Poll: How do you typically create HTML email?

I use MS Publisher when I want to send a nice looking email. Instead of using one of the print templates I have used the email form to start with and then made some changes to it like extending the width of the page. The beauty of this is that you can preview it at any time and make sure it looks the way you want.

Not knowing what others are thinking, I must confess to looking online for answers to this very question. Now I understand that it is not a transparent to you as it is to me, let me try a different question and see if that makes better sense.

I do freelance graphic design for a living, on e of my clients asked me to “do an email distribution of the newsletter” and forwarded a copy of a email newsletter he recieved that was styled like a mini web page (header, footer, two columns, multiple sections etc) with links back to articles on their website.

To try and figure it out, the only thing I could think to search for was “html in an email” maybe digital newsletter would have been better?

Am I missing something? What are the advantages of sending out newsletters in html emails instead of pdf attachments?

To create HTML email campaigns in a corporate environment, I use Photoshop/Dreamweaver to create the message – which is really just a webpage with some very restricted coding guidelines applied. I then upload, test and send out the message in bulk through an email marketing service. Here is a list of a number of the more popular services: http://email-marketing-service-review.toptenreviews.com/.

This process is the defacto standard and probably what people are really asking about when discussing this topic. Creating a message through Outlook, or some other email program will most likely produce a design that does not render properly in all desktop/webmail clients. Likewise, creating a message with perfect semantic css & html is likely to produce unwanted results in many email clients – the current gmail interface being the worst offender! There are considerations such as image-blocking, and level of css support which impact the way you need to code the message for optimal deliverability. It’s a moving target that requires keeping up on issues, and knowing your customer base (ie: if no one in your base uses Lotus Notes, do you really care if the message won’t render well for this client?)

An email marketing service usually offers some sort of preview to view your code in various desktop/webmail clients. It also handles a bulk mailing that is spam-filter friendly. It handles your lists, and the required unsubscribe functions. And it tracks click-throughs and other stats that you should be basing your future email program on. Many offer templates or WYSIWYG editors to create code in the currently accepted format for email.

It’s a complex topic, but there are plenty of internet resources available to begin the process of educating yourself…dive in.

Am I missing something here? I send out html email newsletters all the time and I use ConstantContact.com to do it. (Mostly for historical reasons, there are lots of other services that are just as good.) Why would anyone go to the trouble of creating your own html newsletter mechanism when there are already perfectly good ones out there that cost a pittance to use?

I have a related question, though, that I haven’t been able to find a solution to. I want to add the ability to send a recommendation/invitation to friends from my website (i.e. just like those on-line greeting card sites: prepackaged content that the user can customize with a personal message and enter recipients for), but I don’t want to become a tool for spammers. Any existing solutions for this, or do I have to build my own?

Exactly! Constant Contact IS an email marketing service. You must be using their templates. The reason you may want to create your own template would be to stay within the guidelines of a corporate brand. Many of CC’s templates are restrictive in that regard, and often look generic.

As far as the invitations, there are a number of scripts out there to do this – here are a couple I found on hotscripts:
http://script66.com/turnkey-greeting-cards-website/
http://www.greetingcardpro.com/.

I guess the real question would be – what do you want to do with the email addresses you are collecting in this manner. If this is a method of collecting addresses, you’d probably want it to tie into your Constant Contact lists – perhaps a derivative of their survey forms would work. Or, look into more sophisticated email marketing companies who offer this type of integration.

Personally, I most often use plain-text for email; using only a bit of formatting for very special ocassions.
For my site’s (still undercosntruction) newsletter, however, I leave text/HTML at the choice of each subscriber. I have a server script (roughly below 100 lines) that produces a XML “excerpt” from the content DB and toss it through different, almost trivial (they wouldn’t reach the 200 lines put together), XSLT sheets to generate my google sitemaps, my RSS feeds, and both variants of the newsletter.
Why would I put effort on money on doing what my server can do efficiently and for free?