eBill Templates

These templates are used by Send eBills to e-mail an electronic version of the renewal notice. The eBill notice will provide a single renewal amount. This will be the amount for the first term in the sort order, based on the Business Rule— What should the sort order be for exporting rate terms on subscriber renewal notices? If subscribers click the payment link to enter a payment in iServices Subscriber, different terms can be selected at that point.

Default eBill e-mail templates are stored in the email/renewals directory. Initially an HTML (billnotify.htm) and a text template (billnotify.tmp) are provided. You can have multiple templates that are used for invoices versus renewals, and for different renewal periods, using the names below. Send eBills will use the template for your specific renewal/invoice number, if defined. If not defined, it will use billnotifyren.htm or billnotifyinf.htm, based on whether a renewal notice or invoice is being sent. If those templates are not found, billnotify.htm will be used.

For example, if the first renewal is different from subsequent notices, you can define billnotifyren1.htm. That will be used for the first renewal notice sent to subscribers. Subsequent renewal notices would use billnotify.htm.

Number	Renewals	Invoices
1	billnotifyren1.htm	billnotifyinv1.htm
2	billnotifyren2.htm	billnotifyinv2.htm
3	billnotifyren3.htm	billnotifyinv3.htm
4	billnotifyren4.htm	billnotifyinv4.htm
5	billnotifyren5.htm	billnotifyinv5.htm
6	billnotifyren6.htm	billnotifyinv6.htm
7	billnotifyren7.htm	billnotifyinv7.htm
8	billnotifyren8.htm	billnotifyinv8.htm
9	billnotifyren9.htm	billnotifyinv9.htm
Any	billnotifyren.htm billnotify.htm (if billnotifyren.htm is not found)	billnotifyinv.htm billnotify.htm (if billnotifyinv.htm is not found)

Note: If using the text templates, the same file names can be deployed, with the “.tmp” extension rather than “.htm”.

Naviga recommends moving the templates to the custom template directory, as explained above. If you don't plan to create customized e-mails for each eBill renewal/invoice number, you must remove any undesired HTML templates from your the “renewals" e-mail directory.

Example

Template structure

All of the eBill e-mail templates contain the following content areas:

• Header. The Header area includes a newspaper logo and link to the newspaper website.

• Content. The Content area includes transaction by default.

• Sidebar. The Sidebar area can be customized for marketing message or links to iServices Subscriber.

• Footer. The Footer area includes the newspaper name and address and any other newspaper enterprise items, such as social media links.

Variables Available

The table below lists all of the HTML variables (dates, name, URLS, redirects, image and logos) that may be used when customizing your eBill notification templates. Note that the iServices variables only pertain to sites with iServices Subscriber.

Parameter	Description
Renewal parameters
[Account]	SubscriptionID
[BillDate]	Renewal date
[BillAmount]	1st rate term amount (only one rate term included)
[DueDate]	“Upon Receipt” if no expire or expire date is less than current date; otherwise the expiration date
Miscellaneous
[ImagePath]	Directory containing images (e.g. logo - header.jpg).
[Logo]	Uses image path and appends email specific logo (header600px.jpg).

Google Analytics e-mail link tracking

If you use Google Analytics for website tracking, the eBill e-mail templates automatically send tracking information when subscribers click on a link within the e-mail. The following values are used:

• Originating source (&utm_source): “circulation”

• Medium type (&utm_medium): "email"

• E-mail template name (&utm_campaign): the file name of the template being used, not including the file extension (e.g. "billnotify")

For example:

https://[domain]/[script]/custservice/web/login.html?utm_source=circulation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=billnotify

HTML template design best practices

Naviga recommends following these best practices when customizing HTML e-mail templates:

• Use tables and explicitly set widths in table cells (TD tag) so that the HTML e-mails display at the intended size.

• Images must reside on a publicly accessible location and use the ALT attribute since many e-mail clients (e.g. Gmail and Outlook) by default suppress images.

• Keep the HTML page width small (e.g. 600 pixels).

• Do not use external CSS files. While designing the template, place CSS style in the head and then prior to testing extract all CSS to be in line. You may use http://premailer.dialect.ca as a tool to extract the CSS styles.

• Define hyper links with target="_blank" so they automatically open a new window.