Circulator User Tips

Use the Template Library

The creative team at Circulator works with your organisation to design your email templates.  Each template is based on a brief, based upon your organisations’ brand guidelines and content strategy. Our design team can take a brief and advise on the various options that will return the best results. Each template is designed, built and tested to ensure compatibility across all browsers, mail clients and mobile.

The Circulator platform enables you to easily update email, “microsite” and auto- responder content,  using the editor interface. Our content editor uses the look, feel and functionality of Microsoft Word.  Text can be easily uploaded and modified.  The length of the email can also be altered, ensuring that all our templates are flexible and cater for every organisations needs.

Automated Imagery

Uploading photos is easy within Circulator as our software will automatically resize your images to retain a consistent and professional look throughout all your newsletters.  This ensures that the less technical customers find it easy to produce professional and attractive emails, without the need for a costly design team or image software.

Personalise your Newsletter

With Circulator, you can automatically personalise your message for each client. Circulator can personalise newsletters using first name, surname, company name or a custom field from your database. This functionality allows your organisation to get personal with your audience, increasing interactive rates and generate leads.

Get Social

‘Send to Friend’ functionality enables viral marketing allowing you to effortlessly increase your subscriber base over time.  Encourage your audience to forward your content, thereby increasing the impact of your campaign and growing your database.

Include sensible links

Including a link in your email is so simple – click on ‘New Hyperlink’ (it looks like a globe) and give the full address of the web page you wish to go to. Link tracking is such a powerful feature of Circulator, but some people don’t use it to its full extent.

One thing to remember is to give each link a sensible keyword that describes it. (“Homepage”, “New Product Information” etc). These will be displayed in the reports after the event, helping you immediately see who has gone where. Don’t forget you might be looking at these reports months later – so choose keywords that will always make sense to you!

You can filter the ‘Links clicked’ report by changing the ‘Filter by’ drop down on the top left from ‘Show all’ to ‘Keyword’. You’ll see a list of link keywords you’ve used on that campaign – select any of these to display only the users who have clicked on that link.

You can include as many links as you like. Don’t include too many links – remembering that the more you ask someone to do, the less they will do overall. Each link clicked gives you a small amount more information about your customer. So an email without links can be a wasted opportunity. Driving traffic to your organisations site is one function of hyperlinks, but there are so many more and our team will be happy to explain what these are, so please get in touch.

Reusing your email campaigns

Even if you have not saved a template in the template library, you can recall both previously sent or unsent campaigns to use as the basis of a new one – or simply re-send it as it currently stands.  Re-sending a campaign is very easy. On the other hand, you may want to simply reuse a previous newsletter or campaign as a starting point and simply updated you copy and images.

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Adding a link to an image or logo

To link an image or logo to a webpage, go to the Edit Campaign screen and click on the image or logo until it is surrounded by small squares. Then click on the Link Manager icon in the toolbar above your HTML template window.

This will prompt the Link Manager pop-up to appear. Select Web from the Type dropdown menu, then type the url for your chosen webpage into the Link field. The Text field will by default contain the details for your image, and the Keyword will help you to distinguish between each of the links in your report.

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Adding a link to your text

To link text to a webpage, go to the Edit Campaign screen and highlight the text that you wish to link to. Then select the Link Manager icon in the toolbar above your HTML template window. This will prompt the Link Manager pop-up to appear.

Select Web from the Type drop down menu, then type the URL for your chosen webpage in the Link field. The Text field should contain the text that you wish to link to, and the Keyword will help you identify that particular link in your report.

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Using the link checker and keywords

To check that the links in your email are correct before sending your campaign, go to the Campaign Manager and then click on the “Properties” icon for your campaign. This will take you to the “Campaign Properties” page which includes the HTML Email Link Details and Plain Text Email Link Details.

You may check each link by clicking on each one in turn and ensure their validity by checking that each link has a green tick next to it, generated automatically by the system. If a link is marked with a red cross, then the URL is not valid and you should amend the link accordingly.

When you are confident that your links are working properly, you should also give each one an associated keyword. The keyword is used in the reporting section to help you distinguish between each of the links in your email.