About hvhibiscus

hvhibiscus · ‎06-28-2020

CC is doing it again right now!!!!!! It's becoming so annoying that after 20 years, I'm thinking of leaving CC!!!!!!!! This time I got an actual error message if that helps: An unexpected error occurred while reading your email: Unexpected error encountered parsererror: SyntaxError: JSON Parse error: Unrecognized token '<' It does NOT save ANYTHING!!!!!!! If we can't quickly create and send a campaign, it is worthless to a business! It's the new software. The old software never had all the glitches that your new software has. Cindy Black Hidden Valley Hibiscus

hvhibiscus · ‎06-15-2020

No, in the morning CC was back to normal. It lasted from about 1:30am till about 4am Pacific time. As I wrote in my original message, I have two completely separate ISP's and it was equally slow on both of them. One is Verizon G4 and the other is a local microwave wifi that is lightning fast. All other websites were working fast and normally for both networks and both computers. Only CC was so slow. As I wrote below, one computer was Mac OS 10.15.5. I tried 3 different browsers on it: Safari, Chrome, and Firefox. Cleared cache, rebooted, reloaded multiple time for each of them. Still just as slow. The other computer was Windows 10, I did the same processes with MS Edge, Chrome and Firefox. Same results. All other websites were fast and normal. Only CC was slow. But suddenly around 4 am CC got back to normal, as if someone had rebooted something at your end.

hvhibiscus · ‎06-14-2020

I managed to get a very simple notice sent out, but it took me 45 mins, as opposed to my normal 3 minutes! Each time I clicked to save or change or schedule, it took 8 minutes for the single click to take effect. I had to click, walk away, then come back and wait some more before it would take effect. There was no way to put in a heat ticket on your website. In about 20 years of using CC, this has never happened before, so it took me a while to figure out what was happening. I tried using 2 different computers (Windows 10, Mac 10), rebooted, cleared caches, etc. I then tried each of the computers on 2 completely unrelated lightning fast networks that both worked fine on all other websites. Nothing helped. So I just sat and waited patiently after each single click. I hope you get this fixed!!!!!!! We have always been able to count on quick work with your website! Cindy Black Hidden Valley Nature Arts

hvhibiscus · ‎07-24-2019

A short blurb with a link to the campaign would be perfect for me.

hvhibiscus · ‎06-13-2019

You can fully edit code in the new editor. It was my mistake! I write all my code from scratch for most of my newsletters, and it works just fine.

hvhibiscus · ‎02-10-2019

Email is producing slowly diminishing returns because people hate it due to all the spam. We really do need to start slowly replacing email with SMS. The millennial generation and anyone younger, which is a huge part of our market (and that of many retailers!) uses phones and text, not email. Without an SMS option, the effectiveness of email alone is going to continue to diminish. Can you tell us if there is an SMS option on the horizon? Is is something Constant Contact is working on? If not, we can find another company. But I've been with you for so long and trust you so completely that I would prefer to use CC if this will be coming in the future.

hvhibiscus · ‎01-10-2019

Ah!!!!! I couldn't find it anywhere! Thank you!!!!!!!!! Perfect!

hvhibiscus · ‎01-09-2019

I agree that SMS is a spectacular idea and very necessary in the phone age. Too many people don't even use email any more. We still get a big response to our emails, but not as big as it used to be even when we had a much smaller number of contacts. We boost the response by posting ads in social media with the newsletter, which does help a lot. But SMS would give us a HUGE boost and carry us well into the future! SMS please!

hvhibiscus · ‎01-09-2019

Yes, I agree that this is a great idea.

hvhibiscus · ‎01-09-2019

It's GREAT that you put the search feature in for us! Thank you very, very, VERY much!

hvhibiscus · ‎01-09-2019

I want to be able to write or alter all my own code directly. I've used the Advanced Editor with you for 20 years. Can you please put the Advanced Editor back?

hvhibiscus · ‎01-01-2019

I still use copies of old campaigns as my template and doing that gives me the Advanced Editor so I can edit any and all html in my campaigns. It's really a serious problem though that this is not available with the new editor! If CC ever blocks all html editing, I will have to use a different service, despite 20 years of being with CC! Writing my own html is the single-most important factor for me in our email campaigns. Please tell your engineers they need to put the Advanced Editor into the new editor! Alternately, if you want to write your own html, you can always write it as a webpage (which I do with each newsletter), then send out a tiny email with a link to the newsletter webpage. It's not ideal, of course, but for a truly complex newsletter, we need total command of the css, javascript, and html! I'm shocked that the Advanced Editor has been removed from the Third Gen Editor! How hard can it be to open and save a plain text doc with the code on it from within the editor?

hvhibiscus · ‎07-30-2018

You could use in-line css in the Advanced Editor to place your 3 pics anywhere you want them. Or you could put it in the header and use it in a template.

hvhibiscus · ‎07-30-2018

You can access the full html in the Advanced Editor. I write ALL my own code and only use the advanced editor. It's not dumb-down at all. I use the newest html and css tags and it works beautifully. I haven't tried javascripts yet, but am toying with the idea of adding some in. I'll let you know if that works.

hvhibiscus · ‎07-25-2018

There's a workaround... Open the custom email in a plain text editor as a .txt doc. Then copy and paste it into the CC's Advanced Editor and save it with the name "Template." You'll have to type over the prior articles, but you'll have a template. If you start from that template and create a copy each time to start you new campaign, you'll keep a nice, cleanly coded original to work from.

hvhibiscus · ‎06-29-2018

Hi Marc, To use css, I just put my style sheet in the header of my custom CC template, and it works great. I literally just copied and pasted the whole style sheet into the header using the Advance Editor and saved it as a template that I use to write all my newsletters with. I do write my html by hand, since the html editor could disturb the code, but if you're coding stylesheets, you must write your own too. Anyway, it's a workaround that works!

hvhibiscus · ‎06-10-2018

All we would need is an SMS contact list. Then we can send a text link to the campaign page on our website or on CC's website. We don't have to send the whole campaign out via text. Just the ability to SMS 1-2 lines of text to a large group of customers would work great!

hvhibiscus · ‎06-09-2018

It doesn't matter which of your lists people sign up for. You have the option when you send out each campaign to send "general interest" campaigns to all your lists. Just select them all. No people will be duplicated so no one will get more than 1 copy of the campaign. But this way that kind of info goes to everyone on any of your lists.

hvhibiscus · ‎02-15-2018

We handle this by setting up different lists. When a customer subscribes, they get a choice of which and how many lists they want to subscribe to. Some subscribe only to our monthly Newsletter. Other subscribe to everything we offer. Our main offerings are: - A long, newsy Newsletter we send out once a month. We try hard not to make it a blatant marketing ploy, but a genuine "how to" type of newsletter that people will find useful. - A short, sweet store restocking alert that we send out any time we add new merchandise to our store. This can be once a month during our off season, and once a week during our on-season. (We're a plant nursery.) In your case, it could be when you have new apartments available with a link to your website to see them. You could do more if you like, but most people become resentful if you send more than 2-3 emails per month. 2 great emails are much better than a dozen!

hvhibiscus · ‎02-11-2018

If you want to edit the HTML, just click on Advanced Editor. You can make small changes, or big changes, or write every letter of code for your newsletter if you like. I use only the Advanced Editor and write all my code for each newsletter. For quick notices, I use the HTML Editor and used Advanced Editor to tweak as needed. There's total flexibility!

hvhibiscus · ‎02-11-2018

Alternately, I open the preview in CC, and on Safari on a Mac, I use File --> Export to PDF. On Chrome, I open the preview in CC, use File --> Print --> Click on Change (Destination) in the print dialog box, and select Save as PDF.

hvhibiscus · ‎02-11-2018

In my email program, I open the newsletter, then use File Menu --> Export as pdf. It's Apple Mail on a Mac. Or I just tell it to print, then in the bottom left corner, scroll to Save as PDF. On Google gmail, I open the newsletter, then File --> Print, and in the print dialog box, I click on CHANGE for the printer destination, and select Save as PDF. Those are the only email programs I use, but I'm sure all of them have a Save as PDF capability these days.

hvhibiscus · ‎01-26-2018

Just go to Advanced Editor and change the padding code yourself! You have total control of it that way. Simple!

hvhibiscus · ‎01-26-2018

Actually, you can use your browser auto-fill to prepopulate with all 5 email addresses. I've been doing it for years!

hvhibiscus · ‎01-26-2018

You receive a copy of the campaigns, so just search your emails. Nothing hard about that!

hvhibiscus · ‎01-26-2018

Hannah, is the Text-to-Join feature only for joining the email list? Not for receiving our campaigns by sms text, correct?

hvhibiscus · ‎10-02-2016

My online business has been with Constant Contact for over 10 years now. I'm the webmaster and the person who does all the emails. Before Constant Contact, I sent out every email by hand - an extremely painful and slow job! We've grown from 500 contacts to almost 13,000 contacts, which would never have been manageable before Constant Contact. We send 2-3 emails per month with ease, which brings in about 33% of our gross sales - all thanks to Constant Contact! I write the code for our emails, so I don't use the CC html editor (templates). I wrote my own template, loaded it into the advanced editor, and use it for each email. But when I do occasionally use a template, it works as well or better than any other html editor. CC has increased the templates and editing capacity of the html editor vastly over the last decade. Sure, each change brings a little bit of discomfort learning to use something new on the website, but this is the tech world! Change is constant and, in the end, it gives us more choices. I have checked out other email campaign companies to see if I could save some money, but the quality was very poor. Their html editors rewrote my hand-written code and corrupted it. The other html editors were harder to use with less WYSIWYG than CC's. So I stayed with CC where the advanced editor saves my hand-written code as clean and pristine as I write it, without adding even a piece of white space or a single html tag. So from me, and my online business, a huge thanks to Constant Contact for giving us such reliable, high quality service for more than a decade! You have my loyalty, tested by time and experience, and earned by your hard work. Cindy Hidden Valley Hibiscus Hidden Valley Nature Arts www.hiddenvalleyhibiscus.com

hvhibiscus · ‎10-01-2016

No html template is really a template because you can always change the code. But if you use this method, you will keep your code much cleaner, which will prevent it from starting to have glitches for your customers.

hvhibiscus · ‎09-29-2016

If you can do any coding at all, then you can save your custom template a different way. This is what I do. First, take your time and build the perfect template with everything you like. Go into Advanced Editor, Select All, and Copy. Open a plain text document in Word Pad or Text Edit or whatever program you use for plain text. (Don't use Word or any similar program. It will trash the white spaces and the code, even in plain text!) Paste the code into it, and save it as plain text. Make sure it has a .txt ending, or you can use .html if you edit your code by hand. The next time you want to create a newsletter, start the first screen of a new email, open Advanced Editor, copy the code from the plain text doc and paste it into the Advanced Editor screen. Save and you will see your custom template. This is the cleanest way to keep a perfectly clean copy of your template. If you have any coding skills at all, you can go through and clean it up by hand, getting rid of any excess code. If not, just use it the way it is. If all of this sounds too hard, then another way is to create one newsletter that you like, then the next time, to make a copy of it to start your next newsletter. Each time you recreate, it's best to go back to that original good newsletter so it stays cleaner. If you make copies of copies of copies over time the code will get worse and worse and you'll start to have problems. Good luck!

hvhibiscus · ‎09-12-2016

I use the advanced editor and build css styles into the header and use the same one for each email. Then I hand-code the html in the email. I have tried using a style sheet with a link in the email, but got some mixed results with the interpretation of the style sheet directions. Having the styles built into the header has given me very solid, consistent results.

About hvhibiscus

Re: CC server is excruciatingly slow tonight!

Re: CC server is excruciatingly slow tonight!

CC server is excruciatingly slow tonight!

Re: Want SMS option

Re: Editing HTML in third generation editor

Re: SMS marketing

Re: Editing HTML in third generation editor

Re: Want SMS option

Re: Collapsible paragraphs

Re: Add Search Option to Campaigns

Re: Editing HTML in third generation editor

Editing HTML in third generation editor

Re: Need 3 or more images in a row

Re: Need 3 or more images in a row

Re: How Do I Edit My Custom Template?

Re: Using Stylesheets in Custom XHTML

Re: Want SMS option

Re: Multiple lists, one default on sign up form

Re: how to let contacts choose frequency of mailin...

Re: Your 3rd generation editor

Re: Downloading Email/Newsletter to a PDF

Re: Downloading Email/Newsletter to a PDF

Re: Adjustable Padding

Re: More than one default address for test emails

Re: Add Search Option to Campaigns

Re: Want SMS option

Over 10 Years of Great Service!!!!

Re: How Do I Edit My Custom Template?

Re: How Do I Edit My Custom Template?

How to edit HTML and CSS