Want to spread a number of campaigns over the week or month ahead?

LiveWire Campaign’s new Scheduled Sending functionality lets you do just that!

Simply send the campaign as you would normally, then on the Confirm Details screen, tick the Send Later box and select the date and time you want the campaign to be sent.

This is one of a number of ongoing updates to LiveWire Campaign functionality - let us know what you think - and if you have any suggestions, please add a comment to this post, tweet @LWCampaign - or send an email to info at livewirecampaign.co.uk.

Click through and open percentages are now shown on the summary screen, together with the date and time of the last recipient action - so it’s now easy to see at a glance any campaigns which have had recent activity, without having to click into each report.

You can also sort and filter the summary report by any of the displayed values - which makes it much easier to get an overview of the campaigns you are currently interested in.  This together with the summary statistics, allows you to perform comparative analysis of the best (or worst) performing campaigns, which should help you to create even more effective communications going forward.

And by popular request, we have also added a Hide Test Campaigns button, which quickly removes all the Test to Self campaigns from the list.

This is one of a number of ongoing updates to LiveWire Campaign functionality - let us know what you think - and if you have any suggestions, please add a comment to this post, tweet @LWCampaign - or send an email to info at livewirecampaign.co.uk.

In making these changes, our goals were to:

• Make emails display identically in Outlook 2007 Outlook 2010 to how they display within the Web View, and within other, standards compliant email clients.
• Minimise any change in the appearance of existing campaigns

By and large, we have achieved these goals - the majority of email campaigns now appear virtually identical within Outlook 2007+ to how they do within the browser, with the exception of some minor differences in campaigns which use functionality which is not supported within Outlook 2007+ (for instance background images in headers don’t show in Outlook).

This has been accomplished with minimal impact to existing campaigns - however, as the display code used for the majority of sections within the campaign has been changed significantly, it is unavoidable that the appearance of some campaign templates may be effected.

We therefore recommend that you recheck the appearance of any campaigns you have already created before sending, to ensure no unintended impact.

As always, your feedback is appreciated - add a comment to this post, tweet @LWCampaign - or send an email to info at livewirecampaign.co.uk.

• Layout of summary reports page has been updated to make it easier to access campaign statistics
• Percentages are shown for all relevant statistics
• A list of all campaign recipients can be displayed / downloaded
• Button to Edit Campaign has been added to summary page
• All contacts on every report detail page now link through to the Contact Report page for the associated contact

We’ve also added a Go Back button to the Contact Report page, which will take you back to the page where you clicked the link to load the Contact Report page (either the Contact management screen or one of the reports screens) with the same context selected.

In fact we’ve updated the Contact Management screen so that it always remembers any filters / sorting / paging / etc. until you log off - and will go back to that place next time you return to the page.

Hopefully these changes should make the Contact Report functionality added to the system recently even easier to access, and make your experience using LiveWire Campaign even smoother.

As always, your feedback is appreciated - add a comment to this post, tweet @LWCampaign - or send an email to info at livewirecampaign.co.uk.

• Text is displayed with the same layout and formatting while editing as will be used in the email
• Symbol characters are automatically converted to their HTML symbol character code - this means non alphanumeric characters should now be visible in the transmitted email, without any corruption - even when pasted from Microsoft Word!
• Better Paste from Word functionality - the Paste From Word button removes all the …detritus Microsoft Word insists in wrapping round your content when you copy and paste content - but keeps the basic formatting and layout. Just Click the Clipboard with the blue W when copying and pasting from Word.
• More control over specific styling - right click on any selection to modify advanced properties

We’ve also made some improvements to how the Sidebar renders in Microsoft Outlook 2007 - expect more Outlook 2007 rendering improvements in the near future.

As always, your feedback is appreciated - add a comment to this post, tweet @LWCampaign - or send an email to info at livewirecampaign.co.uk.

We’ve reworked the way in which the email code is generated to specifically target restrictions which are in place with the way in which Googlemail renders HTML emails, so now your emails should look as good in Gmail as when you view them in the Browser.

Please check it out, and let us know what you think - add a comment to this post, send an email to info at livewirecampaign.co.uk - or tweet @LWCampaign.

Keep in the loop as to what’s going on with LiveWire Campaign by following @LWCampaign.

We’ll also tweet in real time regarding any scheduled maintainence and updates to the system.

We’ve just added a Twitter feed to the Quick Start page, so you’ll also be able to see the latest update when you log in to your LiveWire Campaign account .

Feel free to ping us with any questions, or anything you want to share with the LiveWire Team.

We agree - and so we have added a button to each record in the grid - clicking on this will open the Contact Report page for the selected contact. (You can still double click the contact if you’ve got used to that - either way will work)

Take a look, and let us know what you think - add a comment to this post, send an email to info at livewirecampaign.co.uk - or tweet @LWCampaign.

This functionality replaces the existing Edit Contact screen, and allows you to do the following for a single contact:

• View and Edit Contact Details
• View Summary Information:

• Status
• Last Activity
• Last Campaign Sent
• Number of Campaigns Sent
• Number of Campaigns Opened
• Number of links clicked

• Opens
• Clicks
• Bouncebacks
• Unsubscribes

This screen gives you an “at a glance” view of all the interactions you’ve had with a contact using LiveWire Campaign.

We’d love to know what you think of this functionality - let us know by posting a comment, or by sending an email to support at livewirecampaign.co.uk.

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.