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Personalized EmailEver wonder how we manage to produce personalized emails? Others send you impersonal newsletters or letters which begin "Dear Friend,", but our email messages list your name, phone number, and physical address at the top and begin like "Dear Medicine Woman" or "Dear Joanne" -- using your nickname if we have it or otherwise your first name after the "Dear". This is the place to be to learn the products and procedures we use to produce personalized email. Four different products interact in a modestly complex workflow to give us this capability, so you'll have to make a substantial investment of time and perhaps money if you want to obtain this capability in the way we have. However, the results are dramatically superior to impersonal bulk email.
The Project NameWhen you produce a personalized mass emailing project, you will create a set of file which the project uses, To avoid confusion, you'll need a consistent way to name those files. We use a standard form for a project name which we can incorporate into the names of the files which the project uses. This format is a place name or event name, followed by a four-digit year, a dash, and a two-digit month. In this format, an event in Chicago in May 2012 would have the project name Chicago, 2012-05. In some cases, we have also used the convention of the event or place name followed by the year and month of the project. This is only appropriate when the message files evolve during the time that you promote an event, or if you want to name and save the recipient files used for each emailing. The Project Files & The Programs That Create ThemThe program that actually sends the email messages is Gammadyne Mailer (GM) from Gammadyne Software. GM needs a file containing the HTML form of the message, a file containing the plain-text form of the message, and a file containing the recipient data; GM produces a GM project file which contains all of the information GM needs to send a personalized email message to each person in the recipient file. That is four files in total: three are input to GM while one is output by GM. If the project name is Chicago, 2012-05, the HTML and plain-text forms of the personalized email message would be contained in files named Chicago, 2012-05.HTM and Chicago, 2012-05.TXT, respectively. The GM project file would be Chicago, 2012-05.GMM. We have a folder called Marketing where we store all of our files which are related to marketing. We store all of our project files in a subfolder of Marketing called EMail-Merge Letters & Project Files. When we open this folder in Windows Explorer, the default order is alphabetical by filename. In this default, file-name order, we see all of our project files grouped together and sorted by date. For example, a listing of our Marketing\EMail-Merge Letters & Project Files folder might show (in part):
Note that this sample lists the project files (other than recipient files) for three projects: Boston in September 2010, Chicago in May 2012, and Chicago in November 2013. The Four ProgramsYou will need to use four different programs to produce the four files which make up a project. Here is an explanation of the four programs you'll use to produce the four files. An HTML Editor or Web Publishing ProgramWe use Microsoft FrontPage to create the HTML form of our messages. Any contemporary HTML editor should be satisfactory. Note in this case that we use FrontPage to create individual, stand-alone files which are used as email messages and not web pages. Therefore, if you use a web-publishing product such as FrontPage, and you are not a webmaster, you don't need to understand or use the web-publishing features of your HTML product. In this case, preparing the HTML form of the message is virtually identical to preparing a word-processing document for mail-merge. A Plain-Text EditorMicrosoft Windows includes a plain-text editor called NotePad. We use NotePad. (Gammadyne Mailer also uses NotePad to give you the capability to edit your plain-text message while running GM.) A Database ProgramWe use a custom-programmed FoxPro application to create the recipient file. In our case, we export recipient data to the same file every time; we don't save the recipient files. Each export operation to EMailMrg.DBF replaces the previously exported data. This means that our GM project files always use EMailMrg.DBF as the recipient file when we send email to people in our database. Normally, we do not need to examine the specification of the recipient file in GM. Our practice is to start a new GM project file from an existing project file, which specifies EMailMrg.DBF as the recipient file. One exception is when we have a co-sponsor for an event, and this co-sponsor sends us a recipient list. In that case, a special GM project file will specify the co-sponsor's file as the recipient list. Note that this keeps our list and the co-sponsor's list completely separated from each other! Gammadyne MailerGammadyne Mailer uses the HTML, plain-text, and recipient files to produce the personalized email messages and the GM project file. An ExampleThe following diagram shows the relationship of files and programs in a personalized emailing project with a project name of Chicago, 2012-05. The table after the diagram lists the project files and the directories in which we store project files.
Work-Flow For Producing Personalized Email Messages
The Contents of Our Recipient FileYou can't use data if you don't have it, so where do we get the nicknames of the people in our database? We ask for this optional information on our sign-up sheet that circulates at our workshops. GM can use recipient files in almost any database format. This is because it accesses recipient files through the ODBC interface that is part of Windows. If you're not technical, don't worry about what this means, because GM provides a simple interface to ODBC. We use a FoxPro for DOS format with a .DBF extension. We use the same recipient file for each project: EMailMrg.DBF. A recipient file must contain at least one field: the email address of the recipients. In order to personalize the message, you'll need additional fields in the recipient file to hold a "dear" name, a full name, address, and so on. Our recipient file has the following structure, where "N" is "numeric" and "C" is character: # Field Name Field Type & Width --------------------------------- 1 Serial N 5 2 Dear_name C 40 3 Nickname C 40 4 Full_name C 70 5 Email C 64 6 Organizatn C 40 7 Address1 C 40 8 Address2 C 80 9 City C 40 10 State C 2 11 Workphone C 21 12 Homephone C 14 13 Zip3 C 3 14 Country C 40 The Serial field is a simple count, starting at 1 for the first record, 2 for the second record, and so on. This field is required if you want GM to process delivery failure notifications. EMail-Merge Fields and Standard Text in Our MessagesNow we can explain how we can place the recipient's nickname or first name after the "Dear". When our custom database software creates EMailMrg.DBF, it stores any nickname into the Dear_Name, else it stores the contents of the first name field from the source database. The "dear" line in each message file contains the text Dear [[DEAR_NAME]], Note that you must type field names IN ALL CAPS as shown. Why Are HTML & Plain-Text Forms of Messages Required?The industry is in a state of transition from plain-text email -- which used to be the only kind of email -- to HTML email, which contains the fonts, formatting, and colors of a modern electronic document. While virtually all popular email clients (the software on your PC which retrieves and displays email messages sent to you) now support HTML email, older email clients may only support plain-text email. The main problem is the millions of people who have older AOL access software. GM handles this problem by sending both the full-color HTML form of a message and the plain-text form of a message in a single message. Recipients receive two-part messages, but their email clients will only display one part: obsolete email clients display only the plain-text part and up-to-date email clients display only the HTML part. To take advantage of GM's wonderful capability to deliver email to both old and new email clients, you must create a plain-text version of your HTML message. We use a collection of template files to produce both plain-text and HTML versions of our messages with high efficiency and quality control. Manual and Automatic Template FilesA template file contains the contents for a standard kind of task. For example, a letter template would contain your name, contact information, a place to enter the name and address of the recipient, a "Dear" line with a place to enter the name after the "Dear", a place to enter the body of the letter with appropriate formatting already set up, and a standard closing. A template file contains fixed text which you do not normally alter, and replaceable text which you select and replace. When you create a file from a template, your task is to find and replace all the replaceable text and enter text into text-entry areas which the template leaves blank. Automatic TemplatesYou use such a template in an automatic way if your word-processing program supports templates. Such programs give you a way to create templates so that you can easily receive their labor-saving and quality-control benefits. When you use programs which support templates, you click the menu commands to create a new file from a template. When the list of templates appears, you select one of them. The contents of the template file you selected are copied into a new file with a generic name such as Document1.DOC (Microsoft Word) or new_page.htm (Microsoft FrontPage). You save the file with an appropriate file name to an appropriate directory and make whatever modifications are necessary. Manual TemplatesYou can also use template files in a manual way for programs -- such as NotePad -- which do not have automatic templates. In this case, you must manually do all the steps. First, you must create or select a directory to hold your templates. We store all of our manual GM template files in this directory: Marketing\Email-Merge Letters & Project Files\Templates We have some FrontPage template files which are stored in a FrontPage folder. Our HTML Template Files for GM Projects
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