E-Mail Marketing

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"Our church wants to begin sending out the monthly newsletter as an e-mail. Do you use a certain program to create your e-mail newsletters? We've tried using Microsoft Word and saving it as an HTML file, but the formatting isn't consistent and has changed fonts, graphics, etc. when others try to open it. Any suggestions?" -- Martha Middleton, Covenant Presbyterian Church

Word 2000 and later versions create a very rigid sort of HTML formatting that causes all sorts of problems. The last HTML-friendly version was Word 97, which produces fairly clean HTML. A better approach, however is to (1) write and edit your newsletter in Word (of any flavor). (2) Import it as a Word .doc file into Microsoft FrontPage 2003, which will convert it to decent HTML. Then (3) format it in FrontPage for final e-mailing. You'll get much nicer HTML results with FrontPage (or another WYSIWYG web design program, such as Adobe Dreamweaver) than you'll ever get with Word.

If your mailing list is very large, for a nicer look you may want to consider using one of the attractive templates included with FrontPage or with a low-end e-mail service, such as AWeber, ConstantContact, IntelliContact, etc. Using Outlook to send an e-zine causes some real pain, both from design and list maintenance points of view. Several excellent e-mailing services begin at $15 to $20 per month, which rapidly beats postal mailings in terms of time to copy, label, and mail, as well as speed of delivery, copying costs, and postage. Been there. Done that. E-mail rocks!