Ontraport gives you five message editors. Three are for email: Simple Mail, Advanced Mail, and Raw HTML. The other two are SMS and Tasks. Any of them can go out through an automation, a broadcast, or straight to a single contact. Here's when to use each one.
To create a message, go to Contacts, then Messages, and click New message. If you've turned on other objects, like Companies or Deals, each one has its own Messages collection under its tab. On a Basic account, you'll find messages under Automations.
Simple Mail is the editor you'll use most. It works a lot like writing in Gmail, for plain, personal, text-first emails. Use it for follow-ups and anything that should feel like it came from a real person.
Advanced Mail replaces the old OntraMail editor. It's the same drag-and-drop, block-based builder you use for Ontraport Pages, so you build emails from blocks, rows and columns, starting from scratch or from a template. Use it for newsletters and designed promotions. Every email is a fixed 700 pixels wide, and Preview shows you exactly what a real contact will see, with their merge fields filled in.
In the Settings tab, you choose who the email is from. That can be a user relationship, like the contact's sales rep, a specific user, or a custom name and reply-to address. You also choose which address it goes to, like one contact at a company or everyone there. Add your subject and preheader, and turn on link tracking to add UTM parameters to every link. Link tracking is available on Pro and above.
Two settings deserve extra care. Transactional marks an email as non-marketing, like a receipt or login details, and it gets sent even to people who've unsubscribed. So only use it for truly transactional mail. And every email gets a spam score. At five or higher, you can't save or send it until you fix the issues it flags.
Raw HTML is for coders who want complete control over the HTML and CSS. Email code behaves differently across inbox providers, so unless you're confident, stick with Advanced Mail.
SMS messages are plain text. You're billed in 160-character segments, so keep them short. Links can't be hyperlinked, so paste the full URL. From US and Canadian numbers, you can also add images. The editor counts your characters as you type.
For marketing texts to contacts who've opted in, send SMS from an automation using the Send an SMS action.
Here's the big change since we first made this video. One-on-one texting now lives in Inbox. Inbox brings your SMS, email and web chat conversations into one place, with the full thread and the contact's record side by side. Your team can reply, assign and follow up together.
Finally, Tasks. A task is a reminder for someone on your team to do something by hand, like calling a new lead the day after they fill out a form. You set who it's assigned to, when it's due, and the instructions, then add it to an automation so it gets assigned automatically. You can even define outcomes that decide what happens next. The Ontraport for sales teams course covers tasks in depth.
So: Simple Mail for personal emails, Advanced Mail for designed ones, Raw HTML for full code control, SMS for short texts, Inbox for conversations, and Tasks to keep your team in the loop. Next up: how to make sure your emails don't land in spam.