How to send appealing eye-catching advertising emails


How to send appealing eye-catching advertising emails? This is a question you asked yourself for sure. Well, welcome to the world of email marketing.

When launching MaxBulk Mailer you have seen that all you get is a blank document created automatically for you by the application, the place where your message is supposed to be composed.

I guess that at this very early stage you may feel a bit lost or overcome, especially when it comes to filling up that blank document and creating an e-mail marketing message for the very first time.

In this short tutorial, I will try to explain, in layman terms, how to pass this stage successfully and how to send appealing eye-catching advertising emails, like the one below, with MaxBulk Mailer.

How to send appealing eye-catching advertising emails?



How to send an appealing and eye-catching advertising email

With MaxBulk Mailer, you can actually send the same kind of messages you already receive from your favorite online shops and services. However you may send beautiful flyers or really ugly stuff, you are the designer, you are in charge, MaxBulk Mailer doesn't care, it will send it anyway!

Above all MaxBulk Mailer is a bulk email software, its goal is to deliver your message to your subscribers as fast and efficiently as possible.

Here 'efficiently' means that MaxBulk Mailer will do everything to place your message on every recipient inbox folder, with all tags (if any) properly processed, all headers properly set and all tracking code properly inserted (if click-through tracking is activated).

It will also try to handle errors, recover from connection issues, and finish the delivery in a timely manner avoiding overloading the mail server.

What is the best message format?



Bulk Email Software

Depending on the type of message you are composing you have the choice between several formats Plain Text, Styled Text, Text/HTML, HTML only and Web Page.

'Plain Text' is the basic format, what you see is what you get, text with no formatting.

With the 'Styled Text' format you can apply styles, font, color, size, bold, and so on. The message will be converted into HTML during the message delivery.

The other formats are also HTML based. HTML is the language that web designers use to create web pages.

The 'Text/HTML' has a plain text version of the message, 'HTML Only' is exclusively made of HTML, and the 'Web Page' format allows you to send a page by writing its URL.

Designing an HTML message



Designing an HTML message

Even though you can write text messages and even apply styles, MaxBulk Mailer is not really a design tool.

Therefore, to create a good-looking HTML message, it is highly recommended to use a web editor software, especially a WYSIWYG HTML Editor (There are many available for both MS Windows and Mac OS X).

With such a tool you can graphically design your message without (almost) knowing anything about HTML coding.

The workflow you may follow is something like this:

1.- Upload the pictures used by the message to your web server with a FTP Client.
2.- Design the message using absolute links for all pictures and built-in CSS.

Once you are satisfied with your design:

3.- Copy the HTML code from the HTML editor.
4.- Paste it to the MaxBulk Mailer message field.
5.- Set the format to 'HTML Only'.
6.- Click on the 'Preview' tab. You should see how your message looks like.

Pictures are missing?


Well, as stated in point #1, you need to upload the pictures to your web site and update links. Remember, you will send a message through the internet to people that will use a mail reader application to read it. In other words, they only receive the HTML code, pictures will be fetched by their mail software.

However, this will work only if the picture URLs are absolute URLs. In the message we have taken as an example for this tutorial, every picture is referenced as located in the 'pictures' folder, on the computer hard drive.

That works locally but nobody except you has access to that folder so you have to move it to your server and update links. We have used the HTML Editor search/replace function to substitute this: "pictures/" with this: "https://www.maxprog.com/mailout/pictures/"That's all.

The message formatting is different?


Check whether the CSS code is not missing in your HTML code. CSS code is what defines styles in your message. If the CSS code is missing your message will look like an ugly unformatted plain text message. The ugliest thing you have ever seen.

So, there are only two important things you have to take care about before transferring your code to MaxBulk Mailer, you should maintain the CSS code inside the HTML code and upload all the pictures to your web server and use absolute links. If you do that you will be fine.

What about compatibility? Designing a template VS using a free template



Designing a template VS using a free template

It may be a pain to make a given HTML message work properly everywhere. It mainly depends on the code complexity but you should remember that e-mail reader applications are not web browsers, many things are not supported like Javascript, Flash animations, or image maps, just to name a few. WebMail systems, even though working inside a web browser may also give compatibility problems, especially CSS conflicts.

It requires some testing until you can guarantee a message is fully compatible and safe to be sent. I believe the best approach is to design a template then spend as much time as needed to thoroughly test it with Apple Mail, Entourage, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo. If you see differences try to adjust your code and test again. Once your message displays properly in Apple Mail, Entourage, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo then you have a good template you will be able to use again and again for quite a long time, just changing the text.

On the other hand, if you don't have time or the skills to go through this process, you can just download and use a free template as we did to write this tutorial. There are lots of them on the Internet. Look for example at https://freemailtemplates.com/, it is a web that offers free templates.

They say on that page that the templates have been tested with Outlook, Apple Mail, Windows Live Mail, Yahoo! Mail, GMail, Thunderbird, Hotmail, and Lotus Notes. This is a great time-saving!

There are actually lots of sites that offer free templates, this is a small list:

- http://www.emailtemplates.org
- https://themeforest.net/category/marketing/email-templates
- https://www.campaignmonitor.com/templates

or you can even search Google.

Related Live Event: Using free HTML email templates with MaxBulk Mailer





Enjoy!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The history of iCash and Peggy Première

The iCash development was projected in the late eighties but actually began in the early nineties. The very first version was released by the end of 1991. At the time, it was built to run on Microsoft Windows 3.1 and IBM OS/2. It was coded using the Pascal language. The development of the application continued up to the release of version 2.0 on May 1995. The application wasn't known as iCash but as 'Peggy Première'. Peggy because of the Muppet Show character and the analogy with a piggy bank. And 'Première' refers to the shooting of the first scene of a movie (it means 'First' in french). Peggy Première was supposed to be the best Personal Finance software at that time. Well at least in Spain, where I was leaving. The software was only available in Spanish, not even in french my mother tongue nor English. There were no international sales projected. I spent a decade selling Peggy Première, sending 3'5 floppy disks by mail with cash on delivery as t...
Read more

iCash v3

Maxprog is proud to present a new release of iCash, new version 3.0, available now in English, German, French, Swedish, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese on Maxprog website with a lot of new features and improvements Maxprog's iCash is a $30 personal finance and money manager software designed to track incomes, expenses, credits, debts and banks transactions. It offers unlimited categories, multiple accounts creation, multiple currencies, a SQL backend engine, password protection, export/import routines, search functions, and drag & drop support. [Mac OS X , Mac OS 9, Windows] (Available in English, German, French, Swedish, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese) iCash is a Personal Finance software, a tool intended to control your money, keeping track of incomes, expenses, credits, debts and Banks transactions for you. As simple as creating the accounts you need and move money between them! You don't even need to know about accounting or even care about it! iCas...
Read more

Maxprog 16th anniversary

Maxprog just turned 16 years old last monday. Believe me or not, it has been a quite pleasant journey. That's very likely because I do what I always wanted. I am a self-taught vocational software developer, I started programming when I was around twelve. In my place computers were like UFOs so no one could help you or even understand you. I have always been fascinated by algoritms (and spinning things), I started very early and never stopped however, being fascinated by something and creating a company are two different things that require very different skill sets. Indeed, in order to be successful creating a company you have to learn about business, you have to create real products, market them, handle payments and after-sales support. Later you may need to hire people, outsource stuff, learn basic accounting etc. Finally you have to fight against your competitors, maintain a good visibility on the internet and take the right decisions in order to continue in business. Most peopl...
Read more