Creating emails from PDFs

[LaVaineM]

Constant Contact apparently made some tech changes in the area of email campaign design in recent months that are making the User Experience much worse. We have always used Constant Contact. The design set up was user friendly and highly compatible for those of us who like to upload our own newsletter (via PDF) and customize our campaign. 

After recent updates, however, I am unable to fully customize the backgrounds, remove preloaded boxes/spacers and social media icons, or insert my own backgrounds. 

When I called for help, the first number (866-289-2101) was answered by a robot that offered me some kind of special if I would tell her my age. What? I couldn't get past this bot, I hung up and called back. The second call was answered by a different bot, this time an Ai bot with pre-recorded answers for questions I didn't ask. I finally yelled at the phone and the bot got me to a live person. This took me to a foreign call center. The girl there was helpful but I did not want to have her take over my page because I knew from my last experience that this will result in someone building the page from an image of my work and that all my links will not be live and the original PDF of the newsletter will not be downloadable.

I thanked the girl at the call center, deleted my project for the 4th time, logged out of CC, and logged back in. I started again from scratch but THIS time I stuck with the simplest format changes that I knew still worked, left the unneeded "social media icons" (they are not attached to our social media), and set the email to go out. 

This is the second nightmare I have had since you "upgraded" your system sometime last summer. Please address/correct these problems asap.   

[William_A]

Hello @LaVaineM ,

I'm moving this post to our Questions & Discussions board, since it doesn't fit with our Product Ideas board. I've removed several potentially sensitve account details from your post, please keep our Community's Guidelines in mind when posting in this public forum.

Emails made from PDFs have always been just the image of the first page of a PDF, and would only link to the PDF itself. I've tested in my own account, and all the elements described I could easily delete. I can also control individual backgrounds of the section and the overall email. 

If you need guidance on creating emails from PDFs, I'd recommend checking out our main article on the topic. If you need guidance on using the section editor, please refer to this article for step-by-step and visual instructions. Our article on managing and deleting email elements is also a good resource if you're unsure of how to delete specific blocks within a section, row, or the overall email. 

If you're needing live, 1:1 guidance on creating an email from a PDF and removing the elements you don't want, I'd advise calling back in so they can screenshare. Make sure when you call in that you're entering in the number with the applicable country code, if you're from outside the US/CAN.