Using a Wishlist to Build Your Magento Newsletter Template

Building a Magento Newsletter using a Wishlist

With Magento you can build newsletters using straight up HTML.  It's a very nice feature but building out a nice newsletter with enticing product images and "buy now" links can be tedious to do by hand. Here's an easy way to get a good template that has a grid of products with customer convenience hyperlinks.

The Wishlist

Any customer can create a list of all of their favorite products using the wishlist functionality built into Magento. The wishlist "send to" functionality sends a copy of a very nicely-formatted product ad of the wishlist to an your e-mail account... full HTML.

1. Login to the Magento store frontend and add the products you'd like in your newsletter to your wishlist.
2. Click the "Share Wishlist" in order to send to your email address.
3. If you use something like sendgrid or mailchimp as your outgoing SMTP service, you're going to get a lot of injected redirects into your HTML.  You'll need an alternate way of getting the email to yourself. I temporarily disabled the awesome plugin from aschroder.com that sends out SMTP/gmail. After disabling, the email was sent from my web server instead and was clean. 

Getting the HTML from the Wishlist email to your newsletter

1. In your email client, locate the wishlist email and view source (In gmail that's called "show original" and is available from the drop-down menu).  Select all of the HTML in the email and copy to the clipboard.
2. Some e-mail clients such as gmail insert funny characters into the HTML.  If you notice a lot of "=0A" or "=3D" in the HTML you copied, go to http://www.convertstring.com/EncodeDecode/QuotedPrintableDecode in order to "decode".  Once decoded, you'll want to copy the converted text to the clipboard.

Creating the Newlsetter

1. Just paste the HTML into your Magento newsletter template.  Adjust and beautify as needed.

I hope this helps!

Webmaster, All American Hats