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Jenny Lassi

By: Jenny Lassi on July 17th, 2015

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Knowledge Stop: Newsletter Archive Best Practices

Email Marketing | HighRoad News & Events | Content, Social & Digital Marketing

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Whoops, you deleted an email newsletter and want to review it again for an article you remember reading. What do you do? Search in deleted messages for hours? Google it? Ask the sender to resend or forward you a copy, while your request may fall into an abyss of emails? Or do you go to the publisher's website to find a newsletter archive?

What if the information was easily accessible online and you could see all archived newsletters, click on links to find the information you're looking for? It is possible if the sender took deliberate action to make their email newsletters available online.

Email newsletters have an average life span of about 2 weeks. After that some images get deleted from where they're hosted, some links no longer exist and content becomes irrelevant. That said, you may still find value in offering archived newsletters, but there are upsides/downsides and best practices to accomplish that.

PDF/JPG of the Email Newsletter

This is the easiest workflow solution for archiving. The upside is that all images are there. The downside is that links are not clickable, but if that is fine for you then do the following steps:

  1. Make sure all emails are using the View Online system tag %%viewonline%% in either a pre-header or the message body.
  2. Make sure you seed yourself in the segment you're sending to or include a segment with staff in it so you receive the message.
  3. Download a Screen Capture extension for the browser you are using. I personally recommend the FireShot extension for Firefox, IE or Chrome.
  4. When you receive the email, click on the View Online link to get to the online hosted version of your email that lives on our servers for 60 days.
  5. Get a screenshot of the online hosted version and be sure to save the entire page, not just the visible part on your screen.
  6. Upload that image to your website somewhere and link your Newsletter link to that image.

HTML Newsletter with Clickable Links

This gets a bit more detailed and time intensive, but totally possible. The upside is you have control over how long those pages are available and also the location of those pages. The downside can be if you host the images either on your website or inside your Campaign eMail account and someone deletes those images, they will no longer display in your archive newsletter. You can go with this approach by doing the following steps:

  1. For a new newsletter, before the live message is deployed, you can copy the source code from the create step of the message sending process by clicking the Source button in the editor. If you need to archive an email that has already been sent then you can duplicate the previously sent message to retrieve the source code from it.
  2. To save the HTML code of the newsletter you would like to archive, hit the Source button in the editor to see the code. Select all the code, copy it, and then paste the code into a Notepad document. If you have access to an HTML editor program like Dreamweaver, you can paste the code into there and save your file.
  3. Then supply to either your IT/web team to host the code on your website.