We design and send out emails and newsletters for our clients on an on-going basis. We use Constant Contact. I got asked today if Constant Contact allows for a custom template. The answer is yes. That’s exactly what we build for our clients… and for our own email-based communications. You can see samples of our own newsletters by clicking here.

How to set up a custom template in Constant Contact?
When you are on the templates page ready to make a choice, scroll down all the way to the bottom and choose custom. This allows you to copy and paste the code of your custom template into Constant Contact. The catch… your custom template has to be already designed and coded. That’s where the web developer comes in. At MB/I, we do the following:

• Setup the Constant Contact account
• Import the client’s contact database
• Design a custom template that matches the look and feel of the client’s website
• Populate the template with the current issue’s content (text and graphics)
• Create a text-only version (for those recipients who can’t see the HTML version)
• Send out test messages
• Make any necessary tweaks and blast

Why Constant Contact?
There are other vendors; we just happen to have experience with this one… and a good experience. We advise our clients to go this route because there are several things that a vendor of this type offers that can’t be accomplished by just sending these emails out of our own computers. Some of these are:

• Avoiding being classified as spam
• Detecting which recipients can see HTML emails
• Offering a text version to those who don’t
• Tracking who got the emails, how many people opened them, how many people clicked on the links… and even which links they clicked on
• Which email addresses bounced and why
• Who forwarded the email to others
• Automatic sign up and opt-out
• and more…

If you use email-based marketing, you want to do it right. Have a professional template so you stand out from the crowd in the inbox and have the tracking mechanisms a vendor like Constant Contact offers so you can tell what works and what doesn’t.

Don’t send out emails in the dark.