If you have any contacts who read their emails in Googlemail or Google Apps Mail, then they will see a big improvement in appearance of the campaigns you send them using LiveWire Campaign.

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.

LiveWire Campaign is now on Twitter.

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.

Following the recent addition of the Contact Report functionality to LiveWire Campaign, a few of you got in contact with us and let us know that you thought the Contact Report page was very hard to find - requiring a double click of a record on the Contact Management grid.

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.

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.