How to add Holiday Embellishments to your Christmas Emails

Christmas is knocking at our door and it's time to prepare our holiday mailings accordingly.

December brings great opportunities to warm up relations with your clients by sending them beautiful Christmas greetings or promote seasonal special offers and discounts by email.

Giving your holiday email marketing campaigns an appropriate look and feel for Christmas is easy with GraphicMail’s 2011 Editor.

This can be done very simply with the range of embellishments and smart elements we have built into our product.

If you’re starting from scratch, log in to the application and create a new newsletter. Select your usual template from the menu, or browse to the “Holiday” section to see what else we have and try something different.

For now, we won’t be discussing the other normal parts of content creation, so once you’ve taken care of your images, text, links and so on; you’ll be ready to add some finishing touches in the spirit of the holidays.

Part 1: Adding Embellishments

Step 1: Click on "Images" in the left menu and in the drop down, select "Embellishment".

Tip: For speed and convenience - before adding an embellishment, it’s easier if you first click on the area of the email newsletter you want to add it to, since this is where the editor will be placing it. For example, if you want an embellishment underneath a paragraph, click somewhere on that area. Or if you want to place it within an image, double click on that image first for the image editing screen to open up, and then follow the same procedure.

Step 2: Once you’re done that, an embellishment pop-up menu will appear with lots of categories to choose from. Of course for now we'll be focusing on the Christmas theme, so select the "Holiday" option.

Step 3: Here you’ll see large a range of icons; everything from a snowman to Christmas stockings. Browse around, select the embellishment you like and then click “Insert”.

Tip: You can add as many embellishments as you want, so don’t worry about having to pick just one favourite!

Step 4: Your embellishment will now appear on the page. From here you can resize and place it at the desired location by hovering your mouse over and dragging it around. If you're not editing within an image, then you can click on "Format” in the left menu to align any embellishments that you add to "left", "right" or "center".

In this example, we’ve added a Santa, mistletoe, a gift box and some golden bells.

Step 5: Now start having fun. Experiment and add a few embellishments until you're satisfied that your mailer has enough of a Christmassy look to it.

Part 2: Adding SmartElements

Step 1:  Next we'll be adding in a SmartElement or two. These are similar to embellishments, except that they are more for sign-posting or calls to action; such as special buttons, bubbles, captions, seals & guarantees etc.

Step 2: To add a SmartElement, again click on the images tab and select SmartElement. A pop up menu will appear where you can choose from an equally great variety.

Step 3: Once you've inserted, resized and placed your SmartElement, double

click on it to open the “Edit SmartElement” screen.

Step 4: Here you can do any of the usual customisations, such as adding or changing the text on the element or giving it a drop-shadow.

Step 5: For more options - from the image edit screen itself you can also add alternative text for the element (in case your subscriber has image display set as automatically off in their webmail client or email program) and add a URL to link it to your website.

In this case we've added a "Merry Christmas" tag to the top right and placed a "Mail Us" button within.

And that's it!

It’s really just all that’s simple to spruce up your bulk email marketing for the holiday season with our 2011 Editor.

Try it out and comment on this post to let us know how this feature works for you.