We’ve just added functionality to LiveWire campaign to allow you to view all tracking statistics associated with a user.

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.

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.

The LiveWire Campaign Mailing List Widget provides account holders the ability to add a Sign Up form to their own web site, which allows visitors to their web site to enter their details and email address, and automatically be added to the contacts list within the associated LiveWire Campaign account.

We’ve recentally made some enhancments to this functionality, so now you can capture more information about the person signing up (Company and Telephone number) which information is available on your contact list, and also in all campaign reports.

We’ve also made it possible to specify which contacts group widget sign ups are added to - this can be really useful if you use a single LiveWire Campaign account for mailing different groups of customers

To use the Mailing List Widget, log on to your LiveWire Campaign account, then select the Mailing List Widget link from the Contacts tab.  Full instructions for using and customising the Mailing List Widget are displayed at the top of the page.

Please Note: If you already use the Mailing List Widget on your site, and want to make use of the updated functionality, you will need to update the widget on your web site as described on the Mailing List Widget page.

We’d love to hear your feedback on this change - just add a comment to this post, or send an email to feedback@livewirecampaign.co.uk.

If there’s anything else you want from LiveWire Campaign, then why not go and vote for the features you want - your vote really counts!

We have made a significant number of changes to the way in which LiveWire Campaign assembles HTML emails, in particular concentrating on working round display issues caused by MS Outlook 2007.

Email templates which contain a sidebar, now display with the sidebar adjacent to the main email content, rather than underneath the email as was previously the case in Outlook 2007.

We have also made a number of modifications to the templates to resolve issues with incorrect fonts / font sizes being rendered in Outlook 2007, as well as rectifying a number of issues with spacing.

Whilst we have made every endeavour to ensure that the changes we have made do not affect the display of the email within a standards compliant mail client, it is possible that due to the huge variety of available email clients, and the large combination of template customisation options available within LiveWire Campaign, that the appearance of some existing templates may be affected within some other mail clients.  We would therefore encourage you to retest any existing templates that you are planning on reusing prior to sending a live campaign.

We’d love to hear your feedback on this change - just add a comment to this post, or send an email to feedback@livewirecampaign.co.uk.

If there’s anything else you want from LiveWire Campaign, then why not go and vote for the features you want - your vote really counts!

Are you linking to eBay (or other high profile shopping or banking sites) from within your Email Marketing Campaign?

If so, please read the following advice carefully.

One of the most prevelant cybercrime attacks perpetrated by criminals, is Phishing.

Phising is “the criminally fraudulent process of attempting to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy website.”

On of the most common type of Phishing attack, is to send out an email containing links that appear as if they are pointing to a trusted website (e.g. http://www.ebay.co.uk) but in actual fact point to a completely different website - which may on first glance look like ebay - in the hope that unsuspecting recipients will enter their usernames, passwords, and credit card details.

As a direct response to this, the majority of antispam / antivirus software will now scan emails for any links which appear to point to a different website to the link which is displayed.  In particualr, if any of these links point to a high profile shopping or banking website (such as ebay), there is a high liklihood that the email will either be blocked (i.e. the recipient will never recieve it) or the recipient may recieve the message - but marked as a possible fraud attempt by the antivirus software.

The reason that this is a particular problem to users of LiveWire Campign, is that all links within your campaigns are tracked, so that you can see who has been clicking onthe link.  This is done by redirecting all links through the LiveWire Campaign website, and then immediately redirecting to the actual link destination.  This means that if you put a link with the text http://www.ebay.co.uk, and with a destination of http://www.ebay.co.uk - the initial link actually points to http://www.livewirecampaign.co.uk - and there is a high likelihood your email will with be blocked, or will be displayed to your recipients as a possible / probable fraud (which isn’t great marketing!)

The Solution:

Thankfully the solution is quite simple.

Read more »