- [Julian] Welcome back to another video
of techmarketer.io.
Today I'm gonna show you
how you can build such a timer into an email
that you send out via your email program.
Now, I will be using ActiveCampaign
as a email tool of my choice,
but this will work for other email software,
such as MailChimp, Infusionsoft, HubSpot, or Drip.
You just need to make sure that you are able
to insert a custom html block into your email.
This is possible with most of the email tools out there.
So, how do you do this?
We'll use a website called sendtric.com,
which is a free email countdown timer that you can install.
All you need to do is put in your email address,
and then you can choose the date, like tomorrow
at 4 p.m.,
and you can choose the language.
This is all about the
days, hours, and minutes, down here.
You can choose the background and the numbers.
And then, all you need to do
is agree to the terms of service and generate your code.
Now, this code can then be used and copied
to use in your email custom html block.
Save that.
As you see, we have imported our timer right here.
This will count down to your time
that you have specified in sendtric.com, but right here,
if you wanna have a little bit more comprehensive
view of this,
I have actually built a little bit of a spreadsheet
that can calculate the time for you.
This is particularly helpful when it comes to time zones.
For example, I always have my email system
running on UTC time,
so I always know that this is the time
we can send out emails.
But in order to calculate it,
I might need to calculate the time in a time zone converter,
and then input it into Sendtric.
So I've built this little spreadsheet
that will do this automatically for me.
All you need to do is choose your hour
that you want your timer to end.
You choose your minutes.
Then you can input your time zone right here,
so, for example, say we are in Brazil,
and it will give you the right timestamp back,
the right url of that image,
but, also, the right html that you can then again use
and input into your custom html block
so it will be displayed in your email.
If you wanna check that out,
you can head over to techmarketer.io/emailtimer,
and copy off this spreadsheet yourself.
This is basically really how you can implement
a countdown timer into your emails
with the help of sendtric.com
and this spreadsheet, if you choose so.
One bonus that I wanna give you which we often use is
if you are able to use automations
in your email marketing software,
and you are actually sending out multiple emails
that all should have a countdown timer,
you would obviously need to go through all these emails
and implement the countdown timer again and again.
Now, there's a little trick that you can use.
First, you would need to have a custom form field.
In ActiveCampaign, we can
make a form field, a managed field, here.
Go to New Custom Form Field.
This can be a hidden field.
I'm gonna call this timestamp.
All right.
Now all I need to do is go back
into my automation right here.
And then I can tell the automation to,
at the beginning, change my contact field.
Update the contact.
We want to update our timestamp field to new content,
and what do we put in here?
Well, the timestamp
that was actually calculated in the sheet.
So, for example,
we can take our output timestamp right here,
input it here,
and now we'll be able to actually
use this timestamp in our emails.
Let's head back into our email.
Here we're gonna change,
instead of having this timestamp in here,
we'll put in a personalization tag.
This is different for every software out there,
but, in our case, we will just put in
the name of the custom field, which is timestamp.
This will then be automatically replaced
with whatever is in the timestamp of the actual contact.
If you save this, we will get an error here
that the image is not viewable, which is true.
But, if we send a contact through our automation,
let me activate this automation.
Go into our contacts.
Look at our demo contact, and add him to the automation.
Now he will be added and sent out these emails.
This might take a while.
Here we see, now, our email.
When we display the images, we have our timer,
as expected, in here.
And it's a timer that was automatically updated
by our automation, so the user went through this,
and the contact field, the timestamp field,
was updated with this timestamp,
and the email was sent out.
Now, I could go ahead and build this timer
into the email number two, email number three,
exactly with the same personalization tag,
so the timer would be updated throughout
all these three emails.
Now, the big advantage of that is,
if I ever wanted to change the timer because the time is up,
or I have another campaign running,
then I can just go ahead
and update only one field right here,
the content timestamp field,
and it would be updated, and the timer would be updated,
and all of these sequential automation emails.
I hope that was useful to you,
to implement a timer into your automation
or other campaign emails that you have running
on your email tool.
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because we'll bring you new videos every week.
My name is Julian.
'Til next time.