Email Newsletters

Custom Templates and Design For Email Marketing

Another service I offer for clients is email design – HTML-based emails, with a custom design and build, for your monthly company newsletters, special offers, sales, and more.

Email marketing helps you stay in touch with your customers, members, supporters, and clients. With HTML-based emails, you can carry the same style and professionalism of your website over to the inbox.

Experience Matters

As as web designer, I can easily translate the look and feel of your website over to an email tempate, using the same styles, colors, and  images as you do online. HTML software is notoriously behind the times in terms of what they will and won't support–code that web browsers have supported for years still aren't supported in email software. And the way Gmail renders your email design could vary from say, Outlook Express. A good campaign requires testing across multiple software setups, and knowledge of what works (and what doesn't)

Managing Newsletters

There are a number of choices out there, for what to use when managing your email marketing campaigns. You may have heard of Constant Contact. Others include Vertical Response, Emma, Campaign Monitor, and my current fav, MailChimp.

Beyond designing and building an email template, I can help setup your email marketing campaign:

• Advice on which email marketing service to choose
• Help with account setup
• Create signup forms within your current site, linking to your new account
• Designs integrated with your new email marketing software
• Testing of HTML emails across a variety of email readers (Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, etc.)

Are Managed Service Required?

For small lists, I have worked with PHPList, a free, open-source solution where the signup forms and newsletter lists are managed off your web server. This is a very inexpensive option, for lists of 100 or less, with no ongoing costs. A service like MailChimp now offers free accounts for small email lists, however, with the added advantage a managed service offers.

In a typical shared hosting environment, there is a limit to the number of emails that can be sent at once (up to 500/day), and email templates tagged as SPAM (incorrectly or not) can adversly affect an account's email service. Should your email list grow to a sizeable number, managing the list on your own becomes problemic.

Additional Resources

If you want to read up on some of this yourself, here's some good links.

* http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/code-html-email-newsletters
* http://www.email-standards.org/
* http://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/category-archive/cat/designing-...
* http://spamcheck.sitesell.com/
* http://www.mailchimp.com/articles/email_marketing_guide/
* http://www.mailchimp.com/articles/top-html-email-coding-mistakes/
* http://htmlemailgallery.com/

Contact

For more information, contact me or request an estimate.