You have a list of clients and you want a quick, easy and free way to send them your newsletter. We have already covered Scribus, but this time you actually want to put your content within the body of an email rather than as an attachment. Here is our surefire recipe for success:
What you need:
- Thunderbird
- A list of email addresses to send to
- Kompozer (We’ll get to this next)
- Content – this bit is up to you!
Step 1: Kompozer
Download and install Kompozer (Windows/Mac/Linux). Open it and design your newsletter.
Kompozer is a free cross platform WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor, which really means that editing a page is a very easy matter of typing, dragging and dropping. The program is actually an advanced version of existing but no longer supported software called NVU. Kompozer also come as a portable app, ideal if you want to run it off your USB and work on the move.
Now start on your newsletter. Play with your headings, colours, backgrounds, and logos. Let your creative juices flow! If you use images, image options are available by right clicking on the image. Make sure you resize the large ones so that your email doesn’t end up too big. Big emails will overburden your system when you send it out and fill your clients’ inboxes (right click – image properties – dimensions). You can also alter how they look in relation to your text on the page (right click – image properties – appearance)
Once your page/newsletter looks the way you want it, proceed to step 2.
Step 2: Get the HTML
This sounds far more complicated than it actually is. All you need to do is click on the “Source” tab at the bottom of the Kompozer screen and the HTML of what you have just done will appear. Depending on your newsletter, this can be a very long piece of code. Don’t worry about this. Towards the top of the document you will notice a “<body>” tag. Towards the bottom, you will notice a “</body>” tag. Select all of the text between those tags and copy it (ctrl + c, or right click + copy) Remember, it is important that you do not include the <body> tags in your selection.
Step 3: Fire up your Thunderbird
You are almost there! Open Thunderbird, click on “write” to compose a new email. Instead of copying your HTML straight into the body of your email, select “Insert” (at the top of the window) and then “HTML…”.
This will bring up a box asking you to enter your HTML. Paste your previously copied HTML into this box. Click “Insert” at the bottom of the box. VIOLA! Your newsletter should appear in the body of your email!
Step 4: Send your email
Enter the email addresses that you wish to send to. We recommend that you bcc them so that everyone isn’t confronted with a long list of email addresses in their inbox. Confidentiality and data protection comes into this too.
You can use your Thunderbird addressbook to easily manage an email list. We also recommend that you give your recipients an opportunity to unsubscribe, either by adding unsubscribe software to the mix or asking them to send an email with “unsubscribe” in the list. (Make sure you then don’t send them an email again)
Click on “send.” You’re done! Make yourself a nice cup of tea and congratulate yourself on a job well done.
Great stuff! I’m definitely going to use this one!