Digital Marketing

Electronic Data Mailers aka Emailers
WOW… we are so digital and receive so much of ‘Spam’ every day but when I tried to look for the basic information of all… ‘what are electronic data mailers’, I could not find a single blog post, article or any decent  information about it.
So ladies and gentlemen, this post of mine is dedicated to a digital marketer’s best friend EDMs, aka. Electronic Data Mailer, aka. Emailers, aka. Spam mail…

An Emailer is a simple mail sent out to more than one individual and generally but not necessarily promotes something or the other. They are used most popularly to sell or promote whatever the paying Brand Manager tell the digital marketing agency to do.
I created a few mailers for my Bro’s website and will be using the screen shots from the same to explain the simpler version of creating the mailers.
How to create the mailer:
Image > HTML mapping > Hosting

The task of creating the image is generally assigned to the highly paid (or not so highly paid but highly client billed individuals) to think of the best of the creatives to express a brand offering / offer / discount etc. to be communicated in a single image.

The creative guys use Adobe Photoshop or one of the many more so complex image creation solutions that even to open the basic of the Photoshop softwares gives you a headache. ‘Hats off’ to the guy / team who thought of so much of functionality for creating the simple images.

Here is a the short cut for creating the same
Use the power point or even paint to create the image that you want to promote:

Mailer Image in MS-Power Point

Arrange the images in the manner that you feel is the best for expressing the purpose of the mailer in a single view.
Take a screen shot of the slide in the normal view of the presentation, something similar to the above image, as the presentation view distorts the image a bit. Paste the image in paint (helps in avoiding the distortion) and select the image that you require.  As a result what you get is the image of your mailer.

Image in MS-Paint

Apnabill.com Emailer

Copy the image and start the Photoshop (can’t help it… you do need the Photoshop for creating the image map) and select from the main menu file>> and new >>. It will automatically detect the image size from the clipboard (image that you have in copy) and create the new image pane of the appropriate size.

Select the slice tool from the tool box

Photoshop Slice Tool

And divide the image in typically 4-6 parts. To slice, start from one of the corners of the image and create equal sized boxes, each starting from the corner of the other box till you complete cover the image with the boxes.
Again go to the main menu and select the following:

File >> Save for Web

Photoshop - Image Mapping

The next window that opens up you need to change the optimized file format to JPEG (preferred for mailers), compression quality to maximum and check the progressive check box. Also open the image menu in the lower half of the page and put the width as 600 (again, preferred for mailers).
Click on save and …………. There you have it the HTML map for your mailer!!
However there are still a few things left before you can use the mailer. You need to host the images the images on you web server and update the link in the HTML file. And you need to update the following in the  coding: the link of the landing page as well as the alternate text for the images.

And there you have it…. your mailer is ready to go out in the market!!

BTW… my bro has an amazing reseller program going on for bloggers and website owners!!  Go check out….. Apnabill.com Resellers Program