones that I have. So I've got this one that's like a lead magnet fulfillment email, weekly calls for my course for both the one hour before kickoff canceled, closing emails within promos, things like that.

And all of these, you can tell they're using the same general theme. The main difference is that they come preloaded with certain elements, or maybe I change the footer, that kind of thing. So in this case, this is a sales closing email, so we pretty much always need to have screenshots of testimonials. We usually need to have a countdown timer, that kind of thing.

So if I go into the preview mode, I think I have the Deadline Funnel timer in here. Let's see if I... Yeah. So this here uses Deadline Funnel.

This would show the countdown timer once I change the Deadline Funnel expiration settings. This would show the remaining spots coming from an environment variable in Bento, which you'll learn about later. We have the footer here that's promotion-specific unsubscribe, so they can leave just the promo, that kind of thing. So really useful for that.

And then one other element here that I mentioned a moment ago is, beyond an email-wide layout, Stripo also allows you to save templates for modules. So sorry, they call them modules, not templates. Templates would be the whole email. So I'm going to go back to a simple one.

So let's say this was lead magnet fulfillment. I think that's a pretty basic email. So within modules, these are all things that I've used before that I use on the regular. So once I made this little call-out box for a live promo I was doing, and it has, behind the scenes, some visual styling stuff.

So if we go into the preview, you'll see it has this whole box layout and stuff. So things like this, whenever you want to reuse some layout element, you can just save it as a module and just drag it out and customize it. Really, really, really useful. So I like this aspect of Stripo quite a lot, and if you send a styled newsletter like me, I bet you will too.

Couple other things I wanted to show you on Stripo before we leave it is the mobile preview and sending test emails. So back here in the normal testing account, within an email, you can go to this preview tab, and you can do a mobile preview of it here. But sometimes there is a mismatch between how it renders within the Stripo mobile preview and a real mobile preview. So what I personally like to do is [clears throat] click Send Preview and actually send one to myself.

I have a very specific Gmail address that I made, actually, where I don't use this account for anything besides testing emails, and so it's just a regular old Gmail account. What I did is I went into the settings, and I disabled threading. So you know how by default in Gmail, when someone replies to your email, it puts it all in one thread? I disabled that, so every email is its own separate thing.

And what that does is it allows me to resend multiple test emails to the same one without it doing that thing where it does the dot, dot, dot, and collapses resent sections in the thread. I don't know if you've ever noticed that in Gmail. So if you're testing a lot of emails and stuff as you go down the email marketing rabbit hole, it might be useful for you to do something like that, too. But yeah, basically, I like to do this little email testing SOP, so I just paste it in here from my Notion.

This has been refined over the course of many years. Before I send any email, I do all these things, and one of those steps is send it and look at it on my literal phone to see how it all lays out on my phone screen, and I've caught a lot of mistakes doing that. So with this newfound knowledge, let's go create some actual emails. For now, we're just going to create some shells.

The content doesn't really matter, we just need them to exist for future training lessons and stuff. We're going to do a broadcast first. So within Bento, just go to the main [clears throat] Emails tab, and then Broadcasts underneath, and create a new one. And up here at the top where it says New Broadcast, just paste the name from this page that you're on.

We'll call it bento-training-test-broadcast. And looks like we're doing this one with Stripo. So click Use Stripo, and this will take you to the email editor for this email. And you can just kind of play with it a little bit.

So maybe you go blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Maybe you go over here into the Blocks section, and you test with dragging out some of these blocks. So you can drag out a spacer. I've never even used a banner.

Stripo has all these things that I often don't use. So it's like a background image, cool, interesting. Maybe you play with it a little bit to see how the structures concept works. You can drag out columns and stuff into your email.

You can set the background color on one of the quote structures. The structure is like a container almost within it. So you could go in here, background color structure, let's have this one be red. And then maybe now we go to the blocks, and we drag out some text into the left column.

And then maybe we try to see, can you make the left column with a background color? So this right here is the text. Maybe we click to Container, we see what this does for us. What happens if I change this to be gray?

Oh, look at that. So now the container for the text has it. So, I don't know if Stripo has published documentation for the end user. Most of what I've done in here, I've just kind of tinkered and played around to figure it out.

But I would imagine they probably do somewhere. So if you want to try to find general Stripo guidance, you can. But for right now, I think just play with it a little to get a feel for how it works. And then what we'll do is save a template so that you know how to do that.

And by the way, part of the playing process, if you wanted to go to the library and pick one of these templates that vibes with you a little more, you could. So let's say you like this one, and you wanted to have this be your baseline that you're playing with, and you're like, "Oh, it's pretty cool, but I kind of don't like the purple because my brand is green." So maybe you change this to your brand color or whatever, and then you change this structure also to your brand color. This one's odd because it says it's transparent, so maybe it's the stripe that has purple. And then we go background content.

So it was both in the same place. Nifty. And so once you've tinkered with this a little, maybe you change out that logo for yours. You could click Change Image, upload an image from your computer, et cetera.

We will save it out as a template. So first thing, save your progress on the email so far. And then under Library, you can go to the Saved Layouts tab, and this is where all of the ones you've previously saved will show up. And then you can click Save Layout here at the top right, and let's see what I wanted you to call it.

This. So you could save it, and I'm going to call mine template2, since I already made another one before. And then click OK. And now, in the future, you can easily switch into this if you ever wanted to.

And I can also show you later how to delete that, or I can show you now. Let's see what I also wanted you to do here before we leave. So save it. I mean, we already saved it, but why not save it again?

And then click Exit. And now, under Broadcast, if you go to Layouts, you'll see that your new one is here. And if you ever wanted to edit that central layout, you could just click into it and make adjustments. Anything you change here-- Oh, sorry for the mic bump.

Anything you change here will not change emails that currently use it. So if I change this background color to red, and then I go into that broadcast we were playing with, you'll notice that it's still green. So all it does is it changes that layout for whenever it gets loaded from scratch again. So if you went again to your library, and then to Saved Layouts, and then you clicked it, now it should be red.

Let's see. Yeah. So you can edit that central thing, and it's basically like this starting point. That's the best way to think of it.

So the next thing I'd like you to do is make a little Stripo module. Look at this and ask yourself, what's something I could see myself wanting to use more often? I could see myself wanting to use this smart structure. So in Stripo, notice how there's this little dot, dot, dot on the right side?

I can't hover it, because when I hover it, it shows all these options. This is often a good way to know what it is you've selected. If you click this container, you see that this box isn't including the icon. We would want that.

We want the whole row. So maybe I click here, and it looks like it's selected the whole row. You can also use this little up arrow thing in the sidebar to make sure you've selected the outer container you're trying to select. So if we click stripe, look at that.

That selects the whole thing. That's way more than we want selected, which means we were clicked into the right place. And once you have the thing selected that you want to save as a reusable module, you can hover over the little dot, dot, dot menu and click this little download icon thingy, and this is where you save it out. So we'll call this icon row thingy. [chuckles] And then I can click Save.

And now anytime I want to use this again, it's going to be under Modules. Oh, interesting that this is showing on my DYF ones, too. I hope I'm in the right account right now. I'll probably delete this, because I don't want this, [chuckles] especially if it's going to taint my DYF account.

But nonetheless, you can just drag it on out now. So this is a really useful thing, and then if you, like me, decide you don't want this to take up space, you can just click delete, and now it's gone from the modules. So now that you've got the whole Stripo thing down, that's most of what I do in Stripo on a regular basis. So I'd like you to play with Shoji now in the context of a sequence.

So exit your broadcast and go to the Sequences tab. And what did I want you to call it? This. Bento Training Example Sass Free Plan Upgrade Sequence.

So click Create New Sequence, paste that, click Create, and then I believe I'm having you add a Shoji email to it. Yeah. So we're going to just add one email. So we'll click Add Your First Email, and we can do this with Shoji.

And for both Shoji and Stripo, by the way, I didn't mention this before, if you click up here where it says No Subject, or maybe I click my name. Yeah. If you click, the UI changes sometimes. It was a little bit different before, but presently at the time of recording, if I click my little photo, that's where we can enter the subject line and preview text for the email.

In the case of Shoji, you can also just type it here. So for now, this is again just a little tester, so it's like, "Upgrade your plan, dog. Plz srslly upgrade." And this is our upgrade sequence. Hopefully, a lot of people purchase thanks to this.

And that's all we need to do for now. So you can just save that email, that highly compelling email, and click Exit, and let's see if I wanted you to publish it. You don't need to, but if you want to, you would publish it here. So basically, within sequences, if you have an email like this where you've written it but you haven't actually published it yet, any user joining the sequence will not receive it yet.

So this is useful because it allows you to work on drafts without worrying about real subscribers receiving them until you're ready. So given that this is the upgrade sequence, probably we would want the first email to go out instantly. So we can change that to that. And then if you do want real subscribers to start getting it, you could click Publish, but we don't.

So we can do a test email for the broadcast. Yeah, I think broadcast makes sense. So I would say follow my little test SOP, go to the broadcast, send it to yourself. So I'll walk you through that just to make sure you know how.

So we go Broadcast, Open Editor, and then you can click this little Send Preview one and just type your email address here and click Send, and then look at it in your real inbox. I like to look at it on my phone because that's where emails are most likely to render poorly. And just get a feel for that workflow. And once you've done all of these little steps at the bottom, you're good to move on, and I'll see you in the next lesson