Instagram Setup

Using a Litmus Personalize Instagram Tag, you can automatically pull your latest Instagram posts into your email. The UI offers a variety of attractive templates for you to use or you can design custom templates via Content Automation.

Embed social Tags into your lifecycle email to keep email content up-to-date and fresh each time the email is opened. Using a Tag means that your email will always display the latest posts automatically so you can reduce the amount of time and resources it takes to pause and update the content in your lifecycle campaigns. Add Tags to your welcome program, transactional, and sales recovery emails!

Here are some examples of including a live Instagram in emails:

To create a custom Instagram template, the Instagram account must be added as an API content source in your account.

First things first... to leverage your Instagram for live content, an authorization token is required from Instagram. 

How to authenticate your account:

• Log in to the Instagram account you wish to connect or authorize in Litmus Personalize. 
• In a new tab, log in to your Litmus Personalize account and navigate to the Account section of the platform. You will find this in the dropdown under the account name in the top right-hand corner.
• Navigate to the Instagram Accounts area and click on '+Add Account' on the right-hand side. 
• You will then be directed to an Instagram authorization page. Authorize Litmus Personalize to access your account. You will then be re-directed back to the Litmus Personalize UI and you will see your Instagram account connected in this section. 

A live Instagram feed will then be available as a content source and you can start creating your custom designs in the Content Automation templates. 

Creating an Instagram Template

Before you begin, ensure your Instagram account is authorized in the Account section of the platform

• Navigate to the Templates section of the platform. Go to the Content Automation Tab and select '+ New Template'
• Name your template and on the right-hand navigation select 'connect' to connect your Instagram content source.
• Search and select the Instagram content source.

The Instagram content source will be a JSON feed so if you have many content sources you can filter based on feed type.

You are now ready to begin designing your template. Use the '+' icon to build out the blocks, linking up each one to the relevant component of the Instagram image you wish to display.

Top tip: select High-resolution and Anti-Alias boxes for greater resolution.

Navigate through the Content Source and select the element you wish to import.

Instagram now accommodates images of varying sizes, which means that images can look skewed in the image block. To combat this, apply an auto-crop condition to the image block. This creates an auto-crop from the center of the image to ensure each image looks the same.

Click on the image and select the crop icon, then the 'Auto square crop' option and save.

Once you have built out your template, it is possible to duplicate your work to create the impact of tiles. To do this, navigate to the briefcase on the right-hand side, here you can alter the template properties. By changing the Repeat Count, you can choose how many images will be displayed within the one template.

When you then preview your template, you will have the view of the duplicated template.

If you wish to overlay live Instagram images over a designed image, upload your asset as a background image and build the design out from there.

When videos or reels are posted on Instagram, the first frame from the video is used as the thumbnail in our tag, which might be blank or just different from the thumbnail that shows on your Instagram profile. You may want to exclude videos using the filter below:

Creating an Instagram Tag

Navigate to the campaigns section in the platform, here you can either create the tag within an existing campaign or create a new one.

Navigate to 'create a new tag' and select the content automation icon.

Enter a description for your tag and select the template you wish to use and click next.

Next, complete the href field.

There is the option to filter your Instagram images based on certain criteria.

This is a great way to filter data based on a caption with a specific hashtag or to exclude certain influencer content. You can also filter by media type to exclude videos.

The Instagram API contains the 20 most recent images from the connected Instagram account. If you add filtering to your tags and these can't be met to fulfill the whole template you will see the default - this will be the most recent images in the API feed irrespective of any filters applied.

Once you have added any filters you would like select 'next' and the tag will be generated.

Using the tag as generated will show Instagram images beginning with the first in the feed. If you have a single image template or a row of images and wish to change the position of the tag, you can command the position by adding 'pos_(num)' as below: