For close to two years, we’ve been sending out a periodic e-newsletter to our prospects, customers and business associates once a month. Even with this relatively low frequency, this newsletter has proved to be very effective for staying in touch with contacts and nurturing leads, among other things. As testimony, we recently signed a deal from a prospect who had gone cold 14 months ago. He remembered us when he had a need only because he was receiving our newsletters regularly in the interim period.
We normally send out this newsletter around the end of each month. Last year, the date coincided with Diwali, the Hindu festival of lights. So we thought of adding a “Happy Diwali!” greeting line in our newsletter to the contacts in our subscription list for whom the festival was relevant.
Despite its Hindu origins, Diwali has become pretty much a secular festival in India. Therefore, we decided to include the greeting to all our subscribers based out of India.
By the same token, we also decided to include the greeting to all Persons of Indian Origin (PIOs) located outside India in our subscription list.
We decided to skip the greeting for others.
This necessitated the following two versions of the newsletter:
Even we thought the blank line in the second version was not nice.
Before explaining how we overcame this problem, here’s the list of steps we followed to generate two versions of the newsletter.
- In the Excel-based list of our newsletter subscribers, we added a new column called “DiwaliGreeting”.
- Under this column, we entered the following formula: =IF(N12=”India”,1,”?”). This automatically populated a “1” for all contacts based out of India and a “?” for those living outside.
- We manually read the name of the contact. If we judged him or her to be a PIO, we overwrote the “?” symbol with a “1”. Otherwise, we overwrote it with a “0”. We couldn’t find any algorithm that could figure out whether a person was PIO or not based on their name, so we couldn’t automate this step.
- In the Word document, just after the salutation line, we used the If…Then…Else command with the following values:
That’s it.
While v1 of the email came through fine, there was a blank line in v2, which we wanted to suppress.
After a quick Google Search, we visited half a dozen websites that explained how to suppress such blank lines in Word Mail Merge.
All solutions used Mail Merge code, which was Greek and Latin to me.
(Memo to Microsoft: In the early 1990s, I was tired of WordStar and WordPerfect’s cryptic .WP and .WL commands. You launched Word, which replaced these cryptic commands with very user-friendly GUIs. I switched to Word in a blink and stayed with it forever. If you’re now going to start putting cryptic code inside Word documents, I’m going to start searching for another word processing software).
But, for now, we were stuck with Word, so I got one of my more technically-savvy colleagues to have a go. After tweaking some code here and there, we suddenly found the document wobbling unsteadily. Yes, literally wobbling, like the following screenshot illustrates:
For those of you who’re wondering how a plain vanilla document can develop fits, anything with code inside it is no longer plain vanilla.
Given enough time, I’m sure we could’ve cracked this problem and found a technically elegant solution. However, it doesn’t make sense to wait until Christmas to send a Diwali greeting. So, we used a quick-and-dirty workaround that replaced the blank line by “Greetings from GTM360 Marketing Solutions!”.
Problem solved!
In this specific edition of the newsletter, this line only appeared as a replacement for the “Happy Diwali!” line. However, I found that it made the email sound more cordial in general and standardized it in all future newsletters.
While we didn’t solve the basic Mail Merge problem of blank line, I was happy find a workaround that made a lot of sense in the larger context of content marketing.
UPDATE DATED 28-OCT-2016:
Diwali was on 30 October this year. We again decided to include the Diwali greetings in the November 2016 edition of GTM360 NEWS. Based on the feedback received on the last e-newsletter with Diwali greetings in 2014, we made the following changes this year:
- As before, we included the greeting for all our subscribers in India. However, we restricted the greeting to Hindus among our PIO subscribers located outside India.
- Accordingly, in the Excel-based list of newsletter subscribers, we manually read the name of the contact and, if we judged him or her to be a Hindu, we overwrote the “?” symbol with a “1”. Otherwise, we overwrote it with a “0”. We couldn’t find any algorithm that could figure out whether a person was Hindu or not based on their name, so we couldn’t automate this step.
- We expanded the greeting to Wish You A Happy & Prosperous Diwali! and formatted it in Verdana 11 boldface. The alternate opening line continued to be Greetings from GTM360!