You can create a personalized image to match any style, brand or design of your choice. Examples include:

• Putting names on football shirts, credit cards or boarding passes.
• Personalized season’s greetings.
• Live loyalty balance shown on a loyalty card.

To create a branded personalized image in Open Time Content, you first need to create a template. This contains the background image for the design you want to use and the text field for the personalized content. When you add this to a widget, you define how the content is personalized.

On the Open Time Content page, open the Templates tab and click Personalized Images. Here you can see your library of personalized images.

To create a new template, proceed as follows:

• Click New Template. This opens the image editor.

Click your cursor in the content box and you will see the Object Inspector.

Click Upload image… to browse for your background image.

Here’s an example of a personalized background image you could use for an event invitation or birthday greetings:

When you have uploaded your image, you can set the dimensions in the Layout section.

If you are using an image format with transparency, such as .png, you can also set the background color. Click in the color field to display the color palette. Please note that you have to set the background color before you upload the image or it will overwrite it.

Once you are happy with the background image, click the Add Personalization icon. This places a text field over the image and displays the formatting controls for the text. You can add as many text fields as you like.

Now you can format the personalization using the controls on the right.

• Preview Values - Here you can add the kind of text you would expect to see on the image.
• Layout - Enter the dimensions and location of the text field. Alternatively, you can move and resize it with your mouse cursor.
• Font - Here you define the font size, color and style. You can upload a custom font for Open Time Content on the Settings tab.
• 2D Transforms - Here you can add other styles such as rotate, skew or scale one of the axes.

When you are finished, use the preview toggle to test your design and save your changes to complete the template creation.

To create a personalized image widget, proceed as follows:

• In the Open Time Content page, navigate to the campaign you wish to add the widget to and open it, or create a new campaign.
• Click Create new Mailing and Tag and click the Personalized Image icon to open the wizard.
• Step 1: Give the mailing a name (we recommend to use the same name as the email campaign where you will add it) and click Next.
• Step 2: Now configure your widget by adding the click-through URL. The URL is mandatory and must be a complete URL, starting with http://…. Then select the template you created earlier. If you have many templates to choose from, scroll through the selection by clicking the dots below.

• Step 3: You can also add a fallback image to use if there is no personalization data available. This step is optional.

• Step 4: Now configure your tag. Select the text box and then enter a name for each of the parameters you are using for personalization. This name is used to help you add the real variable later on so make sure it is easy to understand.

• Step 5: All your parameters are listed and you can test different versions to make sure that the personalization looks good in all variations or languages.

• Step 6: When you are finished, the tag for you to insert into email HTML code is generated, and you now need to map the values for the personalization parameters to the database fields you will be using. You can copy this into a text editor or do it here and then copy it.

• In this example we have two parameters which map to a custom field Birthday Greeting, with the placeholder $Birthday Greeting$ and the system field First name, with the placeholder $First Name$. You would need to replace the two value entries in the tag with those, giving you:

• You can also test this yourself by copying only the img src part of the tag, replacing the placeholder with your own content and pasting this into a browser window.

You can make changes to an image template, even after it has been added to a live email campaign. To do this, simply open the template in the editor and save your changes. However, these will not be pushed through to the widget automatically.

To update a widget with the changes to the template, proceed as follows:

• Navigate to the campaign where the widget is being used and open it with the Edit campaign icon.
• Find the mailing which uses the template and click the Edit tag icon.
• In step 2 of the wizard, activate the Change template checkbox to display your templates and select the one that you have edited. Even if it is the same template, you must select it again.

• Click through the rest of the wizard. You do not have to copy the tag as this has not changed, but now the changes will be pushed through to the email. You can test this by pasting the img src part of the tag into your browser and checking that the changes have been applied.