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Workflow improvements in the modern editor

Updated

The Modern Editor is Workshop's most powerful and intuitive editing experience yet! Built to help you create beautiful, on-brand emails faster than ever before. With a streamlined interface, real-time collaboration, and smart design tools that work with you as you build, the Modern Editor removes the friction from email creation so you can focus on what matters most: communicating with your people!

Whether you're starting from scratch, building from a template, or letting Cici generate an entire email from a single prompt, everything you need is in one place, designed to be fast, flexible, and effortless.

While there are a number of improvements, here are a number of areas to get started:
 

TABLE OF CONTENTS

AI-generated emails - beta

Workshop's AI will generate a complete draft with a thoughtful layout, clean formatting, and ready-to-edit content! No design experience required. Give Cici a prompt, and get back a complete email!

The more context you include in the prompt, the more you get back.

THREE WAYS TO CREATE

Have Cici create your entire email for you

When you create a new email from scratch in the Modern Editor, you'll land on an empty state with an AI prompt box front and center. Describe the email you want in plain language — the more detail you include, the better your result!

Workshop generates a complete email draft including layout, content blocks, text hierarchy, spacing, and image placeholders, all optimized for internal comms best practices.

Or choose from one of our suggested prompts (or one of your existing templates)

Cici gives you an initial layout! Complete with draft, layout, blocks, spacing, image placeholders, and more. From there you can continue to chat to make changes, or make edits using the editor features.

Best of both worlds

Use both Cici and our editor features side-by-side to build your perfect email!

Copy & pasting from Word or Google

Now, with the modern editor, copying from a Word or Google doc and pasting into your emails actually works!

Easily copy text from Google Docs or Word and paste it into the modern version of our editor. It will keep your structure, headings, and spacing. Give it a try - we know you'll love it!

 

Styles tab - advanced formatting

The Modern Editor's Styles tab gives you a powerful new way to define your email's look and feel in one place. Set your fonts, colors, buttons, and spacing once — and every block you add automatically inherits those styles, keeping your emails on-brand from the first row to the last.

  1. Open a email or template and head to the Styles tab located to the far left. 
  2. Set background color and area width
  3. Apply the font, size, color, and text styles for multiple headlines and paragraph under the Text drop-down
  4. Set your link color, button style, padding, and even divider color!

Every style you set here automatically applies as you build so your email stays on-brand from the first block to the last without any extra effort. The Modern Editor gives you more control over your design than ever before, from typography tokens to button shapes to section padding.

 

Customizing the Suggestion Box (Survey) & Video thumbnails

The Modern Editor makes it easier than ever to get the details right. Customize your survey buttons inline with full control over color, shape, and text styling, and take the guesswork out of video thumbnails. The editor will generate one automatically, or you can select your own from your media library in seconds. No workarounds, no extra steps, just a cleaner and faster way to build.

SUGGESTION BOX

  1. Insert a survey content block and in the left settings bar, give it a name and apply settings
  2. Choose the suggestion box
  3. Scroll below on the left settings bar to apply button text, font styles, color, and even padding

 

VIDEO THUMBNAILS

  1. Insert video content block
  2. Add your video URL (depending on the settings of the video, a thumbnail may auto-generate)
  3. Add your video name (only seen within Workshop)
  4. Replace the thumbnail with just a click!
  5. Even change up the play button styling!

 

Translation

Within the modern editor, you'll have a few ways to use Translation! First is adding translation within the email (body/content), inserting and formatting language links, and enabling a global setting that adds a translation dropdown to all email web views.

Translation in the email body

Using Workshops AI tools, you can easily insert the appropriate language right in the body of your email! 

  1. Draft a new one or duplicate an existing Heading or Paragraph block. 
  2. In your duplicated block, select the ‘AI tools’ button in the in-editor formatting bar
  1. Click ‘Translate to…’ and select the language you would like to translate to
  2. The translation will display and you can choose to ‘Apply’ the exact draft, click in the block to make any manual edits, or tell AI to do something else!
  3. Pro-tip: apply ‘Dynamic content’ for that row so only the appropriate recipients see that row!

You can now control the exact translation your recipients see in the email body! 

Insert and format language links in your email

You can include translation links within your email for recipients to click and view their preferred language in a browser view

  1. Add in a Paragraph block 
  2. Within the paragraph block, select the ‘More’ button in the format bar
  3. Click the translation icon and language
    1. This will auto paste a link in your paragraph block. Add as many as you’d like!
  4. Use the format bar to change the styling of these links

Best of all, you can style and format these language links to match the style of your email and brand! Check out this help doc to learn more about using translation in web view. 

 

Collaboration

When multiple people are in the same email, you'll see live user icons at the top of the builder, and cursors showing exactly where each person is working.

Select a block and your collaborator's name appears attached to it. Everyone's changes are visible in real time! No locking others out of a draft, no confusion on who's working where - just team collaboration, how it should be. 

 

Merge tags

Merge tags allow you to personalize email content using employee attributes (e.g. first name, location, title). 

Must be on the Enhanced or Premium plan. Employee attributes must already be stored in Workshop (synced from AD, Okta, HRIS, or uploaded via CSV).

  1. Create a new email or open an email draft
  2. Add or edit a Heading or Paragraph block
  3. Click inside the Heading or Paragraph block to edit. This will open the formatting bar at the top of the builder. 
  4. Select the ‘More’ option, and from that drop-down select ‘Merge tags’
  1. In the Merge tags popup, select the field you want to insert (e.g. first_name).
  2. Optionally provide fallback text — this will display if the field is not populated for a recipient.

 

Dynamic content (previously audience segmentation)

Dynamic content (also known as audience segmentation) allows you to send targeted, relevant messages to specific groups of employees.

Your organization might send an all-company newsletter to all employees today, but you'd like to add a "Managers Only" section within that email only they see. Or maybe you're an organization with multiple locations (or a remote work team) and want to share location-specific logistics to those teams. 

With dynamic content, you can send one email, but target specific content to sub-groups of your total audience. 
 

Dynamic content is currently offered on Enhanced and Premium plans. If you're interested in personalizing content within your emails, get in touch with your Workshop Account Manager or sales@useworkshop.com.

 

How to use dynamic content (modern version)

Apply dynamic content to target sections of content to specific lists of recipients. Here’s how:

  1. Head to your email or template and select the row
  2. Within the Row settings, click the ‘Visibility’ tab. 
  3. Who should have visibility: will default to ‘All recipients’, meaning everyone who receives this email will see this row
  4. Select ‘Customize recipients’
  5. Name the section and select the targeted audience from your existing Lists. You can select multiple lists if this section should be seen by more than one group. 
  • The web view is the browser version of this email. Turn this on to show this section in the web view, or off to hide it.

Anchor Links, Tables, and HTML Blocks

If you're coming from Workshop's legacy editor, you may be familiar with Anchor Links, Table Blocks, and HTML Blocks.

Anchor Links and Table Blocks aren't currently available in the modern editor, but they are planned for a future release.

HTML Blocks, however, are not supported in the modern editor and are not planned for future support. This is an intentional decision to help ensure emails render consistently across email clients, maintain reliable tracking and personalization, and reduce issues caused by custom code that can be difficult to troubleshoot.

If you're trying to recreate a specific experience or design pattern, Cici can be a great resource for discovering alternative approaches in the modern editor.

We'd also love to hear more about your use case. If there's something you're trying to accomplish with any of these blocks, please share feedback directly from the editor using Submit Feedback (shown below). Your input helps us prioritize future enhancements and better understand the workflows that matter most to your team.

 

 

 

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