After building an amazing collection of Stories and Events in your Content Hub, your team may want to share a specific piece of Content directly with Subscribers. With the Content Block Element in Blasts, you can easily add Content that will link to your Story, Event, or Shared link just like it would from a News Digest.

To begin, click the Content Block icon to add it to the bottom of your Blast layout, or drag and drop the icon from the right panel. Just like other elements, the Content Block Element can be placed in its own row or next to other elements. For more information, please review: How to Use Blast Elements.

After adding the Content Block Element, the Element pane will provide a list of your Content that is eligible to share in a Blast. Content must be Approved and Published to be included in a Blast. If Content is restricted to a Segment, it is not currently eligible for use in the Content Block Element.

To find Content, you can search by Content title and filter by All, Stories, or Events. Content is listed with a preview of the current Story Image, Title and Expiration setting.

To add your Content to the Blast, hover your cursor over the Content piece. When hovering, you can select the Content by checking the box that appears over the Story Image. You can also preview the live Content in another window by selecting the Arrow icon.

After Selecting the Content, click the Link button to load the Content details and begin editing.

The Content Block Element utilizes a combined Image, Text, and Button element to group your details together. The details for these sections are automatically pulled from your Story Image and Summary.

The Image, Text, and Button sections can be toggled on or off as needed, and they are all linked directly to your piece of Content. This means if a Subscriber clicks any of these sections, they will be taken right to your Story, Event Page, or the shared link page.

When available, the Story Image will be pulled in by default. If a Story Image is not available, only the Text and Button sections will be pulled in, and the Image section will be toggled off. An image can be added manually by clicking the toggle to on for the Image section.

This image can be cropped, removed, replaced with another image, and added to your Image Gallery. Alt-Text is also adjustable.

To crop or to remove and replace the image, hover your cursor over the image to select from the crop button or the trash icon. After removing an image, you will still see the thumbnail of the previous image until you replace it.

To add or replace an image, do any of the following:

Accepted File Types:

Accepted File Size:

Full-Width Images will be automatically resized when sending to be 600 pixels wide.

The Story Title, Subtitle & Summary, and Event Dates are pulled in by default when applicable. The text uses the default styling choices from Blast Controls, but you can update it in the Text editor.

“Learn More" is pulled in by default as the button text for all Content pieces. The text uses the default styling choices from Blast Controls and will be automatically centered. This can be updated.

Button color and padding settings are available to edit in the Layout tab.

With Layout options, you can adjust settings like Image Width (fill), container background color, alignment, button colors, and more. To learn more, please review Layout Options of Blast Elements.

With Content being available to include in Blasts, this adds an extra layer of complexity. We designed the Content Block Element to account for many scenarios, and we address some of them below.

When editing Content that's included in a Blast, you'll see the following message at the top of the Content editor.

After the Content is pulled into the Blast for the first time, all of the details that were kept and saved for the Element will remain. If you want to update the Content Block Element to reflect any changes, you can edit this manually from the Blast Editor or re-add a new Content Block Element to pull in the changes.

From the Content editor, you can change all of the settings for a piece of Content; however, it may become ineligible to include in a Blast and you will receive a warning when trying to save.

Settings that will present a warning:

This warning includes the affected Blast name(s) (unless private).

If the Blast is currently scheduled, the warning will prompt conversion of the Blast to a Draft, and you can choose to accept or cancel the changes.

If the Blast is actively sending, these settings cannot be changed.

Content that is deleted, drafted, restricted, or expired is no longer eligible. Your Blast will not be eligible to send until the Content Block is removed or replaced in the Blast editor.

When opening the Blast editor for a Blast with Content that is now ineligible, you'll be prompted to remove or replace the specific Content.

If Content is deleted, when clicking the Content link, Subscribers will be presented with a page informing them that the Content is not currently available.

If Content is restricted to a Segment the Subscriber is not in, when clicking the Content link, Subscribers will be presented with a page informing them that the Content is not currently available.

If Content is expired, links will still present the Subscriber with the Content page.

Content that was created from a Source or Share a Link feature will always link to the original external link that was provided.

Content Block Insights are currently reported within Blast Metrics. The Blast Metrics will report direct engagement with Content Block Elements using Link click activity for each Blast's metrics. For information, please review Specific Blast Metrics.

Under the Links tab, links will be grouped for Content Blocks based on the story URL. If more than one Content Block Element in a Blast is using the same content piece, metrics will still be grouped under one URL in Insights.

If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at support@cerkl.com or use the support Chat toward the bottom right-hand corner of any cerkl.com page.