Tuesday Push : Toddle.com From Alan O’Rourke
The Tuesday push is part of a coordinated effort to spread the work of the Irish tech community.
This week the focus is on Toddle, Beautifully Simple Email Marketing. I haven’t used Toddle before so I took this opportunity to try it out.
I added my email address and got started. The first screen presented an existing layout to customise.
Without reading any of the instructions on the screen the first thing I saw was ‘edit the header’ so I pressed it. This expanded and allowed me to remove the existing header image and upload my own. I continued to edit the rest of the articles and pasted in some Lorem ipsum to fill up some space. My main interest was in sending the newsletter.
I had assumed that Toddle would allow me to send the newsletter out to many recipients and I was curious how it managed it. A message that told me the finished newsletter would be sent to my own email address where I could forward it to anyone I want.
I pressed the ‘Send Newsletter’ button, nothing appeared to happen so I pressed it a few more times. I eventually realised it was showing an animation of ( the Twitter bird?? ) the email sending and was returning to normal very quickly.
I checked my email and received 5 copies from my multiple clicking. Luckily sending this email didn’t cost me any of the free credits.
Amused by my own impatience I returned to Toddle and began to look around in more detail. The interface is really very good and quite intuitive. I was able to edit any article in the email by clicking the tab on the left to update the heading, content or images. Adding a link to a page on my site placed a nice ‘Read More’ link to the end of the article. Adding address information to the email creates a great footer for the email which includes a vCard of your contact details, very handy.
Included in the footer of the sent newsletter are links to any previous newsletters I had created and an RSS feed of the current newsletter. I love RSS feeds so I thought this was pretty cool.
I was interested to see other layouts available. Changing the layout of the email is very easy, clicking on ‘Change Design’ provided me with 3 other layouts to choose from. I chose one of the others layouts and my email updated to the new layout keeping my xsiting text. I sent it to myself to see how it looked. I wasn’t paying attention and it cost me a credit to send out. More credits are available using Paypal and cost only €6 per credit.
I’m glad I took the time to check out Toddle. The interface is clean, clear and great to use. I know a few businesses that have asked for email templates, I’ll be recommending they sign up to Toddle now!
Some comments
When I update an article, it might be helpful to change the ‘edit article 01′ to the title that I write in myself so it becomes ‘edit article whats new…’ assuming I add a title.
The number of articles is quite rigid, it might be usful to allow more articles to be added or removed though this would be harder to implement with some of the templates.
When I sent the newsletter, the animation was very fast, I didn’t realise at first that it had sent at all.
When I was choosing a different template, it would be good to add the credit cost underneath the template or when I hover over it like the template thats free to send.
Advanced sending options wasn’t available after I used up my credits.
The Advanced sending options allowed me to see a text version of the newsletter I had created. Could there be a link to this text only version within the HTML version of the email ?
Tags: alan o'rourke, spoiltchild, toddle
August 12th, 2008 at 6:11 pm
Thanks Gordon for the balanced review. The animation is an issue that is plaguing the team. We have tried everything and read everyone to try and solve the bug. The problem is that the animation freezes after the first couple of frames. This happens with .gifs and even flash. It’s almost funny that we have done so many wonderful and technically really hard things with the interface but what has us stumped is a simple animated .gif
You have some nice suggestions there. Mind if I ‘borrow’ them for future updates
Question: Why would you want a link to the text only version in the newsletter? It’s not hard to do i am just not sure why.
August 12th, 2008 at 9:44 pm
Hi Alan,
Of course, Borrow away.
For the text only version, you already have it covered with the ‘view it online’ link. I didn’t see it at first, same style as the text around it.
Expanding on this, I’ve seen other emails which provide a link to the online version in the html, possibly as a comment in the source so if a persons email client doesn’t render the HTML for some reason, they still might see a small comment telling them where they can see it online.
September 3rd, 2008 at 5:58 pm
[...] Tuesday Push : Toddle.com From Alan O’Rourke [...]
November 9th, 2008 at 12:04 am
[...] The interface is clean, clear and great to use. I know a few businesses that have asked for email templates, I’ll be recommending they sign up to Toddle now! E-Write [...]