Email Campaign Walkthrough This guide is distributed with software that includes an end-user agreement, this guide, as well as the software described in it, is furnished under license and may be used or copied only in accordance with the terms of such license. Except as permitted by any such license, no part of this guide may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any other means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of Macware, Inc. Please note that the content in this guide is protected under copyright law even if it is not distributed with the software that includes an end-user agreement. The content of this guide is furnished for informational use only, is subject to change without notice, and should not be construed as a commitment by Macware, Inc. Macware, Inc. assumes no responsibility or liability for any errors or inaccuracies that may appear in the informational content contained in this guide. 2007 Macware, Inc. All rights reserved. Macware, the Macware logo, Email Campaign, and macxware are either trademarks or registered trademarks of Macware, Inc. or Summitsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Apple, Mac, the Mac logo, the Universal logo, the Made for Mac logo and Macintosh are trademarks or registered trademarks of Apple Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. Other product(s), font(s), and company names and logos may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies. Macware, Inc. Omaha, Nebraska USA www.macxware.com 1
TABLE OF CONTENTS PRODUCT REGISTRATION... 3 GETTING STARTED... 3 THE WALKTHROUGH... 3 RECIPIENTS... 9 SETTINGS... 12 PREFERENCES... 14 SENDING THE MESSAGE... 16 GETTING TECHNICAL SUPPORT... 18 2
PRODUCT REGISTRATION Registering Email Campaign is important. Registration provides you with timely access to the latest product updates, technical support, valuable information about new product releases, articles, tips and hints, and special offers on other products by Macware, Inc. You can register Email Campaign online at: www.macxware.com/site/register.asp GETTING STARTED Thank you for purchasing Email Campaign. This printed walkthrough provides an Email Campaign example that will help you quickly create and send your first message. THE WALKTHROUGH If you don't have the red mailbox icon on your desktop or dashboard, go to your Applications folder and open the Email Campaign folder. This folder shows the 4 main tools: Email Campaign, Extractor, Verifier, and Bounce Handler. 3
The Components folder includes images used in the pre-designed templates that you may want to use in the messages you send. For more information on this, please click here to learn about including images or pictures in your emails. You can drag any of these icons onto your dock in order to provide a quick link to open the applications without having to go to the Email Campaign folder every time. Now open Email Campaign by double clicking the red mailbox icon... When Email Campaign opens, you will be looking at the Message section with all fields blank. For our purposes, we will use one of the pre-designed templates to quickly design a message to send to our mail list. To view the template options, go to: File Templates You will see template categories for Announcements, Letters, Newsletters, Press Releases, Promotions, Seasonal, Transactions, and Updates. Each category contains HTML and Plain Text templates, with HTML templates having two additional options of being Center Justified or Left Justified. For our example, please choose the following template: File Templates Promotions HTML Center Justified WebsiteSaleC7.cxz 4
The promotions template will automatically open to the Preview section in order for you to view how it would look in someone's mailbox. You can see in the Preview that there are some obvious changes that need to be made; most notably the dummy text needs to be replaced with your own. To do this, click the Message tab at the top: The Message section shows the HTML code behind the message you see in the Preview section (the HTML code is what is interpreted by a person's email client, which gives you what you see in the Preview window). To make it easier to find the text you need to change, the HTML code has been spaced out to keep the editable text separate. This means that any line in this section that begins with a "<" is code that generally should not be touched unless you know what you are doing. The lines that don't begin with "<" are what you should focus your attention on: 5
As you make changes to the editable text, you can see how it looks at any time by going back to the Preview section. If you are planning on using the "sale" image that is in this message, you will need to follow these steps. 1) Locate the image by looking at the current location of it on your Mac. This is found in the Message section, looking at the code between the two lines of text that are above and below it when viewed in Preview: <img src="applications/email Campaign/Components/Images/graphics/promotions/salegradient4.jpg" width="600" height="300" alt="sale" /> Please Note: All images included with the pre-designed templates are located in the Email Campaign Applications folder (Applications Email Campaign Components Images). 2) Once you locate the salegradient4.jpg in the Images folder, you will need to upload it to a location on your current website. We recommend you upload the entire Images folder all at 6
once; the size of this folder is small and you can then link to other images in these folders using the same URL logic without much hassle. The most common way to do this is to use FTP software (Cyberduck is a great free FTP software option) if you are already able to connect to your website source by this method; you would then only need to connect to your site and upload the Images folder to your site location. If you have some tech person managing your website, then you would just need to contact them, give them the Images folder and tell them you want this folder uploaded to your site location. For example, say your website is located at: http://www.yourwebsite.com You can upload the Images folder to the root of this website if you want, which means the Images folder would be located at: http://www.yourwebsite.com/images... If you do this, then in order for others to view the images in the pre-designed templates you would now need to change the image link in the HTML code from: <img src="applications/email Campaign/Components/Images/graphics/promotions/salegradient4.jpg" width="600" height="300" alt="sale" /> to: <img src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/graphics/promotions/salegradient4.jpg" width="600" height="300" alt="sale" /> This way, once you send the email message, all people on your mail list will be able to view this image because it is now able to be downloaded directly from your website. If you kept the original image link, only you would be able to view the image in the message because it is directly linked to your hard disk (which other people won't have access to). 3) You might also notice "Sale" in the image link: <img src="applications/email Campaign/Components/Images/graphics/promotions/salegradient4.jpg" width="600" height="300" alt="sale" /> This is alternate text which you can edit that displays if someone hovers their mouse pointer over that image. For example, you can change this to: <img src="applications/email Campaign/Components/Images/graphics/promotions/salegradient4.jpg" width="600" height="300" alt="sale expires Friday, April 23rd!" /> When your mail recipients hover their mouse over the image now, they will see: 7
Sale expires Friday, April 23rd! 4) One final note about images in your message...if you choose to replace any image in the pre-designed templates with your own, make sure you also change the width and height in the HTML code. For example, if the included image is pointing to a location on your website: <img src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/graphics/promotions/salegradient4.jpg" width="600" height="300" alt="sale" /> You might want to replace it with a picture of a house, for example, called "pictureofhouse.jpg". <img src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/graphics/promotions/pictureofhouse.jpg" width="600" height="300" alt="sale" /> However, if your house picture is a different size than the sale image (width="600" height="300") you will need to also change the width and height in the HTML code; otherwise it will get stretched or scrunched because it does not fit into the dimensions of the current HTML code. To find out the size of your picture on a Mac, just right mouse click on the image and choose "Get Info". In the window that opens, you will see Dimensions under the "More Info" category: width x height If your house picture dimension is 500 x 400, then change the HTML code to reflect this new size: <img src="http://www.yourwebsite.com/images/graphics/promotions/pictureofhouse.jpg" width="500" height="400" alt="picture of house" /> Your image should now show up correctly in the message, and by changing the "alt" tag from "Sale" to "Picture of house", your picture can be correctly identified. Your final step in completing your message is to make sure your Subject line is what you want. The Subject should be something catchy, enticing or even just straightforward: (your name/company name) June Newsletter (your name/company name) Press Release (your name/company name) Introduces New Product/Service (your name/company name) Sale - Save up to 50% Once you are happy with your changes, check them once more in the Preview section and then move on to the Recipients section. 8
RECIPIENTS Pulling Together Your Mail List When you first view the Recipients section, it will look blank: It is now your job to fill it with the people on your mail list, which can be done several ways... 9
1) Click the Import icon in the toolbar to see a list of options: To import the people in your Address Book, select "From Address Book...". To import the email addresses from an Apple Mail mailbox, select "From Apple Mail...". This will open Mail and a dialog will appear asking which mailbox you want to import. You need to have a mailbox that you created with emails from the people you want on your list; you cannot just enter "Inbox". For example, if you have been corresponding with people you want on your list for some time, you can save their previous emails in a new mailbox called "Mail List". When you then are ready to import your mail list from Apple Mail, just enter Mail List in the dialog when it appears and Email Campaign will automatically import the email addresses from this mailbox. To create a new mailbox in Apple Mail: Open Mail and then select "New Mailbox..." from the Mailbox menu. Type in a "Name" and then click OK. You should now notice the new mailbox on the left side of the Mail application where Inbox, Drafts, Sent, Trash, etc. are located. 2) You can also just drag and drop a text or Excel file directly into the Recipients window to add those people in these files to your Recipients list. Email Campaign will automatically remove any duplicates from your Recipients list. Depending on how large your list or mailbox is, this may take some time so be patient. Smaller lists should fill almost instantly. 10
3) One last option to building your Recipient mail list is to enter it manually. This can be done by clicking the plus (+) symbol next to the pull-down menu. This will add a new recipient entry at the bottom of your current list, allowing you to enter any fields necessary (at least the email address needs to be entered for any new recipient). Once your list is imported, the Delivery column checkboxes should all be active (checked). This means that your message will be sent to any email address that is checked. You should also "Save" your list by clicking the Save button. When the dialog opens, enter the name of your mail list in the "List name" box and click OK. Your list will now be available to you in the pull-down menu next to the Save button for any future email campaign. One other thing to note about the Recipients section: You can click the cog-like symbol button next to the "+" button to manage your list options: You can "Remove All" which clears your entire list. You can "Reset All" which automatically readies your current mail list to be sent again. You can "Unsubscribe" people in your mail list which keeps their entries in your list, but stops emails from being sent to them. 11
When you are finished with your Recipients, it is now time to set up Email Campaign to get ready to send your message. Click the Settings section. SETTINGS Making Email Campaign Ready to Send the Message When the Settings window first opens, you will see this: The main thing you need to do is set up your SMTP host. 12
Who do you get your Internet from? Before we go any further it is important to understand your Internet connection. Most Internet providers don't allow you to just start sending out thousands of emails all at once at any time of the day; most have strict guidelines about how many emails can be sent in a certain amount of time, and what time of the day they can be sent. If your list is only a few hundred (and you think it will stay about this size), you probably don't have to worry too much. If your list is larger than a few hundred, or you intend to do regular email campaigns, you should call your Internet provider about setting up a business account or what you need to do in order to comply with their bulk mail policy. If you are able to use your current email account settings (because your list is not more than a few hundred) then you can find what needs to go in the "SMTP host" field by going into your current email settings. For example, if you currently use Apple Mail, you can open Mail and select Preferences from the Mail menu. Choose Accounts from the toolbar and select the email account you are using. You will now see a field called "Outgoing Mail Server (SMTP)". What is entered in this field is what needs to entered as your SMTP host for Email Campaign. For the other fields: Authentication: you can most likely keep this as "None", in which case the Account ID and Password fields can remain blank. Delivery: If your list is under 15,000 people, you should be able to keep the checkmark in the Singly box. This means that each email will be sent one at a time. Group mails: Keep this "All at once" if you list is small enough that you will be able to send it everyone on your list in a single session timeframe. You can use the following "Connections", "Group mails", and "Interval" settings to send to larger lists quicker: 13
From: this should be your valid email address that you are using for the email campaign. If you are able to create a special email address for your email campaigns (beginning with "promotion" or "update", for example) that is highly recommended since this email may eventually be flagged by a recipient's junk mail filters. If this happens, you can easily change it to something else. Name: This is where you can enter your company name or personal name that will show up before the email address in the From field when a person receives your email: John Doe [user@email.com] These are the only fields really necessary, although the other ones give you a greater degree of control as you learn more about email marketing. Read the Settings section of this help file for more information on this. When you are finished with the Settings, click the Save button and name your settings something easily identifiable. You are now almost ready to send your first campaign, but we should touch on Preferences before doing so. Click the Preferences button at the top right of the Email Campaign window, or select "Preferences" from the Email Campaign menu. PREFERENCES Fine-tuning the Details When Preferences first opens, you will see the Document section. This is primarily personal preference settings for creating a new Message from scratch, and how the text in the Message section will look to you. 14
For now, click the Misc. category on the left to open these options: If your list is large, and you want your message to be delivered as quickly as possible, uncheck: Output connection log to a file If this remains checked, then Email Campaign will track each step of the delivery process for each recipient the message is sent to. This only takes a few seconds per email address, but if your list is several thousand people it can add up to many extra hours of delivery time. Follow the options in the screenshot above to keep your campaigns quick, powerful and easier to handle. Click OK to save your settings and exit Preferences. 15
SENDING THE MESSAGE Sending a Test Message Now that you are ready to send, it is good practice to send a test message to yourself before sending to the people on your list. This way, if you see any glaring mistakes, or broken links, etc., you can change them before it is too late. To send a test message, select "Test Mode" from the Delivery menu and then go to the Settings section of Email Campaign. The "From" field is where the test message will be sent to. We recommend you enter an email that you can check on another computer, or an online account like Yahoo, Hotmail, MSN, GMail, etc.; this way, if you have images placed in your message you can make sure they show up when sent. Once your email is entered in the "From" field, click the Send button at the top left of the Email Campaign toolbar. This will send the message to your email address. 16
Sending to Your Recipient List If all looks good, go back to the Delivery menu and uncheck the "Test Mode" option. You are now ready to send your email campaign. Click the Send button at the top left of the Email Campaign toolbar to begin. You can also schedule when to begin by selecting "Schedule..." in the Delivery menu. If you are scheduling it, then adjust the date and time you wish the campaign to begin in the schedule window that slides down from the top. Then click the OK button to prepare Email Campaign to send at this time. Once your message begins mailing to your Recipients, you can view the progress in the Delivery section, or step away from your computer. Once sending is complete, you will receive a delivery report (delivered to the email address in the Settings "From" field) summarizing how long it took, the rate of delivery per second, how many people received your email and more. You are now done with your first email campaign! For more detailed information on the features of Email Campaign, please refer to the Help file located in the Help menu of the application. 17
GETTING TECHNICAL SUPPORT Purchasing Email Campaign gives you free access to Macware s online technical support located at: http://support.summitsoftcorp.com/ Email Technical Support: support@macxware.com You can find additional help topics by going to Help Email Campaign Help in the program menu. www.macxware.com 18