Developing eWrite

A few weeks ago, a web service called Toddle was the focus of a Tuesday Push. This gave me the opportunity to sign up to Toddle and see what it could do.

In a nutshell, Toddle allows you to create great looking email newsletters very quickly. I saw that Toddle newsletters could be imported into Campaign Monitor and I wondered if eWrite Messenger could do the same.

With Toddles permission we have created an import feature in eWrite Messenger which allows you to import the newsletters you have created into eWrite Messenger. From here, you can send out the newsletter to anyone in your address book and monitor the readers.

Im very happy to be able to work with another Irish company, to be able to bring another great Irish product to eWrite users. Thanks Toddle!

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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 ?