SV1
Countdown Timer in Email
Dear all,
we want to make usage of a real time countdown inside e-mails relative to the IP address of our recepients since we send to different countries + responsive in mobile + ability to design it freely with our without the addition of the words SALE ENDS + DAYS HOURS MINUTES.
We tried https://litmus.com/community/learning/27-how-to-add-a-countdown-timer-to-your-email
But we don't possess a PHP server at work. We do have Microsoft .net = alternatives possible?Does anyone else ave good experieces with countdown timers in e-mail: would love to hear how you arrange it?
Thanks in advance!
Sofie
Try http://gifcountdown.com/ It automatically shows the users local time and uses a streaming animated gif to update in real time.
Hi Sofie,
There are of course many services that offer countdown timers but may require a minimum send to be cost effective such as LiveClicker, MovableInk and MotionMail.
Regarding PHP, you could get many hosting environments that have PHP installed for less than $5/month. Amazon offers a year of AWS for free and DigitalOcean gives you a small environment for $5, Hostgator you can get a shared account for $4/mth.
If your company has its own website, chances are the server that hosts it supports PHP. Most web hosts includes PHP support since it's a free language. If you want to test the PHP code on your desktop, try downloading XAMPP https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html
XAMPP allows you to run an Apache server (which is actually what you need, there's no such thing as a PHP server) natively on your computer as a testing environment. It cannot, however, be used as a public server outside of your desktop environment. You will need PHP to be installed on your server to use this method in an email campaign. How to install PHP on your server: http://www.w3schools.com/php/php_install.asp
The .NET framework will not work for what you want to do. PHP is able to generate graphic files (.jpg, .gif, and .png), which is why the countdown timer works. There is no support for .NET code within an email since all non-HTML and non-CSS code is striped from emails for security reasons.
Summation: If you don't have access to a server that supports PHP, you cannot do the countdown timer.
I've used MotionMail with great success (users loved it), but it's MailChimp specific. We are looking at gifcountdown.com for a campaign in another provider, but haven't had a chance to test it yet.