Home | Newsletter | Class in a Flash | The Store | Contact Us

How to have a successful trial run

My newsletters import into most professional email publishing services. Please see the list for details on tested systems. You should have a good working knowledge of how you email publishing services work. What you are looking for is where you can paste HTML.

Some of my customers claim they can copy the graphical newsletter into the home email service and it works great. But I don't recommend it. There are a wide range of email publishing services that offer free membership and are probably a better bet for you.

My friend, Heather of Blogs by Heather, offers a SUN assist program to help you with your implementation needs.

Still having trouble? Not sure how to get the HTML? click here for further suggestions and instructions.

Browsers

Different browsers respond in different ways when downloading. If you still encounter difficulties, you might have better results with a different browser. For instance, if you are using Internet Explorer, you might try Firefox or Netscape instead. We find that sometimes Internet Explorer is a little quirky and another browser will not have the same issues. Firefox and Netscape can be downloaded at no charge from their respective websites:

Firefox

Netscape

Microsoft Internet Explorer

If you have a dial-up connection my files are generally very small so it should not take very long to download these files.

If you are still having difficulty please feel free to contact me. I will do whatever I can to make sure you have a successful and enjoyable experience with our resources. Please include as much details as you can. What does the screen look like? What step are you on? etc.

MAC Users

I get those funny crosses sometimes. It's easy to fix. When I get the error message from Constant Contact, I use my cursor to highlight the character it says I can't use (the cross). Then I hit 'open apple-C' to copy and then 'open apple-F' to bring up the "find" box at the bottom of the Firefox window. I put my cursor in the Find box and hit 'open apple-V' to paste in the symbol, then hit the 'next' button to have Firefox show me where the symbol appears. Then I manually delete the symbol from the html or the text. I usually don't see more than 2-3 of the symbol so it's not a big problem. Sometimes I don't get any, so I don't know what causes them.”

Constant Contact Trial Import

This exercise will walk you through the process you will go through for importing a Holiday Helper newsletter into a Constant Contact email. You will need a working knowledge of Constant Contact to perform this test. These steps will also work for many different Email Publishing Services. To see the complete list you can visit my Newsletter Page. For other Email Publishing Service Instructions, please see this page.

For this newsletter campaign you will receive a TEXT file. Normally my newsletter members receive two files attached to an email but it wasn't technically possible with this offer. If you are unfamiliar with downloading files please read my How to have a successful trial run.

Open File

See information below for how to retrieve the HTML code.

Open Constant Contact

Constant Contact recently added a upgraded version to their offering. Since I'm not sure which version you are using, I've left the instructions generic since they both function very similarly. This quick tutorial is for demonstrators who are comfortable working in Constant Contact already. For detailed instructions please see Constant Contact help files.

1) Create a new an Email

2) Name the Email (Holiday Helper Test) and click Next. The name is just so you can recognize the campaign later.

3) Select Category - Custom and click next
                            or
    Email Template - Use my own code

4) Select HTML and click next

5) Fill in all information. Message Header, Personalization and Message Footer with your information.

6) Select Advanced Editor

7) Under HTML editor tab:

        Clear all exist HTML-It's important that there is nothing in the box.

        Open the attached HTML file

        Copy/Paste contents into the Advanced Editor - HTML tab

8) Preview your newsletter. Both the HTML Version

9) Click on the Save & Return button

10) Done!

If you are getting Constant Contact errors that say "Your html must close the <HTML> tag" or you have no pictures in the HTML version, please see Still Having Trouble Downloading section.

RETRIEVING HTML CODE

To view the newsletter, simply click on the listed file. To copy the HTML/Text code to your Email Publishing Service, from the browser select VIEW SOURCE to get to the HTML code and not the pictures. Below are some simple instructions for the most recent version of the most popular browsers.

In Microsoft Internet Explorer, select from the menu VIEW > SOURCE.

In Safari, select the little paper icon on the far right at the top. Select VIEW SOURCE.

In Chrome, select the little paper icon on the far right at the top. Select DEVELOPER > View Source (Ctrl+U).

In Firefox, select menu VIEW > PAGE SOURCE.

Internet Explorer 8 Example
Example of View Source

Google Chrome 4.1.249.1064
Chrome Sample

You should see something like this (garbly gook).

This is called HTML. Please select all the HTML and copy and paste it into Constant Contact - HTML tab. Please note the very first thing you should see is <!doctype html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN". . . . and the very last thing should be </HTML>.