There is no easy answer to this, it is potentially a very complex matter.

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.

We have redesigned the contacts section and made many improvements to the way you manage your contacts.

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.

LiveWire Campaign usage continues to grow quickly, with more and more customers choosing LiveWire Campaign as their email marketing platform.

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.

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.

OK, we admit it, LiveWire has been creaking a bit over recent weeks. It’s become a victim of it’s own success and usage has grown extremely rapidly. This has caused the system to slow at certain peak times so we are going to bring forward a scheduled upgrade of the hosting infrastructure. This will involve a little more downtime, which we know will inconvenience our faithful regular users, but we will do our best to keep it to an absolute minimum.

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.