So exactly how do you use Email-Geni.us? Well in a lot of ways, Email-Geni.us behaves like any other email program. In a lot of other important ways, it does not.
Either way, to use Email-Geni.us you must first register as a user, then login with the username and password you entered. A confirmation email will be sent to you upon registration. When you click on the
"Confirm" link in that email, you will be ready to login to Email-Geni.us and send email. You will be given opportunities to upgrade from these Free services to the paid Premium Services of Email-Geni.us - the Premium Services include the ability to save your email drafts, and to send to lists of email addresses.
For familiarity and consistency, the basic operation of Email-Geni.us is just like any other email program. You create an email, then either save it as a draft for sending later or you can send it right away. The email has a subject and one or more recipients. Recipient email addresses can either be manually entered (just like any other email program), or you can send an email to an entire list of email addresses.
But as we said above, Email-Geni.us does not behave like an email program in some important ways:
- No Incoming Email. Email-Geni.us is for the bulk sending of HTML email - it does not provide for incoming email. The email address that you register with Email-Geni.us will be the address that from which Email-Geni.us sends the bulk HTML email. You can continue to use whatever email program you already use for incoming email for that email address.
- No Attachments. Professional email marketing uses links to existing online files rather than attaching them the actual email itself. This includes all files that you might want to include with an email, such as photos, videos, PDF files and all other attachments. For a detailed description of how to link to existing online files, check out the blog entry on How to Place a Picture Image into an Email.
Now for the good stuff. Email-Geni.us does so much more than any other email program - both with the creation of the rich-text HTML emails themselves and with the management of lists of bulk email addresses.
EMAIL CREATION
When you login to Email-Geni.us, the web application will open on the Compose Mail page. You can also get to this page, by clicking on the Compose button on any page where it is displayed. There are five things on this page you need to understand how to use:
- Recipient field - you can type any email address into this field, or a list of email addresses separated by commas.
- List - users of Email-Geni.us Premium Services will be able to create lists of email addresses and send them emails. This list is where a specific email address list is selected for this email to be sent to.
- Subject Field - this is the subject of the email, just as in any other email program.
- HTML Tab - the HTML tab formats the contents of its display area through the use of the Email-Geni.us Toolbar - the creative brains of Email-Geni.us. This toolbar is an implementation of the popular FCKeditor, the text editor for the Internet. To understand all the features of the Toolbar, take a look at the entry for How To Use The Email-Geni.us Toolbar.
- Plaintext Tab - HTML email uses an Internet email standard that includes both an HTML version and a Plaintext version with each email. Some email programs can only display plaintext. Some subscribers to email newsletters and other content only want to see plaintext. The Plaintext tab is where the plain text version of the email is entered.
When you have created an email using these features, you can either save the email as a Draft (Premium Subscribers only), or you can Send the email right away. To save the email, just click on the Draft button, for working later or sending at a future time. To send the email, just click on the Send button.
EMAIL ADDRESS LISTS
Premium Subscribers to Email-Geni.us are able to send their HTML emails to lists of email addresses. Once logged in, there are two folder tabs at the top of the screen - one called Email the other called Contacts. To create or manage email address lists, click on the Contacts tab, and you will be taken to the Mailing Lists screen. To create a new list of email addresses, click on the New List button. Enter a name for the list (e.g. "Customers") and click the Save button. The new list will be created and you will be taken to the Mailing List Contacts screen. Here you can click on the New Contact button to enter a new email recipient and their email address. When you save a new contact, you will be brought back to the Mailing List Contacts screen. To view the email addresses in the list in alphabetical order, just click on the Email Address field heading, and the list will be sorted.
You can use the pagination controls to navigate to more than one page of mailing list contacts.
To return to the Mailing Lists screen, just click on the Contacts tab. You can then create new mailing lists using the above instructions, or you can view the contacts in an existing list by clicking on the red triangle to the left of the mailing list name. Pagination controls will be automatically displayed to navigate to more than one page of mailing lists.
