Original info-graphic found here.
GraphicMail South Africa - Digital marketing for everyone. Email, mobile, social marketing made easy and affordable! Email marketing tips, mobile and SMS marketing innovations, best practice digital marketing, email case studies and more!
Friday 29 April 2011
Tuesday 26 April 2011
GraphicMail Support Manager Carolynne Higgins's hints on slaying email newsletter gremlins
Ruler of the rings at GraphicMail’s Support call-center provides insights into her fellowship’s daily drill and a few quick ideas regarding email newsletter issues that usually spell disaster for our users' campaigns.
What role do you and the rest of your Support warriors perform on a day-to-day basis?
We handle all in-bound queries related to the use of our products, mainly regarding explanations of how the system works. Our team does constant product testing to refine their expertise of our features and we’re also the first to hear if users have encountered any bugs or if they are having trouble of any kind in producing and delivering their email marketing newsletters.
Being on the front-line of interaction with consumers can be a punishing position. How would you iterate the function of your support team to clarify how you can best be of assistance?
Support people are squeezed every day, often personally receiving all the blame for any product stumbles. Most of the time we simply convey messages from our development people, who are the ones directly involved in the actual workings of the software. GraphicMail’s email newsletter services have been made to be as far as possible 100% easy to use and we do have tutorial videos, webinars and written guides freely available, but there are always a few hitches especially for starter-clients. New technologies have an inescapable learning curve, and that is a considerable part of what Support is for, particularly in the SaaS environment. We’re really just here to help.
With that said, there should be some problems that have become a recurring chant on the support lines. What is the most frequent snag that you are asked to resolve?
It is more accurate to say that we persistently need to deal with a certain set of similar issues that each have different causes. But one of the very familiar suspects occurs when the tables in your email newsletter appear suddenly misaligned for no apparent reason, when you perform a test send. This is typically due to a line of code that your Skype client adds autonomously to outbound messages. Although it’s an easy fix, performed by highlighting and deleting a section marked by “Skype_?” in the HTML editor of the newsletter builder, it will obviously occur repeatedly since Skype is still actively performing the same process. The permanent solution is to disable the add-on in your browser that targets, among other things, your email newsletters. Simply look at your Mozilla Firefox top toolbar for the “Tools” menu, and click through to “Add-ons”. Then just find and disable or remove the Skype entry. Don’t be alarmed as losing this plugin won’t damage your system or make Skype itself defunct. The benefit of going through this slight modification will spare you from needing to Tango with Skype code in HTML at every send interval.
Which other styling issue should users be aware of that could complicate their newsletter distribution?
Most of the problems happen during the phase of putting together your email newsletter - when users are adding in their own content. For example, importing media from a Word document could give you a warped-looking page, where something has once again gone awry on an HTML level. Not that this always happens, but due to compatibility issues and variances in standards by office software producers it is certainly something to watch out for. To avoid this, rather use one of GraphicMail’s free newsletter templates to begin with, or pull in your bits & pieces from a more code-savvy program like Dreamweaver.
So as long as the structure is unaffected by a misstep in the building and sending process the final product will be okay?
Not necessarily. Again, from the first step after you’ve signed up at GraphicMail until your newsletter is delivery-ready, anything can go wrong. We have laid out simple directions for everyone to follow from A-Z, but like learning the alphabet most of us don’t get it right the first time. Watch out especially when dropping content into the newsletter. Plain text can usually be problematic if copied directly off a website or a document - since this will be embedded with styling and other elements that will bring unwanted code over to your page, regularly with undesired effects. The slightly-laborious solution is to copy your text over to Notepad first, and then transfer it to your newsletter directly from there. This strips away everything that you don’t want or need.
What does GraphicMail offer from a more overall Support point of view?
Everything that we realistically can. We handle any and all of our clients’ concerns and go to every possible length to find and offer solutions to these. It’s a comprehensive support service and we have well-defined responsibilities, but there often still seems to be a blurred line of understanding regarding what we can and can’t provide. Principally, we would like to reiterate that while we are always on standby to offer a helping hand, GraphicMail is a self-service application, which means that it is the users’ responsibility to manage their own campaigns and accounts. We do also assist individuals with integrating their email newsletters to other platforms such as social media or Wordpress, but obviously the legal framework of our duties here at GraphicMail restrict us from setting up and managing these in someone else’s name. Common-sense dictates that we cater for everything directly related to GraphicMail features, but that has its limits.
To illustrate this, can you describe a situation where phoning GraphicMail’s Support line wouldn’t be of much help?
We've had a lot of unusual cases over the years, for example; a) If your computer itself is broken or dysfunctional; b) if there’s a power outage in your area; c) if your cat knocks over a teacup, drenching your keyboard, your iPhone and your favourite shirt d) or if you think the orcish horde is attacking… chances are that GraphicMail can’t do much for you. We can however advise you to: a) have your system looked at by a qualified technician if necessary b) light a candle and sing “kumbaya“ c) grab a towel and save what you can, and lastly d) head for the hills. The moral of the story is that we are specialised entirely in giving advice directly regarding our own platform, just like any professionals.
What role do you and the rest of your Support warriors perform on a day-to-day basis?
We handle all in-bound queries related to the use of our products, mainly regarding explanations of how the system works. Our team does constant product testing to refine their expertise of our features and we’re also the first to hear if users have encountered any bugs or if they are having trouble of any kind in producing and delivering their email marketing newsletters.
Being on the front-line of interaction with consumers can be a punishing position. How would you iterate the function of your support team to clarify how you can best be of assistance?
Support people are squeezed every day, often personally receiving all the blame for any product stumbles. Most of the time we simply convey messages from our development people, who are the ones directly involved in the actual workings of the software. GraphicMail’s email newsletter services have been made to be as far as possible 100% easy to use and we do have tutorial videos, webinars and written guides freely available, but there are always a few hitches especially for starter-clients. New technologies have an inescapable learning curve, and that is a considerable part of what Support is for, particularly in the SaaS environment. We’re really just here to help.
With that said, there should be some problems that have become a recurring chant on the support lines. What is the most frequent snag that you are asked to resolve?
It is more accurate to say that we persistently need to deal with a certain set of similar issues that each have different causes. But one of the very familiar suspects occurs when the tables in your email newsletter appear suddenly misaligned for no apparent reason, when you perform a test send. This is typically due to a line of code that your Skype client adds autonomously to outbound messages. Although it’s an easy fix, performed by highlighting and deleting a section marked by “Skype_?” in the HTML editor of the newsletter builder, it will obviously occur repeatedly since Skype is still actively performing the same process. The permanent solution is to disable the add-on in your browser that targets, among other things, your email newsletters. Simply look at your Mozilla Firefox top toolbar for the “Tools” menu, and click through to “Add-ons”. Then just find and disable or remove the Skype entry. Don’t be alarmed as losing this plugin won’t damage your system or make Skype itself defunct. The benefit of going through this slight modification will spare you from needing to Tango with Skype code in HTML at every send interval.
Which other styling issue should users be aware of that could complicate their newsletter distribution?
Most of the problems happen during the phase of putting together your email newsletter - when users are adding in their own content. For example, importing media from a Word document could give you a warped-looking page, where something has once again gone awry on an HTML level. Not that this always happens, but due to compatibility issues and variances in standards by office software producers it is certainly something to watch out for. To avoid this, rather use one of GraphicMail’s free newsletter templates to begin with, or pull in your bits & pieces from a more code-savvy program like Dreamweaver.
So as long as the structure is unaffected by a misstep in the building and sending process the final product will be okay?
Not necessarily. Again, from the first step after you’ve signed up at GraphicMail until your newsletter is delivery-ready, anything can go wrong. We have laid out simple directions for everyone to follow from A-Z, but like learning the alphabet most of us don’t get it right the first time. Watch out especially when dropping content into the newsletter. Plain text can usually be problematic if copied directly off a website or a document - since this will be embedded with styling and other elements that will bring unwanted code over to your page, regularly with undesired effects. The slightly-laborious solution is to copy your text over to Notepad first, and then transfer it to your newsletter directly from there. This strips away everything that you don’t want or need.
What does GraphicMail offer from a more overall Support point of view?
Everything that we realistically can. We handle any and all of our clients’ concerns and go to every possible length to find and offer solutions to these. It’s a comprehensive support service and we have well-defined responsibilities, but there often still seems to be a blurred line of understanding regarding what we can and can’t provide. Principally, we would like to reiterate that while we are always on standby to offer a helping hand, GraphicMail is a self-service application, which means that it is the users’ responsibility to manage their own campaigns and accounts. We do also assist individuals with integrating their email newsletters to other platforms such as social media or Wordpress, but obviously the legal framework of our duties here at GraphicMail restrict us from setting up and managing these in someone else’s name. Common-sense dictates that we cater for everything directly related to GraphicMail features, but that has its limits.
To illustrate this, can you describe a situation where phoning GraphicMail’s Support line wouldn’t be of much help?
We've had a lot of unusual cases over the years, for example; a) If your computer itself is broken or dysfunctional; b) if there’s a power outage in your area; c) if your cat knocks over a teacup, drenching your keyboard, your iPhone and your favourite shirt d) or if you think the orcish horde is attacking… chances are that GraphicMail can’t do much for you. We can however advise you to: a) have your system looked at by a qualified technician if necessary b) light a candle and sing “kumbaya“ c) grab a towel and save what you can, and lastly d) head for the hills. The moral of the story is that we are specialised entirely in giving advice directly regarding our own platform, just like any professionals.
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