Neil McDonald's Dynamics 365 Blog

Dynamics CRM 4 does not come with the ability to compose HTML emails. This limits what can be done via marketing campaigns and email templates. There are companies who have created various addons and accelerators for this. Most give marketing stats and pretty graphs, but they are very expensive and do more than you need in many cases.

If you are looking to just send out a HTML email and do not care about click through rates etc then this free option should help. You’ll need a HTML editor and a web site where you can host a web page and some images.

First of all, you need to create your HTML email in you HTML editor.

You will need to change any relative paths to style sheets and images in the HTML to absolute paths e.g.

Change this:

<p class=MsoTitleCxSpFirst align=center style='text-align:center'><img width=438 height=329 id="Picture 0" src="penguins_files/image001.jpg" alt=Penguins.jpg></p>

To this:

<p class=MsoTitleCxSpFirst align=center style='text-align:center'><img width=438 height=329 id="Picture 0" src="http://www.yourdomain.com/penguins_files/image001.jpg" alt=Penguins.jpg></p>

Next, upload your HTML email and related content to your publicly accesilble web server

Navigate to your HTML page via a browser, highlight the whole page and copy it to the clipboard

Now just create an email template, email or campaign activity and paste the contents of the clipboard into the email body

You can now send your HTML email via the CRM without having to pay a marketing company!

If you are looking for an integrated marketing solution with all of the trimmings, then companies such as ExactTarget and C360 offer more professional products.