Email: Creating and Sending Email 

Creating an Email

There are several ways to send email, but no matter how you send it, it’s always put together in the WYSIWYG editor (which stands for ‘what you see is what you get’).

The email editor looks like this:

Merging Data Into Emails (using Merge Fields in Emails)

Underneath the editor is the Mail Merge feature. To add a merge field from the contact’s database, just select the field from the drop down menu and click the Insert Field button.  Note that you can also simply type the merge field into the body of the email, or even the subject line for the same effect. Merge fields are always surrounded by [brackets]. But be careful if you choose to type it in manually because if it's not typed exactly right, it won't work.

Merging PURLs into an Email (or postcard)

Using PURLs in an email is done exactly the same way as merging any other data, as described above. Toward the bottom of the list of possible merge fields in the dropdown menu, you'll see a list of PURLs for all the Landing Pages you've created (and set hosting for). Simply select the one you'd like to put into the email, and click "Insert Merge Field," and you're all set. Note that you will only find merge field options for PURLs that point to landing pages for which you've already set up hosting. Note also that PURLs must be activated before they'll work. PURLs are activated in any of three ways:

1. Sending an email with the PURL

2. Sending a postcard with the PURL

3. Exporting a PURL

Adding Links

To add links to your emails, be sure to use the Insert/Edit link icon in the upper right of the WYSIWYG editor. By using this feature (as opposed to simply typing your links directly into the email), the system will track when your contacts click the link.

Here’s how you do it:

1. Write your email normally. For example, you might write ‘To learn more about our services, just click here.’

2. Highlight the portion of the text that you’d like to have linked. In this example, you might highlight ‘click here.’

3. Click the Insert/Edit link icon.

4. Type the destination URL in the field marked ‘Address:’. Note: You MUST type the complete URL, including http://

5. To double check that your link is typed correctly, click the green arrow button just to the right of the Address field. This will load the page that you’re linking to in the preview window. If you see the right page in the preview window, click OK at the bottom of the Insert/Edit Window.

Now when your contacts click that tracked link, you can see that the link was clicked per contact in the contact log and even set rules based on clicks using the Active Response system [Note: OfficeAutopilot Only]. Note that if you want to create a rule that’s triggered when a contact clicks a link in an email, that email MUST have been created in, and be stored in the message library.

Adding Images to Your Emails

There are two ways to add images to your emails. You can upload images to our server and use those, or use images hosted elsewhere in the internet.

Both methods are pretty simple.

Using an Image that YOU Upload and WE Host

First, you’ll click the “insert hosted image” button just underneath the email editor.

Then browse around your computer for the image, and click upload.

Then choose which folder you’d like it to go in.

Then, once it’s in our system, you can add it to any email (or postcard, or landing page for that matter). 

Adding an image that’s hosted elsewhere on the internet

We suggest you use Photobucket.com to host your images. It’s simple and free.

1. Go to photobucket.com and create an account.

2. Upload your photos. If you have a lot of photos you’re going to want to include in various emails, you may want to use their “Bulk uploader” option at the bottom of their “images from my PC” window.

3. After you upload one or more images, you will see your photo(s) at the bottom of your screen along with four different options for how to share them. In this case you will highlight and copy the URL in the “Direct Link” field.

4. Next, go back to SendPepper’s WYSIWYG message composition area, click the “Insert/Edit and Image” icon, and Paste the URL from photobucket.com into the Source field.

5. You should see your image appear in the box above.

6. You can adjust the sizing of the image in the width and height fields, title it, and give it a border. You can even adjust the relationship of the picture to the text in your email and preview it in the box on the right.

When you’re finished, click "ok" and you’re done.

Creating Text/Multi-Part Emails

Email is a complicated thing. One thing that makes it complicated is the variety of email ‘readers’ that your contacts will be using to view your emails. Some people use Outlook, others read their email online with Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, or something similar. Then there’s Mac Mail, Thunderbird, and on and on. To make matters worse, each of these programs has a host of settings that alter the way emails are displayed for them.

In order for your email to be easy-to-read by the most recipients, you’ll want to send your emails in HTML and Text versions. HTML is the fancy way to send emails, and allows your reader to view it like a webpage, with graphics, various fonts, text sizes and colors, and links. Most recipients these days will view their email in HTML. However, some people are still concerned about email security and viruses (though you can’t get a virus from email HTML!), so they ‘turn off’ HTML in their reader. Then, they only see plain text. No images, no color, no size, no links. The problem for senders is if you ONLY send an HTML version, the reader will see all your garbled code in their email.

So, someone developed a special type of email called Multi-Part email, or MIME. This allows you to send both HTML and text-only versions of your email at the same time in the same message. When your recipient receives a MIME email, the reader (not the user – the software itself) selects which one it would like to display (HTML or text) and shows that.

The great advantage is that when a user has HTML turned off, they’ll get the text-only version… and it’ll look neat and tidy with no garbled code in there. The downside for senders is that we lose the ability to track both opens and clicks. Still, that’s a small price to pay to make sure we don’t send out emails that look like garbage!

So. Here’s what you have to do:

1. Create your email in HTML as you normally would.

2. When you’re done, click the ‘copy from HTML’ button at the top of the ‘Plain Text Email’ section (below the HTML editor).

3. Clean up your text version. Remove extra line breaks and just generally tidy it up.

4. This is an important step! If you have links that were copied from the HTML version, like ‘click here’, you’ll need to change those. Because plain text email doesn’t allow for HTML links, you’ll have to change ‘click here’ to the actual link.

For example, if your HTML email says "...'click here' to see our new line of widgets..." you’ll need to change that to something like this:

To see our new line of widgets, click here: www.newwidgets.com/freeoffer.html

That way, the text-only recipient can see the link and use it. It’s a good idea to send HTML and text versions of ANY email that is sent in any volume. If you’re just shooting off a single email to a contact, you don’t need to bother. But if you’re writing a follow-up sequence that will go to all new contacts, it’s critical to add the text-only version to your emails. 

Sending Email

There are several ways to get email out to your contacts. The simplest (though least automated) is to simply select the contacts you’d like to email, and click the ‘send email’ button. You can also send email to an entire group of contacts by selecting the group, choosing ‘all in group’ in the group options section, and then clicking ‘send email’.

You can also send a single email to a contact by clicking their email address or, when you’re looking at the contact detail screen, by clicking the 'send email' button in the upper right.

Finally, you can have email sent automatically to your contacts by adding email steps into Sequences or by having some action cause an email to be sent automatically via an Active Response rule. You’ll learn about how to do that in the Automation section, below.

Using Messages from Message Library

When you’re sending messages directly from the Contacts Tab, the contact detail screen, or when you’re building a sequence in automation, you’ll see a section at the very top of the ‘create email’ screen that says ‘Message Library’. There will be a dropdown box below that says ‘Pull Message’.

When you choose a message from that dropdown box, the system will load that message from the Message Library into your email editor. From there, you can edit if you want to, or just click ‘Send’. There are big, time-saving advantages to having a lot of stored messages on the ready for you to pull for use whenever you want. Obviously, it saves time and keeps consistency in the look and feel of your emails, but there's another advantage as well.  If you use emails stored in the message library, you can have it so that when a person clicks a link in those emails, that those clicks actually trigger rules or change their lead score. [Note: OfficeAutopilot only]

Note that whether you edit it or not, the delivery results of your mailing (sent, opened, clicked, etc.) will be reflected in the Message Library along with all the other mailings of the same message. Learn all about how to best use those stats to improve your marketing.

FAQs

Some questions we've heard...

"I want the Send From or Reply To Email address to display the contact owner's info. Can I use a merge field for this?"

"When I hit enter on the editor, it creates a double space. What gives?"

"I sent an attachment with my email. Everyone got the email, but some/all my contacts said they didn't have an attachment. What happened?"

What does "Send Out Name" mean in the email editor?

Can I use CSS in my emails?

What file formats do you support for images?

I’m nearing my monthly allotment of e-mails, once I hit the cap will my account be locked out?

When I send e-mails from within the system and then hover over any of the links they are being redirected to pep.rs/randomnumber here. Why?

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