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.

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.

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.

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.

The good news is that the new platform is going to improve the speed and capacity of LiveWire hugely. We’ve also been hard at work redeveloping the contacts management section. We’ve incorporated many LiveWire users requests and suggestions in it’s design and we’re sure you’re going to love all the extra features and the simplicity of it’s use. Please bear with us, we’re working very hard to improve LiveWire and the upgrades will be coming online almost daily over the next few weeks.

To delete all members within a contact group:-

• Go to the Contacts Tab
• Select a “Contact Group”
• Select “View Contacts” which will show you a list of all contacts with membership to that group
• Use the “Delete Group & these Contacts” button

NOTE:Please remember this deletion is permanent!  

These changes were made to LiveWire Campaign on the 12th May 2008.

Two years ago I was badly let down by the garage I was purchasing my new car from. Not only did they tell my that my car was actually months away from delivery only days away from the promised delivery date but they also tried to ’steal’ my deposit when I subsequently canceled the order. I was not a happy bunny. Fortunately my bank stepped in. I’d paid the deposit on credit card and my bank returned the money immediately when I called ‘breach of contract’ on the motor dealer. A lesson to be learned there!

A day or two later I received an email from a leasing company listing the months special offers and one particular vehicle caught my eye. Suffice it to say it was delivered a week or so later and it was a timely email campaign that prompted the purchase. I’m still enjoying driving the car though I’m now looking forward to renewing my contract with the same leasing company in July.
More recently my old jet washer finally gave up the ghost and began to emit little more than a dribble. Email marketing came to the rescue again. Just last week I received a special offer in my inbox of a £175 power washer for only £60. I jumped at the chance and ordered one.

Last weekend I cleaned my car with it. A power washer purchase prompted by email marketing used to clean a car purchased from a timely email campaign. Proving, if proof were needed, that email marketing is still alive and well and the secret is still just sending the right message at the right time.

E-mail marketing is still one of the most cost-effective ways of finding new clients and building a stronger relationship with current customers, but competition is fierce, the economic climate is looking decidedly inclement and your e-marketing messages have to work harder than ever to cut through the smog.

We worked one on one with each of the attendees and showed how email marketing fits into the big picture. It’s still amazing to find large organisations getting their e-marketing communications badly wrong. Some were still batch sending many thousands of emails from Outlook and had no idea if any one at all was reading them!

The fact is, even with all the SPAM and all the bad communication out there, email marketing still works. Often it’s just a matter of keeping your audience engaged for long enough until you manage to send the right message at the right time and make a sale.

Here is a short list of some of the points we highlighted at the workshop. They are the basic fundamentals of a successful campaign. We’ve talked about them many times before but they are worth repeating:

• Get personal – personally addressed e-mails with, if possible, personalised content is going to have more chance of establishing trust and a relationship
• Write a meaningful subject line and opening – write a succinct, transparent and descriptive overview of the offering you wish to promote. The reader should be able to work out within a few seconds if it is of interest and whether they wish to learn more
• Copy – Be concise and use short sentences, paragraphs and bullets points to ease reading
• Be sure to proof the copy – silly little mistakes stick out like a sore thumb and spoil all that effort you invested to make the perfect e-mail campaign.
• Test your e-mail before you send it – do a dry run to yourself and a sample group
• Answer all replies with 24 hours – e-mails are a quick and easy channel of communication and interested parties will want quick answers. Do not disappoint on the first and probably only time you will have to make a favourable impression

In my daily business life, quite often I get emails in my inbox that are requests or queries that I take a few minutes to reply to. It takes a bit of thought, a bit of consideration and a little bit of time. Often my reply to a specific request is in the form of a proposal. The questioner asks if he can have ‘A’ and I reply yes, or no but you can have option ‘B.’

And then I get no response. Zero. Zilch.

Just a few words is all I ask in return. ‘Thanks, but no thanks’ would be a start. An explanation would be even better but it doesn’t always happen and I wonder why. Perhaps it’s a symptom of why some people seem to forget the rules of communication in email. They forget about punctuation, capitalisation, forming a coherent sentence. I read a few paragraphs of text recently where the writer had decided, apparently that full stops and new sentences were old hat and that they’d use hyphens instead. Interesting concept but it didn’t really work.

Of course it’s a symptom of the well documented general laziness with the English language that is creeping in. It starts badly in school and, in my experience, sometimes doesn’t ever improve. Good communication skills and the ability to formulate concepts and translate them into words are key skills for marketers and graphic designers but it appears to me that many new graduates are taking these abilities less and less seriously. It’s a shame. These skills are fundamental. Without them how can we communicate our ideas effectively and succinctly? How can we tune in to what people want and give it to them? I value them much more highly than I value a designer’s technical abilities with Photoshop.

I realise I’m taking a risk writing this. I know there are much cleverer people than me who have spotted all the grammatical errors I’m sure I’ve made, but at least I’m trying.

Contacts who are already on your contact list, and are also contained within the file you upload can be processed as follows:

• If you would like to add both existing contacts and new contacts to the same group simultaneously,
  select Add to same contact group as new contacts.
• If you would like duplicate contacts to be ignored (not added to a group), select Ignore.
• If you would like to add existing contacts to a different group than new contacts, select Add to different group(s).