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L
linbay
Inspiring
July 12, 2017
Answered

Mobile-ready emails looks different when people forward thru Outlook

  • July 12, 2017
  • 2 replies
  • 1216 views

Hi, we created a mobile-ready eDM, when we sent to our sales, it looks correct, but once the sales forward to their customers through Outlook, it looks way different from what the original looks like.  I Googled on-line, Mailchimp mentioned to create a "Forward to a friend" link instead to using Outlook.  It that correct?  Is there any other solutions besides signing up Mailchimp?

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer Jon Fritz

    #Nancy Oshea, You nailed it on the head, rep's responsibility is to sell, and majority of them won't have any web knowledge, asking every single one of them to sign up to mailchimp, load cvs, learn to work mailchimp, migrate original html from outlook to mailchimp would be a tall task.  It wouldn't be fair to them as this should be design/market team's job, not sales dept's.  Why do we let reps send out emails?  To let reps send out eDMs is more targeted than to send from corporate.

    Another scenerio is we send the eDM to PMs, PM sent to reps, and reps to clients.  Again, PM's job are engineering/development of products.  Not feasible nor in company's interest to have hundreds of PMs and sales to signup/learn mailchimp.


    It could possibly be more efficient to use PDFs instead of html emails in this situation, especially if the design elements of the document are an important factor.

    Since the recipients expect to receive the email, there wouldn't be much issue with the "don't open attachments from people you don't know" advice, and a PDF attachment would be rendered fairly universally, either through browsers and email clients with native support, or through Acrobat.

    It would also be relatively small, if it's just mimicking an html email.

    2 replies

    O
    osgood_
    Legend
    July 12, 2017

    From my experience forwarding on never works. Several of my clients try and do that and it always fails. I would always use a proper mailing out service like Mailchimp or use your own server script which will send the source code out. Not sure how many you need to send but Mailchimp offers a free service if its under a certain amount and it takes very little time to set up.

    Nancy OShea
    Community Expert
    Nancy OSheaCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    July 12, 2017

    Ditto what osgood said.  Forwarding emails from Outlook or other stand alone email clients is no solution.  HTML email needs to be sent from an email server.  If you don't have one, Mailchimp is a good choice.  Constant Contact is another.

    Nancy

    Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert
    Jon Fritz
    Community Expert
    Jon FritzCommunity Expert
    Community Expert
    July 12, 2017

    Depending on how you designed the email, and how it's being forwarded, and what service you're currently using, and where your images are being stored, and a number of other factors, there may or may not be anything you can do about it.

    HTML emails are not the same as webpages being rendered by browsers following a set of standards (more or less). Email clients vary, wildly, in how they render html emails by default, let alone after someone has increased their security settings.

    For example: if you're storing the images from the email on a shared local network, your sales staff, while connected to said network, would see the images without issue. Once the email leaves your local ecosystem, the image links would break because the viewers of the email wouldn't have access to the file paths used.

    If you're storing the images remotely, a default or higher security setting on a viewer's email client would knock all images out of the email with a "For your security, images have been blocked, right click to download" message, unless they've whitelisted your company's email domain

    If you're sending a large number of emails, without the benefit of an email service, you could also be blacklisting yourself on corporate email filters as a spammer.

    Depending on the program used, forwarding an email will sometimes only forward the text unless directed to do otherwise.

    There are a ton of things that need to be perfectly in place to make an html email come through correctly, it's hard to say what might be stopping yours from working correctly with the info provided.

    L
    linbayAuthor
    Inspiring
    July 12, 2017

    We are using eCampaign to mass sent to our sales/distributors nationwide, thereafter they send to their contacts.  They receive our emails in outlook so they forward with Outlook.

    We are the corporate headquarter, we prepare all marketing materials (for example, this eDM) for sales in every region nationwide, it'll be difficult to ask every one of them to sign-up to mailchimp, and ask them to learn from ground up on how to send emails other than Outlook.  Ask them to provide all their contacts to us is out of questions too.

    It is very annoying that the end receipient cannot see the emails the way it should.

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