03 July, 2010

The Guide for Electronic Direct Mailers

I would personally like to thank Justin Holt for helping me create this tutorial.

Firstly, I would suggest you to visit the ‘5 steps to Create and EDM in 30 seconds’. If that doesn’t work with you then you could come back here to find out the reason behind it.

What you must know before you go ahead:
Gmail, Aol, Hotmail, Windows Live, MS Outlook, Thunderbird etc… All these Email Clients behave differently to EDM’s. And these are quite the hardest nutshells in the Email Marketing Arena which usually require some expertise.

Problem that you might have faced:
  • To Remove gaps between images if you have added multiple images to the body section of the email
“So if you’re a lazy or impatient and do not intend on saving 12 months x INR 4000+ = INR 48,000  a year, don’t read further.”
Let’s Begin:
#1:
If all you have to do is to have an image in the body part of your Email. Visit 5 steps to Create and EDM in 30 seconds.

#2:
If your intend to have a long image in an EDM that is taller than 1728px (pixels), then I would suggest you to have break it – horizontally using Adobe Photoshop. Ideal width for an image would be 500px. Height should not exceed 1728px. If it does, break it up horizontally in batches of 600px height
The reason behind it is available here: Campaign Monitor

#3:
To use #2 in emails you will need Thunderbird Mail Client that is similar to Microsoft Outlook but is free, download it here - Thunderbird and install it and set up your personal account like Gmail/Hotmail or any other there.

#4
Next you need to upload the images to a server. It is always ideal to upload images to your website and then use the link in the code below. Download the recommended version of File Zilla to upload it to your server. If not, you can always use free image uploader such as Tiny pic,

Once you upload, copy the link as 'dark' highlighted  in the image below - http://i45.tinypic.com/35886tg.jpg


Note: Uploading images to free upload sites can reduce quality. Resulting in slightly blur images. Eg: Copy my code and paste it directly as instructed in #5 without change and you can see the difference in quality. The first image was uploaded at TinyPic and rest on personal servers.

#5
Now open Thunderbird Email Client. And click the option ‘write’ at the top left corner. Now enter your email id. and take the cursor to the body section of your email.  Now click ‘insert’ on the top bar and select html. Once you do that, enter the code below:

#6

*******************************************************************************
<html>
<body>
<table align="center" width="828px" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">
<tr width="828px" height="1700px">
<td width="828px" height="1700px"><img style="display:block;" src="http://sdm.0fees.net/images/1_01.jpg" width="828" height="1700" border="0" alt="Must See in Malaysia" /></td></tr>
<tr width="828px" height="1700px"><td width="828px" height="1700px"><img style="display:block;" src="http://sdm.0fees.net/images/1_02.jpg" width="828" height="1700" border="0" alt="Must do in Kuching" /></td></tr>
<tr width="828px" height="1526px"><td width="828px" height="1526px"><img style="display:block;" src="http://sdm.0fees.net/images/1_03.jpg" width="828" height="1526" border="0" alt="Contact Info" /></td></tr>
</table>
</body>
</html>
**********************************************************************************

Three things you will need to change are:
(Copy the above code to a notepad or MS Word and do the necessary changes as mentioned, then copy and paste the same in the html box)
  • Width and the Height
  • Link that you copied from the Tiny Pic as seen in the screenshot earlier
  • Alternate Name (alt=””). (This is needed when the email client doesn’t download the images in the body section automatically, so that it serves the purpose of the description of the image)
#7
Once you have done the necessary changes, insert it into the html box that popped up in the Thunderbird Email Client.


#8
When your done, click ok and this should load all your images in the body part of the image perfectly.


#9
For all other complex E-Newsletter I would suggest
  • You should have –
  • Adobe Dreamweaver
  • Photoshop
  • FileZilla
  • Basic HTML Knowledge
  • And access to internet to download couple of layouts from Mail Chimp or Campaign Monitor.
Just Search for “download html newsletter templates” on google and you should have several results to download free templates. All you then have to do is open the index.htm or .html file in Notepad and edit the necessary details as mentioned in #6 plus the content.


#10
Your good to go! 
For those who asked me about not allowing the files to be automatically downloaded while sending an EDM, the answer – it depends from one email client to another. For eg: Gmail might stop loading images once. But if you grant it access to load images, then all emails coming from that particular email id may download automatically. Hence it solely depends on the Email Client and its settings.

For further assistance add me on Twitter @anikethdsouza. Also you can chat with me if I am seen online on the top window of my blog

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot for the kind help

Anonymous said...

thanks.....i hope it would help

Unknown said...

I am looking for help in growing my Company's presence in online business. Would you be interested to work part-time on this project- if so what will be your charges - pls reply to jaya@seektarvel.com.au

Aniketh Dsouza said...

Hi Jaya,
Thank you for connecting with me.
I do not actively blog at Aniketh's blog & TheValueNetwork.in however you could still find great resources there. I left some great resources there, before I started sparkz.co which is publish my research, share my ideas etc. I see that your company is into travel and my research blog highlights travel as I worked on successfully establishing Digital Presence of Tourism Malaysia & Star Cruises in India and I still strategies for them.

Apart from the above in the travel category, I also work on digital presence of a super electronic store called Vijay Sales based out of Mumbai.

My current role is that of a Digital Solutions Manager and I provide online solutions for Tourism Malaysia, Star Cruises, MT Educare, California Pizza Kitchen, Hard Rock Cafe, Shiro Restaurant & Vijay Sales.

Do let me know, what online solution are you actually looking for.

Feel free to connect with me at:
http://facebook.com/anikethdsouza
http://twitter.com/aniketh
anikethdsouza@gmail.com / aniketh@live.com

Unknown said...

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