Announcements are a core component of every LaunchNotes project. They power your ability to create, publish, and notify your users of product updates and changes.

Typically, announcements are created to communicate any product change (or group of changes) that modifies the product or user experience. This can range from the Tier-1 feature release that can drive new business, to functionality enhancements to bug fixes, to weekly and monthly roundups of product development progress.

This article will cover the following:

The announcements workflow is broken down into 4 simple steps:

To create a new announcement, select the + New Draft button in the top right corner:

You'll be taken to the Draft announcement screen, to build all the content related to your announcement: the headline, hero image, body, associated categories and roadmap Items, an excerpt, and content (including images, gifs, videos, etc.).

At any time, you can preview this draft announcement in a separate tab to see what your product update will look like on your public or private LaunchNotes page.

The announcement hero image is the banner, Loom video at the top of a LaunchNotes product announcement and will appear at the top of an email notification and on the LaunchNotes page.

The excerpt on your announcement is the summary with an announcement on a LaunchNotes page, as well as, in a Slack notification (if you are using the Slack Channels integration). The text auto-generates the first 200 characters of your announcement body, where it will then be appended by an ellipsis ("...").

You can override the auto-generated excerpt by selecting the edit icon in the excerpt field to enter your preferred summary.

Videos can be placed within an announcements such as YouTube, Vimeo, Loom, etc, via the iframe option in the editor toolbar. You can also upload videos in mp4 format up to a maximum size of 20MBs (via the "add media" option in the toolbar).

Depending on the structure of the iframe snippet when it generated in your third-party tool, it may not load as intended. A workaround for this is to get the sharable URL, and wrap it in the following example format: <iframe src="https://app.tango.us/app/embed/e9487697-1fa0-4469-a9ea-fb2600c6cbbb" />

Every announcement also has its own search & share settings that can be optimized to optimize SEO performance.

Once you've completed the content for your announcement, select continue to notifications, which will take you to the customer channels screen. Here, you'll be able to choose whether or not you'd like to send email notifications to your users about this announcement.

If you opt to notify subscribers, you'll then be able to see the following:

Selecting continue to preview will take you to step-3 in the announcements workflow, which is the previewing options. Previewing options allow you to see how your announcements will appear to your customers over your different engagement channels, as well as on your LaunchNotes page.

On this page, you are able to filter through different windows that will show you how each announcement will appear to your users (on your page, across email, and via Slack). You also have the ability to send test emails and Slack notifications, so you can view how your announcements will appear across different channels.

Send test emails

The send test email function allows you to send your email draft to yourself and colleagues, for any approvals, edits and suggestions, and to see how your announcement email will land in your users' inbox when published.

At this point, you'll be prompted to either publish your announcement now or schedule your announcement to be published at a later date/time.

If you wish to schedule an announcement to be published at a later time, select the schedule and publish later button, and select the time you'd like this to be published.

Once you set the date and time, you'll notice a banner across the top of the announcement referencing the publish date with an option to reschedule.
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From here, you can exit out of the announcement and you'll be brought back to the announcements section in LaunchNotes in the management portal.

Selecting publish now on the preview announcement screen will initiate a pop-up message to confirm that you'd like to publish your announcement to your LaunchNotes page. Select publish now to confirm publishing and sending of notifications (if selected).

Finally, you'll see a "lift off" message that confirms your announcement has been successfully published, as well as, the total number of notifications that were generated to your subscribers. On this screen, you can return to the announcements home screen or view the announcement on your public page.

If you scroll down on the lift off page, you'll also be able to see the announcement analytics dashboard with engagement analytics on the following:

*Open rate tracking relies on images, so it isn’t 100% accurate. If a subscriber’s email client has images turned off, the tracking image won’t load, and their email won’t register as opened.

You can always go back to your announcement analytics dashboard for any published announcement by selecting it in the announcement home, where you'll be able to toggle between the visitor, email, Slack, and feedback analytics.