DIY Email Banner with Logo

An email banner is an image which appears at the top of every email you send. It can incorporate your company logo, tagline and other elements. Your email looks professional while ensuring that you stand out from the other 50 emails your customer has received that morning.

DIY Email Banner

An email banner can be setup as customised stationery in Microsoft Outlook Express quickly and easily. You can even have more than one for different products, branches or divisions within your company. By making your banner resemble your website, you will reinforce your on-line branding making even first time visitors to your website feel right at home.

How to Setup an Email Banner

1. First you need a low resolution version of your logo with tagline. It should be the exact size on screen as you want it to appear in your email. (If you don’t have Photoshop, you can open your logo in Paint and adjust the size – no more than 600 pixels wide)
2. Once you have a logo or banner saved, open Outlook Express
3. On the top menu, go to TOOLS
4. Select OPTIONS and go to the COMPOSE tab at the top
5. Under stationery, tick MAIL
6. Click the SELECT button then CREATE NEW
7. Click NEXT to start the stationery wizard and tick PICTURE
8. Click on the BROWSE button and click through the files until you find the image you saved at the beginning
9. Click OPEN and select POSITION – top, left and TILE – Do Not Tile (this is very important)
10. Make sure the COLOUR box is white then click on NEXT at the bottom
11. Change the font to Arial, size to 10 and click on NEXT at the bottom
12. Change left margin to 25 pixels and top margin to 125 pixels (or other to suit the size of your logo)
13. Give your stationery a name, then click FINISH, and OK
14. On the options window, make sure your new stationery is showing next to the SELECT button.
15. If not, click on SELECT and choose the stationery you saved.
16. Click APPLY at the bottom and then OK to close the Options window.

Now when you create a new email message, the banner should come up automatically. If you do not want the banner to come up every time, you can either select No Stationery under the arrow beside New Message button OR, you can leave the box unticked under tools and options, then select your stationery using arrow next to new message every time you do want the banner. If you have problems, you need to check TOOLS, OPTIONS, SEND. The Mail Sending Format must be Html.

Note re email software – if you use Microsoft Outlook as your email software, there is a similar system for setting up a banner. However, there is no option to stop the logo from tiling (repeating down the page) so you will need to follow all the steps above using Outlook Express (most computers have both programs as standard), then open Microsoft Outlook and select the stationery you have saved. These 2 programs share the stationery folder.

Custom Email Banner

If you would like your banner to include website navigation and links, you will need to link to a custom html file which can be created using a website design program. This is basically an email newsletter template so you can go further and include tables, other images, colirs etc if you wish. All links need to be hard coded (ie. include the full web address with http etc in each link). This may be something you need to ask your web designer to supply. It shouldn’t take more than an hour.

Please email me if you need help creating a custom banner for your email.