CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Recently a client after investing hundreds (even thousands) of dollars getting CiviMail working and learning the system, rejected it as too difficult and switched back to Constant Contact.  Now they use CiviCRM only for collecting online contributions via Paypal, nothing else.

Sad isn't it?

I tried everything, from video tutorials, to hands-on training, and they just couldn't get it.  Not dumb people, all hold Master's Degrees, but not techies either.

The most notable complaint was the WYSIWYG (TinyMCE), which they claimed, although I could only occasionally replicate, was changing their HTML before an after saving the template.  Their HTML was pretty standard, they were trained not to copy and paste from Microsoft Word, for instance, but reliably using the WYSIWYG editor was not working for them.  

Issue 1: the people were flummoxed by line spacing.  When a new paragraph is created, is it a <br><br> or a <p>&nbsp;</p> seemed to be inconsistent at best, and new lines were displayed differently in the WYSIWYG than in the receipient email.   After a long struggle, the client just gave up, and threw CiviMail by the wayside.

Issue 2: the people were flummoxed by fonts.  In the WYSIWYG it looks like Arial.  But in outlook the recipient sees Times New Roman.  The client got frantic, fast.  No explanation of CSS environments and default fonts eased their mind.  No workaround was sufficient.  No template editing made them happy.  Woe is me, right?    

But not a unique story, I'm afraid, right? (chip in yours here)  The client still likes me, but they hate CiviMail.  So now what?

IDEAS:
1. The default settings on TinyMCE and FCKEditor are generally problematic, IMHO.  Find a way to restrict use of certain features - fonts, colors, etc.  Change input defaults: eliminate the use of <p> in the CiviMail WYSIWYG, cause for anyone who makes HTML email templates, knows that: CSS not fully accepted in most email clients, <p> can screw up a lot of stuff, and probably just using a pair of <br><br> is easier.

2. Create a simple mode, somewhere simpler than WYSIWYG editing and certainly simpler than raw HTML editing, so the can be dumbed down to the point of making it, ahem, cough ... Master's-Degree-people-proof?

3. Review what is so easy about Constant Contact, and try to replicate it.  Learn from them.

4. Get it working so that the default font (when none other is specified in the WYSIWYG) is times new roman, or some other such obnoxious font, so the client knows when they must specify otherwise.  Got a lot of complaints that everything looked Arial in the WYSIWYG, but the recipient got Times/Ariel hodgepodge in Outlook.  that ain't fair, I have to agree with them.  I understand why, as a techie, but they don't.

5. Analyze (more of us) the user experience, do some testing, does line spacing happen consistently, for instance?

Any ideas from you all?

I'd be happy to, as soon as I wrap up a big project that's due at the end of April.

since you are a *techie*, you might want to consider contributing to and improving CiviMail. Open source projects rely on contributions from the community and from folks like yourself to improve and close (or widen) the gap from the commercial counterparts

lobo

Interesting, We have many clients using CiviMail (CK editor), sending out hundreds of emails a month to 100,000+ contacts and have not heard any of the issues.  None of our clients are techies, but some have HTML experience.  I'm familiar with Constant Contact, Mailer-Mailer, and other  AMS or CRM mailers and I'd rate this mailer quite good. 

When we train our clients on CiviMail, we set up example templates/headers/footers and they tend to copy from them.  We also provide documentation that we've developed to help (most of the documentation is not Civi specific)

Two keys points that we emphasize:

1) don't create a lot of headers and footers; keep them simple and concentrate on building brand image; I now that it is very easy to create lots of different looks for bulk mail in Constant Contact, but changing the header and footer just creates confusion and deemphasizes the brand.

2) Be sure a no-reply email sends the message.  If you want a reply, add an email in the text of the message.