One of the frequently asked questions we get asked related to email templates is how to include images or graphics or attachments in crm 4 email templates. Well, the short answer is that you can’t include attachments in email templates, BUT, you can still create very nice and professional looking templates by using image links.
In fact, by using image links your emails will be much smaller then embedding the images right in the emails, thus saving crm database space, and email resources.
Here’s a short blog creating email newsletter containing graphics and images and nice formatting.
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The first thing you will need to do is create a public facing web page with your newsletter. If your company has a public facing site this can be a subfolder in your public site. For example, our Sep 09 newsletter is a single page:
http://www.powerobjects.com/newsletter/Sept09/sept09_newsletter.html
You can use any web site editor – FrontPage, Dream Weaver, etc.
If your company does not have an easily maintainable public facing site, use one of the many free services that allow you to create a public facing site – for example Microsoft Office Live offers free hosting of public facing sites and they have a good online editor.
http://smallbusiness.officelive.com/en-us/
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Once you have a public facing one page web site newsletter, select all on the page, then copy. Using keyboard short cuts, you can click on the page, then control-a (for select all), then control-c (to copy). Do this on a browser while browsing the public facing web site newsletter.
- In crm, create a new email template. In the body of the email, we can not right click and select paste. However, we can use the control-v, keyboard shortcut to paste.
- The last step is to verify all links. We need to verify both image links and hyper links to make sure they have the a ‘fully qualified path’. This means that the URL is complete. Simply click on the link or image, and enter control-K. A link image box will then appear. Verify the url is complete and if not enter it fully with http://www….
That’s it – you can now email blast your newsletter. You can now use crm email template with very nicely formatted newsletters. This process may appear a bit cumbersome, but after you create a couple newsletters you will notice it is not bad at all.
Alex Fagundes
Another item to mention on the fully qualified links is to make this easy on yourself and build the webpage this way in the first place. Most web editing tools like to place hyperlinks and image links as relative links. Spend a little time up front cleaning up the code for the webpage and your life will be a lot easier!!
While I like the idea of tracking the bulk email sent to prospects and contacts, I’d hate to lose the ability to use click tracking to build up personas. Is there any way to have CRM track clicks?
Yes! We give our hosted customers free e-mail tracking, it tracks opened e-mails and click through links. http://www.powerobjects.com
We also sell the powerEmail.
Dean
Hi. Great question. Our clients have been using powerMail for a little while. PowerMail is a crm component we wrote that allows you to not only track when and how many times an email is opened, but also tracks each and every url clicked on. The data lives right in crm. This is free for all of our clients, but we are now making it avail for adhoc purchases. My next blog will be on PowerMail.
Great tip which has saved me hours and hours of work. I’ve found this tip to work for anchored links in the email body, but do you have any suggestions for background images that CRM sees in the template but can’t be seen when the emails are sent?
Wayne – I’d have to test this….I’m guessing it would have more to do with how the email client rendered the email – if it is going out as html then you would think all would be fine, but there might be some background image rules I’m not aware of….
Does anyone know if it is possible to add dynamic fields to an email template
Example
https://apply.gcu.edu/Register.aspx?&Owner={!user:Owner;}
Hi Janus,
Yep – you can add dynamics fields to an email template. The fields need to come from the entity that the template is based on OR from entities ‘one level higher’. So if your template is for contacts you can pull fields from the contact entity and the owner entity.
Frist Happy New Year everyone
I have created the signature template, I can save this template and still see the link, I can then insert this template into an email, I still see the image at this point is when my issue happens, when I save, or send the email the link disapears with no sign of it even being there.
Hi Leon,
Check the history and the email that was sent. Is the link being physically removed or simply broken and not working? What we have seen often is that the web server where the images are from is not public available so emails received by folks outside your company have broken links.
Hi Wayne,
You say you found a tip to work with anchored links aswell, can you tell me how this needs to be done?
I would like to send newsletters through this template with and index section. This section holds anchored links to other parts within the same html body (so no pop-up to an online html page). Can you -or anybody else who knows this- tell me how this works in CRM?
Thx in advance!
Hi L. Overbeek
In you CRM E-mail teplate edit anchored links (press Ctrl-K).
In hyperlink remove all symbols up to #AhchorName