As you will all be aware, there have been many changes on the Personalised Gift Ideas website over the past few months. We are now sending more regular emails to our customer base, informing them of our latest offers, company news and new products. In order to reach your customer base effectively and to send out thousands of emails, many businesses use companies such as Mailchimp.
While sending last week’s newsletter, not only did we come across the usual html import issues which occur on a weekly basis, we also ran into some difficulty once the newsletter had been sent to our customers. Quite niavely, we assumed that once the html preview and test worked in Mailchimp and in your own email account (ie. Gmail), then it would work in all email accounts.
Little did we know how different each email provider is – the difference between viewing html coded image banners in Googlemail and Hotmail is quite remarkable. It’s difficult to comprehend that the same html coded email can appear so differently to different people, depending on which email provider they are using.
This however was not the main issue…. our main issue this week was that of web browsers. Having tested our email newsletter thoroughly and with different email providers as well, we sent the newsletter, as normal, only to receive an email from one of our web designers ten minutes later. The screenshot he provided us with, showed our email as a blank sheet of colour, even after clicking on the oligatory ‘Display Images’ which will appear at the top of the email.
We were puzzled at first… we had tested the email… it had worked perfectly in all of our email accounts… why on earth was it not appearing? We were somewhat panicking at the fact that this now ‘blank’ email had gone out to thousands of our customers.
After puzzling over this for some time, we realised that our web designer was using the web browser ‘Chrome‘, we were using ‘Firefox‘ and most of our customers would be using ‘Internet Explorer’ to view our newsletter. Therein lay the problem. The code which we had used was not being viewed properly in Chrome and Internet Explorer, only in Firefox. A quick edit of the header and footer tags was enough to change this mixed up email into the superb newsletter we had originally created. We just hope that our customers weren’t too puzzled by the mixed up images.
***TOP TIP:*** If you’re coding a newsletter for distribution through MailChimp, make sure you use DreamWeaver to construct your code – MailChimp likes this format.
It just shows you, not matter how prepared you are and how much you test html code and test your newsletter, when using a mass-email provider such as MailChimp, the problems can be never ending until you are able to work in the format which MailChimp requires.
