How to send HTML marketing e-mails

If you don't know exactly how to send HTML marketing e-mails I must warn you that it's really easy if you have basic HTML knowledge. Forget about MS CRM for a minute, write your own HTML code as you would if you were developing a webpage.

Then just copy and paste your HTML code into the field OFFER (Campaign) and then create a new campaign activity, select E-mail as your CHANNEL and then hit Distribute Campaign Activity. You should get something similar to this.

If you feel comfortable with HTML you can write your HTML code directly into the OFFER field as I did. If you want to include images don't forget to make them available through a public web folder. In this example I used the Google logo.

As you may also have noticed I hard coded the UNSUBSCRIBE e-mail address link. There is an explanation for that. Normally one would simply write a regular unsubscribe text and then select that text and hit the UNSUBSCRIBE button available when seting up the new e-mail activity. However if you set the FROM field to a Queue (as I did) your unsubscribe e-mail link will be broken to "mailto:[Run_Time_Address]?subject=[Run_Time_Subject]". After a lot of testing I gave up of this feature and decided to hard code the unsubscribe text/link. Doing this I'm also sure to include the unsubscribe text/link. I should warn you that the unsubscribe e-mail To should be the Queue's e-mail and the subject should be "UNSUBSCRIBE: E-mail Activity Subject". It's very important to match the UNSUBSCRIBE subject with the e-mail activity subject or the CRM won't be able to connect the unsubscribe request with the campaign in order to automatically create a campaign response and set sender's Send Marketing Materials = NO.

I will write a specific post about How to send e-mail campaigns from queues because I have some useful tips and tricks for you.