HTML Emails

[Ginzburgh]

So I work in marketing (at a company, not at an agency) and I design email newsletters for the department. My main job is running promotions and programs but as soon as they learned I was savvy at graphic design they are using me more for the newsletter stuff considering our ad agency charges like thousands of dollars per email.

So I have been designing one page newsletters in photoshop and illustrator and saving them as PDF's, then copying the PDF from acrobat and pasting it into the body of the email window. This sucks because the text comes out fuzzy, the file size is rather large, the recipient can't select any of the text, nor can we do cool stuff like embed links.

So I am thinking about taking the leap into HTML emails.

My first question is, what are the other options besides HTML?

If I do decide to go down that path, will I have to learn coding, or are there programs that let you design the page like you would in illustrator and it will do the coding for you. I read somewhere that golive has this function but I am too much of a n00b in this that I don't know if understood what I was reading.

Help.

[Tossica]

Make it in Word and save as HTML.

[Jay]

Who would these emails go to? FYI BlackBerry users can only see code when they are sent HTML emails so if you're sending it to business types you just eliminated half of your target audience.