It is an important time of the year to be marketing. We have included a couple of blog posts this year on the email editor and image insertion in PhotoOne. The post today puts a finer point on several features in our studio management software that will allow additional creative flexibility.
So you’ve added images to your emails, but now what? After inserting an image you may find yourself at a loss on how to improve your marketing emails. The PhotoOne email editor has more than just the ability to insert images; it is also very easy to “hyperlink” the image to the homepage of your website and use the format tabs to “create an email screen.”
We will review hyperlinking. In order to add a link to your email follow these steps:
1) highlight a word or image in your email that you wish to link
2) click the earth icon next to the “insert image” button
3) this brings up a window with two fields: URL and email type
4) to link to a URL:a) leave the email type at http:
b) copy the address to the website into the URL field while making sure you include the whole link. example: http://www.photoonesoftware.com5. to link to an email address that will open the default email application:
a) change the email type to mailto:
b) enter the email address into the URL box. (Note: Don’t delete the text auto-added that says “mailto:”)That’s it! Now if your customer clicks the image or text it will bring them to the website you specified.
The next topic is the HTML and the plain text tabs. Let’s first provide a brief overview on how email works. With the prevalence of DSL and cable, emails are able to have complex code called HTML. Before this infrastructure upgrade, plain text was the only option for emails. Plain text means no images, no links to websites, and no fancy colors or backgrounds; just words. With faster connections images, links and code became more acceptable and HTML became the standard. You should note though that there are some rare cases where email providers only support plain text which is where the text tab comes in.
If you click on the text tab you’ll either see a blank email or your email, but just text. If you have something entered, but this is blank you can click the “generate text from HTML” and it will create a plain text email from your original email. If you have just an image for your email PhotoOne can’t generate text from it and you may want to make a small text email explaining your promotion. Creating a separate plain text email will not affect the HTML email and will only go to customers that don’t support HTML.
The HTML tab supports HTML 4.0 code and any changes you make while on this tab affect the edit tab and vice versa. If you know HTML you can create code here or you can use a program that allows you to generate HTML. Once done, just copy the code from that program and paste it into this tab.
There are hundreds of places to learn HTML, but if you are looking for a place to start W3Schools has several different tutorials from the basics, to tables and forms. I recommend starting with fonts and backgrounds and then moving onto tables and forms. With fonts and backgrounds you will be able to customize the color and font style of your text as well as the background. Tables may be useful if you have a variety of packages you want to show off and forms are great for getting quick feedback from your customers.
I want to thank Shane for providing this blog post. Shane is a member of our Technical Support team at PhotoOne. One thing he did want me to point out is that our Technical Support team supports PhotoOne and not HTML coding.
{ 0 comments… add one now }