Everyone will tell you, you shouldn’t send out a purely graphics based email campaign. Graphics aren’t loaded by default in email clients so most people just click away or delete your email without ever even seeing your message.

Or do they?

We recently tested this theory by going against the grain and sending out an email campaign that was made up of just one large graphic. The design was based on a recent press advertisement. It was simple and visually striking. The call to action was a telephone number and the whole graphic was a link to the website.

And guess what?

Over a third more people opened the campaign than ever before and we had 300% more sales interest than any of our previous campaigns. So it just goes to show you shouldn’t always just believe what you’re told. Sometimes it pays to break the rules.

As well as adapting the built in templates you can also upload your own HTML to LiveWire Campaign and send completely bespoke email campaigns to your customers.

We’ll take a lot of the hard work out of creating your own custom HTML email because LiveWire takes care of the ‘tracking,’ unsubscribe’ and ‘view as a web page’ functionality automatically.

There are lenty of other reasons why LiveWire is the perfect choice for bespoke campaigns but here‘s just a few:

• Your web code is automatically validated to W3C XHTML standards
• Any links you put into your HTML are tracked in your LiveWire Campaign reports
• A web version of your email is created and hosted on our servers for free
• An unsubscribe link is automatically appended to the foot of your email
• You can remove all LiveWire branding from your email*

If you need some help with your creative and HTML code we can supply that too. For an additional cost our team can provide you with creative concepts, upload the approved version to LiveWire and we’ll even send the campaign for you.

* All LiveWire branding is removed from your emails when you purchase a ‘Remove LiveWire Branding’ voucher.

There is no easy answer to this, it is potentially a very complex matter.

The LiveWire Campaign Team do all we can to ensure the mail our system (our web servers and software) sends, is as unlikely as possible to be flagged as Spam as it can be. We comply with spam laws and insist that all of our customers only send emails to opted in addresses.

There will however always be the chance your emails may be flagged as spam depending on 1) who you send to and 2) what email software they are using. Some software decides if an email is spam [this software can be at your ISP, your mail provider, your locally installed software or all three]. Then users also have the ability to flag your email as spam in certain email tools / web email services.

Methods used to recognise spam vary, but tools usually scan through your email and look at how your email is composed.

You should avoid the use of:
1) Uppercase subject lines
2) Over long subject lines
3) Over use of commonly used spam words and characters. “£,” “FREE,” “£xxx″”!!!” “Prize”

Also, Customers may perceive offers that they’re simply not interested in at the time as SPAM and use the “report SPAM” button in their email software to express their feelings. They may want to remain on the list, but they don’t understand the implications of hitting the ‘report spam’ button.

We have redesigned the contacts section and made many improvements to the way you manage your contacts.

A new button ‘manage contacts’ has replaced ‘View All Contacts’, ‘Add A Contact’ and ‘Add/Edit/Delete Contact Groups’ in the contacts section. You’ll find this a much more powerful tool for organising your contacts and groups, and it’s easier to use too. The attached image and the corresponding help text provide the basics on how you can use the new tool.

Firstly, select the contacts tab and click on the new ‘manage contacts’ button. You’ll now see the new contact management tool.

You will notice that the help text for this page is in a new drop down box. To view the help text, just click the arrow on the right hand side of the blue bar.

Contact Groups:
View your Contacts by “Contact Group” using the drop down box on the top left below the help bar. This will display all the contact groups you have set up previously. To reset the contacts select the “View ALL” option.

Individual Contact Management:
Double click on a contact to view, edit or delete it. Use the “Add” button to add new contacts.

Batch Management:
Select one or many contacts with the right hand checkboxes, or by using the “Select All” button. Once you have your contacts selected, either by filtering or by manual selection, you can perform the appropriate action, such as “Delete Contacts” or “New group… +” from the “More Actions” drop down box.

Page Size:
You can change the amount of records displayed at the bottom of the screen in increments of 25 Contacts per page.

Sorting:
Click on the column headings to re-order by “First Name”, “Last Name”, “Email Address”, “Company”, “Phone Number”, “Unsubscribe” or “Unique Ref. No”.

Searching and Filtering:
When you hover on a column heading a down arrow will appear on the right of the heading which can be clicked to reveal a “Fly Out panel” of filtering and search options.

Use the filters to return contacts that match the text you are searching for. I.e. go to Email Address ‘Fly Out panel’ > Filters > Type in ‘@hotmail’, and this will filter your results to just those contacts who have hotmail addresses.

LiveWire Campaign usage continues to grow quickly, with more and more customers choosing LiveWire Campaign as their email marketing platform.

This means that, once again, we have to increase the capacity of the system. Any delays you may have been experiencing over the last month or two during busy periods will soon be a thing of the past.

In addition to this we will also be making some major upgrades to the contacts section. You can expect to see vast improvements in the management of your subscribed users.

This work will be carried out between:
8.00am - 1.00pm (BST / GMT +1.00) on Monday the 14th July 2008
during which time the website will be unavailable.

If you have any important campaigns to send out on or around this date you will be able to send these when normal service resumes at (or before) 1.00pm.

We’ll be working as fast as we can to keep the downtime to a minimum and we hope this essential work doesn’t cause you too much inconvenience.