Delivering Custom Email Messages to iPhone and iPod Touch Users

A friend recently asked me if there was a way to target an email for the iPhone, but still display normally for other clients.  My response was initially “no”, but after further thought I realized that there is a way to display a sort of customized email specifically for iPhone/Ipod touch users.

To do so requires a little ingenuity, in the form of a php app (downloadable below) and the following steps:

1. Add an image to your html, preferable the one your going to use as your targeted iPhone message.
2. Remove any width, height, and alt tags from the above tag. You want this image to be as non-descript as possible when it displays to non-iPhone users.
3. Next, apply an image map to your image.
4. When your done with step 3, replace the src of the image with “iphone.php?file=yourfilename.gif”. ‘file’ is the only variable that iphone.php accepts. If you don’t specify it, it will return a blank gif. “yourfilename.gif” refers, of course, to the image you want iPhone users to see.
   Your image tag should look something like this now:
   <img src=”http://www.YourDomain.com/iphone.php?file=yourfilename.gif” border=”0″ usemap=”#iphonemap”>
5. Now just make sure that the image you are referencing is in the same folder as the ‘iphone.php’ file (or that you’ve put the right path to it).
6. and your done!

Now when you send your campaigns, iPhone users can receive a custom email/message with multiple clickthrus!

Note: I haven’t done a thorough test of this among multiple email clients. I can only confirm that it works well with Thunderbird and the iPod Touch.

If you have any issues or suggestions with these files, please leave a comment below.

Download ZBIT
(Zach Biles iPhone Targeting…..sounds better than ZIT =) ).