Html emails campaigns

[hnava]

Hello,
I have already looked in the forum and found no solution to my problem. Our company already has templates for email campaigns that have been tested to work in most major email clients. We really want to manage everything from Sugar, since until now we had been using MailChimp for our marketing campaigns without any problem. We were really excited to find out that Sugar has email marketing capabilities, but the excitement has turned into a lot of frustration because we can't use our templates in the html editor (tinymce) that is stripping out our code and images, it completely strips out the paths to the image urls and messes the styles in the head tags.

We've tried configuring tinymce, even turning off the clean up, but nothing we do seems to work, and their instructions are just not easy to follow. It seems that not just us but a lot of people are having the same problem and no one is finding a clear solution to follow.

I dont dare ask in the Tinymce forum because I've already read a lot in it these past days them and despite the inmense amount of people with the same problem, the developers are very rude and dont give any clear solutions but just insist in that this is how it should be. Our templates are tested and there's nothing wrong with the code so I dont want tinymce modifying any of the code.

We really want to switch to sugar for our email campaigns, so after days of trying to figure this out, I thought that maybe using another editor like CKEditor would work for us, however I dont know how to install it in Sugar. I have already uploaded the files to the include folder, but I dont know what other files should be modified and exactly how.

Do you have any suggestion for this problem please? Would changing to CKEditor help us? Is there any other solution? It would really be a pitty not being able to manage everything, including our email marketing through Sugar, the whole point of the nice tracking and reporting tools for the campaigns you have there would be useless.

Thank you!

[stephanw]

we have similiar issues. html code, that looks perfect on a webpage, is messed up delivered via the sugar email client. even if it looks good in the tinymc editor.
would be helpful to some "rules", what to be done within the editor and what to avoid.

regards

stephan

www.niftybits.de

[noisygecko]

Has anyone figured this out? We are running into it and need to get an email sent out. Is there some way of completely avoiding the WYSIWYG editor?

[webmalone]

I am not a Sugar Guru, but I have become very familiar with using Sugar to perform large HTML email marketing campaigns, and have performed over 20 in the last year, and just completed my first with version 6, to just over 100k unique emails.

I have experienced all the troubles that are expressed in numerous threads in the forum, and I have found solutions to everything that has been driving me crazy ... except no Sugar 6 Theme in CE.

This topic about HTML emails I can sum up by saying the HTML editor in Sugar is useless. For one, it inserts TBODY tags into your html, no matter if you have them or not ... Spam filters do not like that tag. It also has trouble with Word HTML ... but you shouldn't be using Word to create HTML pages anyway because the code is extremely heavy and it never looks right.

So the only way I've found to manage the code for both the HTML and TEXT is directly in the database. I use Navicat to connect to MySQL, which is kinda like using an ADP file in Access for MSSQL. I copy and paste the code directly into the email_templates table and then initiate the send using the Sugar Interface.

I use Dreamweaver to create the HTML and after creating the TRACKERS in sugar, I just put that TRACKER tag into Dreamweaver.

It's critical to manage the TEXT version this way too, BECAUSE if you open the email using the HTML Editor, then edit the Text message, and then click save, it will insert the TBODY tags and whatever else it wants to. It's very silly and I've tried to fix it and said the hell with it.

I'm also overcoming the Bounce Back problem using a 3rd party program that monitors the bounce back Inbox and compares those messages to the email_addresses table, flagging HARD and SOFT bounces. THIS has been the hardest thing to overcome!

I have another tip for running your email TEST messages through a SPAM filter before you send the actual email and I have found this to be the most helpful tool for tuning my html ... it gives every email a score.

After a year of messing with Sugar for email marketing, I don't really understand why I'm still using it. But I guess it's because it's free and hip

[anat]

Hi,
Are you using an Emogrifier?
How are you setting the CSS for the emails? If you are using standard CSS style blocks, then you are doing it wrong.

Email is a very different beast from web sites and instead of having CSS and HTML separate, you need to put them together.
If you want your paragraphs to be a slight grey with a set font family and size, then EVERY <p> needs these styles set.

e.g

<p style="font-size:12px;color:#444;font-family:Arial,Verdana,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Your content</p>

I personally use http://www.pelagodesign.com/sidecar/emogrifier/ to Emogrify the CSS into the HTML. Seems to do a reasonable job, with only some minor tweaks needed here and there.

SugarCRM does cut out the <HEAD></HEAD> and ending </BODY> contents of your code because it puts in it's own unsubscribe link and because you shouldn't need it as email clients ignore it.

If your issue is that SugarCRM is screwing up your HTML, then that's possibly because you haven't allowed certain tags to be allowed in HTML emails (e.g iframes or whatever weird things it blocks by default because you shouldn't be using them), or because of issues with the WYSIWYG editor.


Webmalone, what bounceback issue are your referring to?
Also, do you have any suggested ways of getting a spam score? At the moment we send the emails to about 8 email addresses, some with Gmail/Google Apps, with Yahoo, Hotmail and a local ISP. None are getting marked as spam as far as we can tell.
We are also checking the emails in the web clients, Entourage, Outlook and Thunderbird. Sometimes it'll like fine in one, except maybe some of the text is a little darker, you'll then look in another client to discover that the text isn't being styled and has defaulted to a different font and looks rather ugly.

[webmalone]

Just finished my "Cyber Sale" email campaign using Sugar 6 and it went very smooth. I used Sugar to manage my Target Lists, to initiate the send, calculate Opened Emails and to manage the Unsubscribes.

I do not use Sugar to manage the HTML or Text versions, Bounce-Backs, or the Click-thru data. For Click-thrus I simply add Google Analytic parameters to each email link and it works really well. The click-thru data is not real-time (updated nightly) but the data is much more revealing and I highly recommend this method ... see link format below.

I use an Exchange server to send, and because many of the bounce back emails come back as an attachment, Sugar cannot read the RemoveMe ID in the attachment and therefore it cannot accurately track the Bounce Backs ... not even close. So I use Arial's Campaign Enterprise to monitor and process the bounce-back inbox and write the Hard and Soft bounces into the Sugar Database, into 2 new fields I added to the Email Address table. I have performed a couple upgrades and those fields are still there, so I'm happy.

Before sending an email I use SiteSell to grade each message, and although I cannot confirm this grade means anything, it certainly has made me focus on the code and inline css and wording and font and so on ... and my open rates have gone up because of it ... and it's free. In order to use this service I had to modify the language file that embeds [TEST]: in the front of the subject line for each Test email. I changed it to simple say TEST (no brackets or colon) and I receive a bounce back email (usually seconds after I send a test email) and it giving me a grade for that message. I then tune the code (BOTH THE HTML AND TEXT) to figure out why the score is what it is. This took me some time to figure out, but it works great.

This email was graded at a 1.9 ... I strive for < 2. They say anything below a 4 is good to go.

http://www.egrips.com/newsletters/10...%2BSale%2B2010

[bkahlert]

http://www.inbox25.com/sugarcrm.php#content... check it out

[takingyouforward]

Well, click the html icon button then paste your solid html script. make sure the images should be a full path so that it will show up clearly. You can still use your html codes for email marketing or even auto responder can still. If there are still any problems, just post it here. I know What You See Is What You Get will not accept any html code there, it will strip out those codes and will display on the page. if you change the format to only html script box then paste it there.