Gerry,

You will need to move your embedded CSS included in your Theme file), into "inline CSS" in your HTML page region content. This is because some mail readers will strip out (disallow) the CSS from the HTML and thus break the formatting.

It's an involved process that a web coder that knows HTML and CSS will have to do for you.

For example, let's say that your .css file (Theme) defines your paragraphs with padding like this:

p {padding: 1em;}

Your page region content looks like this:

<p>This is a paragraph in my email page.</p>

Normally this would be styled by your browser with padding. But email readers may strip out the .css include file, so in order to preserve the padding, you must put your styling "inline" in your content like this:

<p style="padding: 1em;">This is a paragraph in my email page.</p>

for it to render the same.

A real pain I know, but they block this because there could be some malicious css in an email and they don't want any funny business.

Hope that helps!

I'm sure it will but I'm struck by the fact that a major selling point of LiveSite is that "any webpage can be an email campaign". This is not completely true and diminishes the value of the site. Why can't the LiveSite editor write the code like this from the getgo? My Constant Contact emails look beautiful and I edit them directly using a similar RTF editor.

Frankly, we are probably going to continue to do all our email campaigns out of InfusionSoft instead of cancelling our subscription to InfusionSoft. Which might make us reconsider moving our shopping cart to LiveSite as well. This problem combined with the fact that your email campaign analytics are very weak makes LiveSite much less useful.

Are there any plans to address email analytics (tracking, bounces, opens, etc) and email campaign formatiing?

Thanks,

Gerry

Well, for the most part, you don't have to customize your web pages in liveSite before you send them in a campaign. Many email clients will render the HTML and CSS the same as the web browsers. Now some versions of Microsoft Outlook for example need configuration settings to be updated in order to view the pages properly.

Our previous posting was a method you can use to guarantee that all email client readers, new and old, would see the same rendering. Constant Contact is providing you a template that has been pre-built to do this, but it is not as customizable as a liveSite web page design so there are obvious trade-offs.

You can track email campaigns now using Visitor Reports. We don't handle bounce-backs or open rates at this time but it is something we are looking into for the future. We will make sure your vote for these is tallied.

Thanks, I appreciate the reply.

Gerry