Email Marketing Tips

One issue that can be faced when sending email from an email marketing platform such as LiveWire Campaign, is that destination mail servers do not know if LiveWire campaign is permitted to deliver mail coming from your email domain.

SPF records allow you to specify which servers are allowed to send mail for your domain, and we would strongly recommend that you do set up a valid SPF record for your domain - as more and more mail servers are now giving emails a higher SPAM score if no valid SPF record can be found for the sending domain - or even worse, if an email is sent from a domain which has an SPF record, but from a server which is not shown as permitted to send the email.

To set up an SPF record for your domain, you will need to have access to (or make a request to someone who does have access to) the DNS records for your email domain.

A TXT record will need to be added to your domain configuration, containing the following:

• “v=spf1 a mx include:iwiremail.co.uk ?all”

Iwiremail.com is the domain which LiveWire Campaign uses for sending email - the section include:iwiremail.co.uk in the SPF record is what specifies that emails from LiveWire campaign servers are permitted.  The other instructions specify that any mail server for your domain, or any other server which is registered on your domain (e.g. your web server) is also allowed to send email for your domain - these settings should be safe for most domains, but in some cases may need to be reviewed by an IT professional dependant on your domain configuration.

One thing to note, is that you will not be able to setup an SPF record if you are sending from a shared domain email address (e.g. hotmail.com / gmail.com / yahoo.com /etc.) - and this is just one of many reasons why you should never send email marketing campaigns from such an address.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you need further assistance or advice in setting an SPF record up for use with LiveWire Campaign - either post a comment, or send an email to support at livewirecampaign.co.uk.

First of all, let us apologise to any customers who have had difficulties uploading large contact lists over the last few weeks.

We have now made some major improvements in performance, which should mean that most reasonable size contact lists (<=5,000) will upload  in a few seconds, and even much larger contact list should upload within a minute.

Please let us know if you have any issues with the new functionality - and we promise there will be more major improvements to LiveWire Campaign functionality in the near future - particularly for managing contacts.

Microsoft have taken the incomprehensible decision that Outlook 2007 will no longer use Internet Explorer to render HTML emails and instead use the archaic Microsoft Word HTML rendering engine. 

So instead of taking advantage of Internet Explorer, Microsoft has opted to use the limited support for HTML and CSS built into Word 2007 to display HTML emails. 

As a result of this decision there are a wide variety of CSS and formatting features not supported in Outlook 2007. Microsoft have been kind enough to supply details of what these are, which you can view here:- Microsoft Outlook 2007 support.  

We have determined that the new “features” of Outlook 2007 apply to any formatting and styling that may have been intended to:- 

1) create readable HTML emails
2) present well designed and implemented emails
3) make HTML emails that look like they were made this millennium
4) enhance the recipients experience
5) meet accessibility standards 

In all seriousness, what this means is that the majority of HTML emails in Outlook 2007 may be difficult to read, poorly formatted and will not display as they were originally intended to.
Outlook 2007 is yet to become the mainstream email client of choice, but as businesses begin to upgrade their systems over the coming years this situation needs tackling head on. 

We will be addressing Microsoft’s calamitous decision head on, by re-writing our email templating system over the coming months to ensure maximum compatibility for Outlook 2007 users. 

Our new templating system will not only be built to ensure compatibility with this new Microsoft product, but we will be taking this opportunity to greatly improve the user interface for LiveWire Campaign users. 

At LiveWire Campaign we are dedicated to our customers, and we realise presentation is often the most important factor in the effectiveness of your content. Branding and style have an important role to play in business communications, which is why we have already begun working towards solving this problem. 

We can only hope that by the time Outlook 2011 comes out the geniuses at Microsoft haven’t opted for a plain text rendering engine!

Some users of LiveWire Campaign may have noticed the following issue after purchasing a voucher using a credit or debit card.   

• The transaction is completed, the card used has been debited, and the message you’ve successfully completed your payment is shown on the PayPal site. 

• When you click the “Return to Gencia Media” button, you see the message: 
   

Your card transaction didn’t go through
the transaction has been given a status of “FAIL”  

• Your voucher is not shown within your LiveWire account until the next time you login. 
   

• PayPal Account transactions correctly showed the voucher purchase was successful message. 
   

This issue was caused due to an invalid communication sent by PayPal to our servers for card transactions. We have resolved this issue by ignoring the invalid part of the communication sent by PayPal. 

Sorry for any inconvenience this may have caused. If you have been affected by this issue, please email support@livewirecampaign.co.uk. 

Regards,  

The LiveWire Team.