fancy emails without an ESP
September 10, 2020 10:49 AM Subscribe
I need a tool where a designer builds a branded HTML email and then a regular, non-tech-savvy person sends that email from an individual Outlook accounts, that does not require an ESP like Mailchimp / Constant Contact / etc.
Bonus points if the sender can make small edits before they send, and it also works for Mac users.
Context:
At my workjob as a designer, we often get requests for fancy-ish emails that can be sent by individual people. Normally this is used when people want to send out a one-off, nice-looking email to a short-ish list of people — like the corporate relations team sending out a holiday "e-card" to their contacts lists.
We do have an ESP, but using that would be too much work for these emails because there are twelve people all sending to small lists of twenty-ish people each, and also those twelve people all want to have their individual email addresses as the sender and add their individual email signatures and personal messages in the email, etc.
Up until now, we've used Internet Explorer's "send page by email" function to do this: we build them a webpage, they embed that in an email, and edit and send as normal. But we just dropped support for IE internally, and the "insert as text" Attach File dialog method workaround is a bit too convoluted to explain to non-tech-savvy users. We also can't just use Word docs, because the design team is all on Macs and special formatting frequently screws up between Word/Mac and Word/Windows.
We do not want to build emails as JPGs or PDF attachments, because those methods are problematic for usability,security and accessibility.
Anyone got anything?
Bonus points if the sender can make small edits before they send, and it also works for Mac users.
Context:
At my workjob as a designer, we often get requests for fancy-ish emails that can be sent by individual people. Normally this is used when people want to send out a one-off, nice-looking email to a short-ish list of people — like the corporate relations team sending out a holiday "e-card" to their contacts lists.
We do have an ESP, but using that would be too much work for these emails because there are twelve people all sending to small lists of twenty-ish people each, and also those twelve people all want to have their individual email addresses as the sender and add their individual email signatures and personal messages in the email, etc.
Up until now, we've used Internet Explorer's "send page by email" function to do this: we build them a webpage, they embed that in an email, and edit and send as normal. But we just dropped support for IE internally, and the "insert as text" Attach File dialog method workaround is a bit too convoluted to explain to non-tech-savvy users. We also can't just use Word docs, because the design team is all on Macs and special formatting frequently screws up between Word/Mac and Word/Windows.
We do not want to build emails as JPGs or PDF attachments, because those methods are problematic for usability,security and accessibility.
Anyone got anything?
This is not elegant, but I have used RapidWeaver to design the email and upload the graphics/photos to our server. (I use a "stack" that is for designing emails rather than webpages.) Then I copy the html and use Thunderbird to send the email - Thunderbird has an option for pasting html. In theory your designer could do this, using Thunderbird to send the designed card(s) to the 12 people, who then use Outlook to send it on to their 20 recipients. The Thunderbird step makes it easy for the 12 people to change the text if they want, because it preserves the ability to edit.
posted by xo at 11:25 AM on September 10, 2020
posted by xo at 11:25 AM on September 10, 2020
There are a ton of Windows desktop programs that let you maintain a subscriber list, edit your bulk e-mail, and then send it out through your regular e-mail provider. I don't have experience with any of them but if you didn't know it's a thing, well, it's a thing. In a quick Google search I found:
Some of these are free for small lists. Again, I have not tried any of these programs nor do I recommend any particular one.
posted by kindall at 11:52 AM on September 10, 2020
posted by kindall at 11:52 AM on September 10, 2020
Best answer: I'm currently dealing with this at work too, and it is a pain. What we've come up with is:
- Designer (on a Mac) builds the email, either with HTML (insert like this) or just using Outlook's limited design tools. We have some default templates at this point that we just drop header images and text into.
- Designer saves as a Mac template (.emltpl)
- The .emltpl goes as an attachment to end users who are on Macs. They'll just need to do File > New > Email From Template
- Designer sends the designed email to a Windows user (in this case the dept manager) who copies and pastes the design into a fresh email and saves that as a Windows template (.oft).
- End users who are on Windows get the .oft (Same new-from-template method above, just a different filetype)
Mac users can't use or create .oft and Windows users can't use or create .emltpl and it is so annoying.
You'll want to keep the design VERY simple, when Outlook sends an email it strips out a lot of formatting, more so than when it receives one. Also you have to make all your images 96 dpi (yes really) or Outlook will downsample them to hell. I don't know why Outlook feels the need to deep-fry every 72 dpi image because it wanted 96 dpi, but that's what it does.
I hate Outlook so much.
posted by 100kb at 12:25 PM on September 10, 2020 [4 favorites]
- Designer (on a Mac) builds the email, either with HTML (insert like this) or just using Outlook's limited design tools. We have some default templates at this point that we just drop header images and text into.
- Designer saves as a Mac template (.emltpl)
- The .emltpl goes as an attachment to end users who are on Macs. They'll just need to do File > New > Email From Template
- Designer sends the designed email to a Windows user (in this case the dept manager) who copies and pastes the design into a fresh email and saves that as a Windows template (.oft).
- End users who are on Windows get the .oft (Same new-from-template method above, just a different filetype)
Mac users can't use or create .oft and Windows users can't use or create .emltpl and it is so annoying.
You'll want to keep the design VERY simple, when Outlook sends an email it strips out a lot of formatting, more so than when it receives one. Also you have to make all your images 96 dpi (yes really) or Outlook will downsample them to hell. I don't know why Outlook feels the need to deep-fry every 72 dpi image because it wanted 96 dpi, but that's what it does.
I hate Outlook so much.
posted by 100kb at 12:25 PM on September 10, 2020 [4 favorites]
I used Beefree when I had to do a one off email outside of our usual Constant Contact/Mailchimp stuff.
It worked ok.
posted by sciencegeek at 3:25 PM on September 10, 2020 [1 favorite]
It worked ok.
posted by sciencegeek at 3:25 PM on September 10, 2020 [1 favorite]
This thread is closed to new comments.
- Design the email in maichimp or whatever. (You could use your ESP or a free mailchimp account, or anything else)
- Send the email to regular, non-tech-savvy person
- The regular non-tech-savvy person then copies/pastes that into a new email message (or forwards it), and sends it to their small list, from their regular email client.
This would also allow them to make small edits.
I'm not sure I understand your reason for not wanting to use mailchimp or another ESP for this.
posted by ManInSuit at 11:22 AM on September 10, 2020