by Wikus Engelbrecht
31. March 2011 04:49
Communicators have always had it tough. This is what one realizes when talking to GraphicMail’s Carolynne Higgins.
Yoga gurus, for example, knot their bodies tortuously, in order to commune with the universe. Medieval emissaries risked execution for the sake of passing the word along between kingdoms. And whereas John Edward may have sold his soul to cross over and chat to the great beyond, Carolynne has good reason to contend that being on your business’s first point-of-contact front-line is a task only for the least feint of heart.
One ring, to rule them all…
This is perhaps what some may be thinking as they dial through to GraphicMail’s support line to engage with the support staff. On the average day at the office, this brave fellowship needs to deal personally with everything from calm queries, to furious callers looking to for a firefight. The email marketing quest is ongoing and intricate, and the bitter reality of the digital platform is that all blame often gets thorwn on the support department whenever users have any issues relating to the products.
The hard line is that support warriors are only the messengers, relaying information from other technical wiz-kids, in as coherent and simple a way as possible. Realistically there is only so much that can be done in helping customers to help themselves, which is to be expected.
It can be a bit tricky to navigate through documents and tutorials, which is understandable especially for new users, the support team on-hand and ready to assist every day. Though by taking care to eliminate the most common pitfalls, users can avoid running the expense of time and money in climbing on the phone lines needlessly.
Let’s say your newsletter templates are not displaying properly in the browser. The tables are a mess and its anatomy just looks warped in whichever way. It could be anything from one to a million of possible things that may have gone wrong, and it would never figure out which. Right?
As a matter of fact, no. The main culprit is typically the code that gets added to a template by your Skype client whenever you send out an HTML newsletter. This can easily be fixed by viewing your newsletter template in an HTML editor, searching for a block of text market by the note “Skype_?” and deleting it. The problem will recur unless you make a minor adjustment to your Skype system settings, although GraphicMail support is happy to clean it up for you. If you; open your Mozilla Firefox browser and click the “Tools” drop-down on the top menu bar, then navigate to Add-ons, travel down the list, find and disable Skype. This only means is that Skype will be prevented from making its mark on everything you send off your PC. Don’t be worried, it won’t make anything disabled or lost.
Another recurring issue is seen when users try to copy text directly from a document or a website to their newsletter templates. Please bear in mind that these sources are rich text, saturated with codes, styling elements and little hobbits that are not obviously visible. This can be smartly prevented by dropping your text into Notepad, which takes away everything except the words, and then transfer the cleaned-up text from Notepad to your newsletter template. Also pay close attention when you are importing newsletter designs from a document as, differences in standards and measurements between various word-processors and online editors sometimes cause a fair amount of layout and sizing cracks. You can re-adjust these, with some hassle, though it would be less effort guaranteed if you just utilize our newsletter templates from the first step.
Our offerings speak for themselves by reiterating that GraphicMail is a self-service application, like other permission-based email marketing suppliers. But the value that we already add to your business does not extend to campaign management or accountancy. Our features have been designed to be 100% easy to use, though we know that a little help is sometimes still necessary, which is why we are happy to talk to you.
