Email newsletter

[Roboframer]

The look of our newsletter does not do justice to the amount of people it now goes out to.

It started out like a letter home, and, apart from increasing from 4 pages to 8; still is.

It is distributed in 3 ways - email, snail mail and handout and it's just the email that I want to upgrade with links, colour and photos - just too much time and money to make a few thousand hard colour copies every other month.

I'm thinking adobe acrobat - only had a quick look, seems I can download a free version - thought I had it already actually, but seems I only have adobe reader.

What's it like - user-friendly wise? All I want is text, photos and links. Couldn't I just put all that in an attached word document?

Any other ideas?

[prospero]

Personally, I find .pdf documents slightly hard to read. Too much scrolling. Most people will have the reader, but if they don't read them regularly they will probably not have latest version and will start getting pop-ups when they try to open your letter which will p them off and they will wonder wth this guy is trying to send me......

Only prob with ms Word .docs is that not everybody has Word installed.

You can do quite a lot of formatting in the e-mail itself. Insert pictures, change background etc.

[Roboframer]

You can do quite a lot of formatting in the e-mail itself. Insert pictures, change background etc.

Ok - I can do that already - so pictures of 800x600, with some in B&W would upload pretty fast I reckon.

Just that once read, recipients would have to go to old email to call it up again, unless they copied and pasted it somewhere else.

Then again, when I receive adobe links, unless I have gone to the trouble of re-naming them or saving them in a place I'll remember or find easily again - I can't easily/quickly find them.

But it's quite easy to find old email, although the format is not as nice as an adobe file.

[Dermot]

Cute PDF http://cutepdf.com/ is very good for converting documents to PDF format.

If you have Microsoft Publisher you could use that to create a news letter, once you grasp publisher it is quite easy to use, once you have mad the news letter in a Publisher format you could then convert it to a PDF copy.

http://www.constantcontact.com/index.jsp have a very nice Email method of making news letters and they will also manage the subscribe/unscribe requirement aspect of your email mailing list.

I will send you a copy of a news letter I got from a local gym who use Constant Contact,

The Framer's Workshop (Kristie (sp)) “I think” also uses Constant Contact for her email news letter, or something similar.

[markw]

You could send an email that links to a newsletter on your website. This has the advantage of keeping the email small and quick to load - the website can be very basic to accommodate your newsletters. In my experience people tend to dislike emails that are very bloated.

[WelshFramer]

The problem about email is that some email readers (like the one I use) are set to read text only and won't display fancy emails full of html and other stuff like that.

Not all of us have Word but even if we do, Word will reformat a document as it opens and the reader may well not see it as intended.

The great advantage of PDF is that the reader should see it exactly as intended. PDFs can easily be created to be consistent with other versions of Acrobat so there's no problem for readers who only have old versions. They can be optimised for email or web distribution so can be very small files.

If the document is formatted as a landscape A4 page then they can be displayed to read conveniently on a computer screen or printed for reading. They can also be set to automatically open so that the whole page is displayed to fill the screen if wished.

Here's an example of a pdf page designed for easy onscreen reading. Note that it has navigation buttons incorporated into the page to make it easy for anybody - even if they can't find Acrobat's toolbar.

Picture.jpg (183.72 KiB) Viewed 7749 times

[markw]

PDF's are very good. Personally I think pdf has many advantages over other formats from a design perspective - what you create tends to be what ends up with the customer.

One of my biggest gripes about web site design - its design by compromise - same applies if you design email newsletters, dont think for a minute that your stunning composition will look as good when your customer opens it.

[WelshFramer]

Of course, an alternative is a blog. Here's quite a nice one.

http://www.pet-portraitartist.com/blogs/

[Dermot]

Great idea the Blog…

I have often given thought to the use of a blog in business…it takes a special kind of business for a blog to work, I feel.

Knowing a little about Johns business from what he has shared, I would think his business is just about the most perfect business to have a blog………the big thing here is Johns writing ability which is great, it would keep his blog very fresh and interesting….

You can have a blog up and running in about ten minutes using https://www.blogger.com/start suggest you set up a Gmail account to keep things simple…it will also let you know if people are using the blog to contact you…

Yep super idea a blog in Johns case…

[Roboframer]

Thanks for the advice/info/emails peeps - much appreciated.

A blog! Never thought of that, will seriously look in to that.

Good 'ere innit

[WelshFramer]

Take a look at http://wordpress.org/ and http://en.wordpress.com/features/

Seems to be the most popular tool for creating blogs.

[Bill Henry]

The only disadvantage to a blog that I can see is that people will have to be directed to one through an e-mail rather than have your newsletter appear “in their face” unsolicited. That may be an extra step that some folks won’t be bothered with.

Adobe Acrobat is probably the most universally accepted format that almost everyone can read. The nice thing is that you can format both images and texts to make a really slick, professional presentation. On the down side it costs nearly £300.

But, given the cost of direct mail, that should pay for itself fairly quickly.

(I do agree with Peter that Acrobat sometimes it gets a bit “clunky” when you try to scroll it – the more images you have, the more it seems to hesitate.)