Images for Your Christmas Emails and Newsletters

We received a great response to our post on sending out invitations, greetings and newsletters via email (Outlook) and fax. If you haven't seen it yet… Here's a link to the Post.

A few readers also asked if there were any good sources for Christmas related images. Rather than listing any sources… Just do a search for FREE CHRISTMAS IMAGES in Google and you will find hundreds of sources.

Before you use the images, check the website to see if they have any conditions for use of their images.

How to download images from websites
The basic steps for downloading and using images from most websites are…

• Right-click on a image > Save As...
• On the pop-up screen, provide a name for the image and the location where you would like to save it.
• Click Save.

How to use downloaded images in your emails

• Create a new email
• Place your cursor where you would like the image to be placed
• Select Insert > Picture...
• Click on the Browse... button and locate the image that you would like to use.
• Click OK

I hope you found this article useful… and remember if you need to send out many invites, greetings or newsletters the easiest way is EmailMerge for Outlook.

$10 from all purchases in December will go to our Children's Charity projects.

Holiday Tips, Thank You & Children’s Project

The team has had some lively debate over this email… and I’ve revised its contents twice. We wanted to make sure that we were able to convey both our enthusiasm and appreciation without sounding exploitive. So here goes…

Seasons Greetings to all our readers. This week I'd like to share some tips on using Outlook (or Word) to send out invitations, greetings and news (which we all need to do at this time of the year).

I'd also like to THANK YOU and share how this year YOUR purchases have enabled us to help many children here in Fiji.

If you'd like to go straight to the tips section, you can scroll to the end of the email… but I hope you'll take few minutes to read the following.

HELPING CHILDREN

For those of you who do not know it, our team is based in Fiji. Fiji is still a developing country and although we are blessed in many ways, there are still a lot of people who need help.

Throughout the year the whole team at Standss tries to give time and a portion of our income to community projects here in Fiji.

The charity that we work closest with is Save the Children Fiji.

This year we worked with them on several projects including a sizeable donation to their relief efforts for children affected by severe flooding in the early part of the year. This project helped provide bus fares, school lunches, uniforms and books to THOUSANDS of children in Fiji… children who otherwise may have had to drop out of the school system.

We will continue to work with Save the Children in 2010 and have already started work on a new project…

BOOKS FOR THE CHILDRENS HOSPITAL

Early this year my 4 year old son (Nirav) had to be hospitalized due to flu-related dehydration (he lost 5% of his body weight within a few hours between visits to the doctor). We were told that he needed to be put on drips and the only hospital that could do that (because of his young age) was the Children's Ward at the public hospital.

As I mentioned previously… Fiji is still a developing country. With the limited resources available, the very-hard working doctors and nurses ensured that my son (and many other children) recovered quickly.

I am very happy to say that my son was home in 2 days.

During his 2-day stay my wife and I kept Nirav entertained by reading books to him that we had got from home. I observed that a few other parents did the same. But…

Many other parents were unable to do so. Some had come from far away and others may not have had the resources to purchase books.

After my son was discharged I hoped that I would get the chance to do something for the hospital. (I am a little ashamed that I did not act sooner.. when the sense of gratitude was strongest)

Several months ago I was fortunate to meet a senior Doctor at the Ministry of Health and we discussed the possibility of setting up reading stations in the children's ward… from which parents could pick books (at no cost) to keep their children occupied and entertained as they get better.

I'm very excited to report that the project has been approved and I am meeting with senior hospital staff later today to work out how many books, shelves etc are needed.

At the minimum we plan to…

• Get several nicely colored bookshelves

• Stock the book-shelves with the appropriate number of books for children from 6 months to 10 years old

• Restock the books on a monthly basis (damaged books and books that have been taken away by children)

We will request parents to look after books and leave them for the enjoyment of other children… but if a few books find happy homes outside the hospital… that is still OK.

It is the holiday season… and we are aiming to get stage one of the project implemented BEFORE CHRISTMAS.

At this stage this project will be 100% financed by our company. This has only been made possible through the support of our customers and we'd like to say…

THANK YOU… IT IS ONLY WITH YOUR SUPPORT THAT WE ARE ABLE TO BRING JOY TO THE CHILDREN OF OUR COUNTRY.

I will keep you informed of progress on this project with more details in our Outlook Tips newsletters next year.

WHAT CAN YOU DO TO SUPPORT OUR CHARITY EFFORTS

This year….as a special Christmas Project, we will set aside $10 from each and every sale in December for our 2009-2010 Charity efforts.

READ the Tips section below… if our software can help you with your Christmas emails or faxes… please ACT NOW!

You don't need to do anything more… just continue to support our company by using our products. And if you don't like something… please let us know.

OUTLOOK TIP: HOW TO SEND OUT INVITATIONS, GREETINGS ETC

The holiday season is the time of the year when we often need to send out "mass mail" i.e. copies of the same letter, fax or email to many people… things like invitations to parties, holiday greetings or marketing/sales news.

We have put together a collection of tips on our website that lets you automate most of this using Outlook and/or Word.

Some of the tips use our own products (EmailMerge for Outlook and Fax for Word) and others need nothing more than plain old Outlook or Word.

Take a look now:

http://outlook4business.blogspot.com/2009/12/sending-out-invites-greetings.html

(If you decide on the easy way i.e. using our software, we will use $10 from every sale to help with our charity efforts for children in Fiji)

Thank you again for your continued support and we wish you all a very Merry Christmas.

Sending out Invites, Greetings & Newsletters via Email, Fax or Post

It’s almost Christmas… it’s the time of the year when we need to send out invitations, greetings and newsletters to friends and clients.

Depending on your contact list, the best way to contact your friends this year maybe using email, fax or post/hand delivery.

Most of these mailing can be considered “mass mailing” i.e. we want to send copies of the same mail to everyone… possibly customized with their name and address at most.

Microsoft Outlook and Word have some built-in features that automate this process for you. In addition we have built our own tools to further speed up and simplify the process for you.

In this post I’ll discuss both the built in free ways as well as our own addins.

How to Email out Invites, Greetings and Newsletters.

I am going to start with what I consider to be the easiest, fastest and most powerful way of doing this… our own EmailMerge PRO for Outlook.

View EmailMerge PRO on our website

We recently wrote an article in Outlook Power which takes you through EmailMerge step-by-step.

View Step-by-Step instructions for EmailMerge PRO on Outlook Power

$10 from each purchase in December will go towards our 2010 Children’s Hospital Project.

Can you do this without using our addin? Outlook can use Word to do this but it’s time consuming and not as powerful. Here’s a link to a tutorial.

How to Fax out Invites, Greetings and Newsletters.

Despite what many people will have you believe, Faxing is not dead.

In fact in terms of deliverability, it can beat email - there is almost no chance that your fax won't get delivered because of an over-zealous spam filter.

You can use Microsoft Word and the free fax printer that comes with Windows 2000/XP/Vista/7 to send out personalized faxes to your customers this year.

The Bad News: Windows Fax and MS Word don't talk easily to each other out of the box.

The Good News: Fax4Word allows you to fax merge straight from Word to the Windows Fax printer.

View more information on Fax for Word.

$10 from each purchase in December will go towards our 2010 Children’s Hospital Project.

How to Print Letters and Envelopes for Posting and Hand Delivery

Even if you will be sending paper based mail this year, technology can help you.

Here are step-by-step instructions to:

Use mail-merge in Word with Outlook data to create and print personalized letters

Use mail-merge in Word with Outlook data to print mailing labels and envelopes.

I hope you find the above information helpful in staying in touch with friends and family this year.

Thank you again for supporting our 2010 Charity Project.