It is possible to use RapidWeaver for Macintosh (or any other web-creation tool) to create beautiful emails that contain personalised text, HTML pictures and any other web object. This will make your business campaigns, wedding invitations, birthday celebrations, etc much nicer to view.
The use of a linked web site means that your emails remain very small and text only. Any included graphics are downloaded only when the email is viewed. You will need a copy of RapidWeaver (www.realmacsoftware.com) and an FTP web site (such as from your ISP).
Here are the steps:
Launch RapidWeaver and create a new Style Text web page. I am adding the web page to the end of a current list of web pages.
Click the Page Info and uncheck the ‘Show in menu’ checkbox to set this page to upload but remain invisible.
Click the Setup button and set the ‘File Links are’ popup to Relative to Website Address’. Click OK to save. This will cause the HTML links to fully point to the web site rather than just to the web page’s folder. This will allow your email HTML to look to your web site for any images.
Create a new Style Text web page underneath the mail hidden menu and give it a name e.g. Birthday Invitation 2009.
Launch CRMHaven. Mark all the Clients you want to send the invitation to and choose eMailMerge from the Action menu. Select the merge fields you want to insert later into your emails from the popup menu then copy them to the clipboard.
Paste these merge fields into your web page. Type any text you want, insert images, change the formatting, etc. You can insert any CRMHaven field into any location on your web page. When CRMHaven goes to send the email it will substitute the value from your records.
Preview the page in RapidWeaver ensuring it looks right as formatted HTML and will fit inside a normal email program window.
Click the Publish button to send the email template to the FTP site.
Launch your web browser (e.g. Safari) and navigate to the newly created web page. You may need to manually enter the page name if you made it hidden from the menus. In my case the URL became
Choose View Source from the View menu in Safari. A new window will appear showing the HTML text code for your page on the server. Type Command-A to select all the text and copy it to the clipboard.
Launch CRMHaven and again choose eMailMerge from the Action button. In the Body HTML text area paste the HTML text from the clipboard. In the Body Plain text field you may want to paste in just the text from the invitation. This field is used by email packages that cannot display HTML.
Change the email Subject to something more suitable e.g. Birthday Invitation. If required, set the server address and port (normally 25) to those of your ISP specifications for outgoing email (normally smtp.myisp.com).
Click the Preview button to open a new window displaying the web page of the HTML text. All graphics should download from your FTP site and display correctly. If a graphic is not downloading you may need to edit its link in the HTML source.
Click the Test button and enter your email address. Click OK to send a copy of the email to your email program. This allows you to ensure it is all working before you send it to all your contacts. Note - the web page above includes all the menus of a full web site. You will normally want to turn these off.
If the Test works correctly then click the Send button to begin emailing out all the invitations.
Warning: most ISPs put a limit on the number of emails you can send per hour. Also don’t quit CRMHaven just after clicking Send - it sometimes takes a few minutes to send all the emails. Since the CRMHaven emails are being merged, it sends one actual email per marked Client.