Please note we have now fixed the issue with the file uploads in Suite26 today.

You are again now able to upload CSV files when importing your contact lists and upload images for your email campaigns.

Thank you,

The Suite26 Team

Please note we are experiencing an issue with file uploads in Suite26 today.

This includes CSV file uploads when importing contacts and all image uploads for email designs. The technical team are currently looking into the issue and we hope to have this fixed as soon as possible.  Apologies for any inconvenience caused.

Please keep an eye out for the next service update.

Thanks,

Suite26 Team

Including the following four tips will help you engage with your recipients better, maintain their trust and get those images displaying.

At the top of your email:

Remind them why they are receiving your email
You are receiving this email...
-Because you are a customer of X.
-Because you signed up to X newsletter.
-Because you are a subscriber to X emails.

This will help the recipient immediately recognise who you are and remind them why they are getting the email.

Use a Viewonline Link to help display blocked and unloaded images
Most mail clients will not display the images on your email, so inserting a viewonline link at the top of your email will help encourage recipients to open up the email in a new web browser page. This will display all the content and images in full.

Try including:
-Problem seeing the images? [viewonline]Click here to view this email in your web browser [/viewonline].
-Images not displaying? [viewonline]View the full email online here [/viewonline].

This will help to get the email opened and avoid recipients possibly ignoring or deleting the email because they’ve been put off by the email looking incomplete.

At the bottom of your email:

Include full company details
Always include your company name, address and contact details at the foot of your email. This will help you build and maintain trust with the recipient. Emails without full company details can look illegitimate and untrust worthy, which could lead to the email being marked as spam.

Make the unsubscribe link easy to find
Avoid burying the unsubscribe link amongst a paragraph of text or changing its colour so that it doesn’t clearly stand out against your email’s background colour. If a recipient is no longer interested in receiving your emails, make it easy for them to locate the unsubscribe link, rather than running the risk of the recipient getting annoyed and marking the email as spam.

Happy New Everyone.  Lets kick things off with a new year email marketing tip for you.

Adding Alternative Text To Images

Images on HTML email designs do not always display automatically in most email clients, so adding a short sentence or description (alternative text or alt text) for each image gives the recipient a quick overview of what to expect, either before their email client loads the images or before the reader has to right click and download the images.

Another benefit of including alt text on your images is that it helps improve your text to image ratio on your email. Having an even text to image ratio is something that increases your emails’ chances of getting through spam filters and landing in your customers’ inbox.

To add alternative text to your images in Suite26:

-Click on Edit Primary Content
-Select Insert/Edit Image
-In the Image Properties box, type in your alt text description in the Alternative Text field as shown below.

How to add alt text to your images

After inserting your logo and images onto your email template, why not make them link through to a specific landing page on your website.

To set-up a link and drive more traffic to your site:

- Simply click on the image or logo you want to set-up as a link

- Click on the Insert/Edit link button in the toolbar menu.

- Type in your desired URL (e.g. www.yourcompany.co.uk/specificpage)

- Hit Ok.

You may then notice blue border appear around your image or logo (as shown above) and no doubt, you’d like to remove it.

To remove the blue border and make your email look sharper:

- Click on the image or logo again

-  Click on the Insert/Edit Image button in the tool bar menu. An image properties pop-up window will appear

- Type a 0 in the boarder field, as shown on the left.

If you need any help inserting images, creating links or removing the blue border, please give Mark a call on 0845 313 0912 or email enquiries@26.co.uk

No matter what level of email marketing experience you have, failing to follow these simple email marketing best practices can affect your email campaigns’ success.

By sticking to this checklist, you can help guarantee more opens, clicks, responses and ultimately sales, (if that’s your goal?)

Branding:

• Does your email feature your logo, corporate branding and colours?
• Does the branding on your email match the same style and feel as your website?

Content:

• Does your message contain the benefits to the reader? How will they benefit from your offer, latest news or new product or service etc?
• Does your email include well-placed, clear and compelling call-to-actions? Is it obvious what you want them to do next?
• Is your email well structured and have an even balance between text, images and links?
• Have you avoided using spammy words in your subject line and body text?
• Is your subject line intriguing and persuasive enough to make the recipient want to read on?

Personalisation:

• Have you tried personalising your email with the customer’s name, yet without over-personalising the email?
• Is your ‘From Name’ a named person or just a generic one such as info, sales or support? Using a name can help make it feel friendlier.

Data Management:

• Have you recently checked to see how up to date your email address data and contact groups are?
• Is your sign-up process as easy as it can possibly be? Have you personally tested it recently?

Legal Bits:

• Does your email contain any of your corporate details? Full company name, head office address, a contact number?
• Is your unsubscribe link clearly visible, simple and straightforward?

Technical Design & Testing:

• Have you tested the your email to see how it renders in different mail clients and web browsers? Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo etc?
• Have you included a link for the email to be viewed in a new web browser page?
• Do your images have alt text so that content will still appear even if the images cannot due to certain mail client settings?
• Have you kept the resolution size of your images and logos small and checked that they load properly and quickly?

If you can tick all these boxes, you’re ready to go!

It has been bane of email marketing for designers and marketers for years, but it has just been revealed that background images can now finally display in Outlook 2007.

With a few modifications to the code, here is how to set it up:

First you have to add xmlns: v=“urn:schemas-microsoft-com:vml” to your html tag.

Secondly, within your style tag, add the following selector:

v\:* {
behavior: url(#default#VML);
display:inline-block;

Then finally, within your table cell, you must add:

<td width="600" height="402" valign="top" bgcolor="#000000" background="images/yourimage.gif">
<!—[if gte mso 9]>
<v:image id="image" style='position:absolute; height:402px; width:600px;top:0;left:0;border:0;z-index:1;' src="images/yourimage.gif"/>
<v:shape id="text" style='position:absolute; height:402px; width:600px;top:0;left:0;border:0;z-index:2;'>
<![endif]—>
<p align="center" style="font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; color:#ffffff; font-size:18px;">This is the text in front of the background image.</p>
<!—[if gte mso 9]>
</v:shape>
<![endif]—>

It appears that a recent change to Gmail has automatically started adding margins around images.

Most people will not notice the change, but if you sending an email which requires to images to  be placed right next to each other you will may see a gap between them.

This can be remedied by adding a simple "display: block;" to your images like so:

<img src="image.png" style="display: block;" />

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!

If you are using images in your HTML e-mail campaigns you will need to ensure that these images are hosted somewhere on the Internet so that your recipients can see them.

Not everybody has access to a web server for hosting image files, but this is not a problem when you use Suite26.   You can use the built-in File Manager for storing any images for your campaigns.   Just ensure the images you upload are kept within the Public folder.

To make things easier the WYSIWYG editor includes a handy "Insert Image" button which will can link through to the File Manager, making it simple to add images into your e-mail campaigns.

You can find more further details in our Help Centre:

- Using the File Manager
- Adding images into your HTML e-mail campaigns (FCKeditor)
- Adding images into your HTML e-mail campaigns (TinyMCE)