Over the Christmas & New Year period the Suite26 team @ Global Gold will be available as follows:

Christmas Eve: 10am - 2pm
Christmas Day: CLOSED
Boxing Day: CLOSED
29th - 31st December: 10am - 2pm
New Years Day: CLOSED
2nd January: 10am - 2pm

Normal hours resume from Monday 5th January. For a number of support articles and how-to guides please visit our Help Centre. You can also e-mail support@26.co.uk

Suite26 now allows you to add special tags into your e-mail campaigns which will be replaced with actual values when your campaign is sent.

You can use these tags for adding in the day of the week, month name and year, among other things.

These tags can be added into your campaign by using the Insert Special Tag area when editing your campaign content.

If you have added any personalisation to your e-mail campaigns (ie name, e-mail, membership number etc) you may wish to preview how the e-mail would be look for a particular user. This is now possible when sending a preview e-mail. 

From the e-mail campaign overview click on the Send Preview link and enter the e-mail address where you want to receive the e-mail or select one of your contact groups as you normally would and click Continue.

There is now a second stage to the send preview process where you will be asked how you want to personalise the preview send.

The default setting will use the details of the recipient(s) of the preview (if they are not in your contacts database any fields in the e-mail will be blank)

The second option is to select a contact at random from your database and use the details for that contact to personalise the preview e-mail.

For the third option you will need to enter the e-mail address of one of your contacts and their details will be used for the personalisation.

This new feature is a great way to ensure that e-mails you have personalised can be tested thoroughly and arrive as expected with your recipients.

Suite26 has started integrating with the feedback loops of a number of the major mail providers (AOL, Hotmail etc).

These providers often provide a ‘Report Spam’ or ’Spam’ button within their interface which users can click on to mark a message as spam.  Unfortunately, some recipients use these buttons as a quick way of unsubscribing instead of finding and using the link within the e-mail itself.   It is therefore very important to ensure that these recipients are unsubscribed from your lists.

By integrating with the provider’s feedback loop, Suite26 will receive an automated notification whenever these buttons are used and we can then locate the original recipient and ensure they are unsubscribed from future mailings.

Any contacts which are unsubscribed in this way will appear in your e-mail reports with ’Feedback Loop’ as the unsubscribe reason.

It is very important that you honour these unsubscribe requests in the same way as any other.   If you continue sending mail to recipients who have unsubscribed in this way it is very likely that you will be blocked from sending mail to any addresses by that provider.

If you have any questions regarding this feature or require any other help with deliverability and spam related issues, please do not hesitate to contact support@26.co.uk

Following on from our improvements to the contact export functionality, we have now updated the contact import with some new features:

• New 4 stage process.
• Progress bar while file uploads into the system.
• Create a contact group at the same time as importing.
• Indicate the first row in your file contains headers.
• Update your existing contacts using the import process.
• Additional options regarding blank and/or invalid e-mail addresses.
• View import errors.
• Recent history of contact imports.

For full instructions, please see our help article on importing contacts into Suite26 from a text file.

We’ve recently made some improvements to our export contacts functionality.

• You can now select which contacts you wish to export.  This includes all contacts, a contact group, a saved filter or a custom subset which you create on the fly using the segmentation filter.
• You can choose 5 different text file types to export to.
• You can select which fields appear in your export.
• We’ve added a progress bar while the system writes your file so you can see that the system is still active during large downloads.

On top of those changes you can also view your recent exports from the contacts dashboard and re-download the file.

Please see our step-by-step guide to exporting contacts for full details.

You can now create saved filters on your contacts database using our segmentation filter.

You can then use this filter when sending an e-mail campaign to quickly send to the specified contacts.

For full details, please see our help article on setting up a saved contact filter.

It is now possible to specify which version of your e-mail campaign (TEXT or HTML) you wish the View Online link to display.

The default view online link as shown below will always take the recipient through to whichever version they received (TEXT or HTML):

[viewonline]Click here to view this e-mail in your web browser[/viewonline]

To override this default behaviour, just edit the code as show below:

[viewonline:HTML]Click here for the HTML version in your web browser[/viewonline:HTML]
[viewonline:TEXT]Click here for the TEXT version in your web browser[/viewonline:TEXT]

For more details please see our help article about adding unsubscribe and view online links to your e-mail campaigns.

We’ve added a new feature into Suite26 today that allows you to import your e-mail campaign content directly from a URL.

Many of our customers have their e-mail campaigns designed by agencies which then host them online to view, whilst some customers design their campaigns in a program such as Dreamweaver and then host their on their own webspace for testing.

When you create a new campaign with Suite26 you simply need to enter the URL where your campaign is hosted when you reach stage 3 of the add wizard:

Suite26 will then go to that URL and get the HTML and CSS along with downloading the images into the File Manager.

After a few seconds you should automatically have your campaign content created and fully hosted within Suite26.   The import process will even automatically create the plain text version based on the text within your campaign.

All you need to do is check the content, make any final adjustments or changes and you are ready to send!

Suite26 now supports an alternative WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor for creating and editing your HTML e-mail campaigns.

We now support both the existing editor, TinyMCE, and the new editor, FCKeditor, leaving you free to switch to whichever editor you find easier to use.

Above, the FCKeditor in use and below the TinyMCE editor.

For current users of Suite26 you will find that we have left the default WYSIWYG set to TinyMCE to avoid confusion.  New users of Suite26 will have FCKeditor set as the default.

To switch to the editor your prefer, or to disable the editor completely, just click on the Options tab and then Preferences.