Overview: Emails in Sora

Emails seem like a small thing, but can be some of the most time-consuming pieces of a process. People processes require a ton of communication, and it’s incredibly important to get right. Some examples:

Sending a timely welcome email so that new hires know what to expect

■  Sending a monthly 401k email to relevant employees
■  Sending an email to an internal stakeholder with relevant information about an employee (e.g., sending an email to an HRBP with exit interview survey responses)
■  Sending a beautiful email getting employees excited about an upcoming event
■  Sending a nice note on an employee’s work anniversary

In Sora, emails are incredibly customizable and personalizable, from the look and feel to the content of the email. Below is a quick overview of all of our email functionality. As always, please feel free to reach out to support@sora.co with any questions!

Setting up an email

You can customize the following in a Sora email

■  Subject and email content, including variables (we’ll get to those in a bit)
■  Whether all dynamic fields are required. If you’re sending a ton of employee data to your IT team, and it doesn’t necessarily matter if “Last home state” is blank or not, you can uncheck this box. By default, we keep it checked, so that we never send an email to an employee that looks like “Hey <$~*-- firstName --*~$>” — like we’ve all received before.
■  Who the email comes from. This can be a specific person, like “laura@sora.co,” and you can customize the name that comes with it. Or it can be a dynamic person, if you want this email to come from an employee’s manager, for example:

■  Recipients. To, Cc, and Bcc recipients can be email fields stored in Sora (e.g., an employee’s email or personal email), dynamic relationships stored in Sora (e.g., Manager or Buddy), or any other valid email address (e.g., laura@sora.co).

When the email will send

The last two steps when setting up an email are to set up a trigger and any related filters.

A Sora trigger tells us when to send the email. It can be either:

■ On or around an interesting date or event (e.g., 5 days before start date or 3 days after leave of absence start date), or
■ After a different automation has been completed (e.g., after an engagement survey is filled out)

As with all Sora automations, filters can be added so that any particular email is only generated when relevant.

■ For example, a recurring benefits email (like an open enrollment reminder) may only be relevant to full-time employees, or a L&D reimbursement reminder may only be relevant to certain teams

Types of emails

Sora can make an email feel like it resulted from you typing out a personal note, or it can look like a professionally designed HTML email. Or it can be somewhere in between!

Our default email is designed specifically to look like you wrote it in Gmail or Outlook — it has a standard font and font size, comes from your email address, etc.

But Sora also allows you to extras like full-width images, buttons, columns and dividers, etc. that make an email feel particularly polished and exciting:

Variables

No matter what you want your email to look like, it should probably feel personalized. Sora has endless personalization options:

■  Insert basic data like preferred first name or start date
■  Add any data that you store in Sora or any of your other systems — address, compensation information, relationship information (e.g., manager’s name or email, buddy’s favorite snack, or recruiting coordinator’s Calendly link), etc.
■  Survey responses like technology preferences or fun facts

Type two brackets (“{{“) to pull up a list of variables and add them to your email subject or body.

More on HTML emails

Functionality

You’ll find all of our functionality in the email toolbar:

■  Change font, font size, and color:

■  Add images from your computer, from a Sora variable (maybe an employee photo uploaded in a welcome survey, or a Slack profile photo), or from a link:

■  Add customizable buttons and links:

■  Add as many custom columns and dividers as you’d like to separate sections in your email and make it visually interesting:

■  Attach files from your computer or from a Sora variable (e.g., an offer letter):

Existing HTML emails

Have an existing email that you want to port into Sora? Sora support will do this for you! Email us at support@sora.co at any time.

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