Emails Appearing Blank for Some Clients

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Guzel duChateau
Guzel duChateau
Tenth Anniversary Photogenic First Comment Facilitator Level 1
in Blackbaud Luminate Online® & Blackbaud TeamRaiser® Discussions
Hello o wise Blackbaud & Luminate community:


I'm hoping that your brains can help me solve a problem that's recently started occuring for us. In the last 3 months, I've heard from several of members that they are receiving blank emails from us. They've been using a variety of email clients (Outlook 2007, Hotmail.com) and a variety of platforms (desktop, web browser) so it isn't a client or platform specific issue. This also doesn't seem to be a wide-spread issue, as there hasn't been a precipitous drop in email opens and clicks, but I've started to hear it from enough people that it is concerning.

 

I run all of our emails through Email on Acid and don't see the issue of blank messages appearing in any of our tests. Have any of you been running into similar issues? I've also reached out to Support, but thought I'd reach out to the larger group as well.


I'm also attaching a copy of the full HTML from a newsletter we sent out yesterday that one of our members said they saw as blank.


Thanks in advance for any thoughts you might have!


-Guzel

 
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  • Philip Nawrocki
    Philip Nawrocki
    Ancient Membership 500 Comments 100 Likes Photogenic
    Hi Guzel,


    I see a few things that could be affecting your e-mail. Just listing these out to help. :-)


    1. You have three different sets of style tags in your e-mail. One is empty, one is partially commented out(second one). There is no closing --> code. The third one is after the first <div> in the e-mail: <div class="content" style="display: block; margin: 0px auto; max-width: 620px; padding: 10px 0px;">

    2. Remove all the <tbody>/</tbody> tags. There were not matching closing and end tags. 15 opening ones to 14 closed ones. Plus Luminate SPAM Assassin flags this.

    3. There are extra closing </p> tags throughout

    4. There is this css: ?=""  not sure what that is for

    5. The end of the e-mail is missing a closing </div>, </td>, </tr>, </table>

    6. You have:

        <link href="http://my.preservationnation.org/css/UserGlobalStyle.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">

        <link href="http://my.preservationnation.org/css/CustomStyle.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css">


    getting injected from Luminate. You can have this SDP turned off/set to false through Lumianate support. Then you don't have to worry about overwriting Luminate sytles in your e-mails. 

    This is the SDP; EMAIL_INCLUDE_LINKED_STYLESHEETS


    7. You don't need the <p> tags around your meta elements and those should go in the <head></head> section

    8. I changed your mso coding for outlook as well. Now the e-mail will align center and you can put more styles for this just after the </style> tag.


    Check out the attached code and let me know what you think. I tested in Litmus and it came back a-ok too. You will probably have to test with the users that are having issues to see what is going on.


    Thanks,


    Phil





     
  • Guzel duChateau
    Guzel duChateau
    Tenth Anniversary Photogenic First Comment Facilitator Level 1
    Phil,

    Thank you so much for taking the time to look at this. You've definitely been helpful and given me some areas to look at.


    Always a great way to start out a week! :)


    -Guzel

     
  • Philip Nawrocki
    Philip Nawrocki
    Ancient Membership 500 Comments 100 Likes Photogenic
    No problem. Let me know how it goes.


    Phil
  • Grace Rose Khalsa
    Grace Rose Khalsa
    Ninth Anniversary 10 Comments 25 Likes Photogenic

    Philip Nawrocki:

    >snip<

    2. Remove all the <tbody>/</tbody> tags. There were not matching closing and end tags. 15 opening ones to 14 closed ones. Plus Luminate SPAM Assassin flags this.


     

    Phil, off-topic, but in regard to your #2 point in reply to Guzel, I have to say I find this *highly* ironic - since, as you say, the Spam report available in Luminate says that <tbody> tags are not good - BUT, the system insists on adding them in even after removing them over and over in Plain Text Editor. I deeply and sincerely wish (perhaps I need to go to Ideas!) that the developers would fix this awful anomaly...


    Thanks for the chance to rant about this!

    Gurukarm

  • Sam Li
    Sam Li
    Ninth Anniversary 10 Comments Photogenic Blackbaud Certified

    Guzel duChateau:

    Hello o wise Blackbaud & Luminate community:


    I'm hoping that your brains can help me solve a problem that's recently started occuring for us. In the last 3 months, I've heard from several of members that they are receiving blank emails from us. They've been using a variety of email clients (Outlook 2007, Hotmail.com) and a variety of platforms (desktop, web browser) so it isn't a client or platform specific issue. This also doesn't seem to be a wide-spread issue, as there hasn't been a precipitous drop in email opens and clicks, but I've started to hear it from enough people that it is concerning.

     

    I run all of our emails through Email on Acid and don't see the issue of blank messages appearing in any of our tests. Have any of you been running into similar issues? I've also reached out to Support, but thought I'd reach out to the larger group as well.


    I'm also attaching a copy of the full HTML from a newsletter we sent out yesterday that one of our members said they saw as blank.


    Thanks in advance for any thoughts you might have!


    -Guzel

     

    Hi Guzel, I

    Is your LO multilingual? If whoever receiving the email did not have a preferred locale selected or a locale that's out of your LO's locale range, it might result in LO not sure to pull what content into the email body and result in blank messages.

    Sam

  • Philip Nawrocki
    Philip Nawrocki
    Ancient Membership 500 Comments 100 Likes Photogenic
    Hi Gurukarm,


    Are you, or is someone on your team, switching the e-mail from the plain-editor to the WYSIWYG editor somewhere through the development process? If so, that will add the <tbody> tags and a bunch of other unnecessary code to your e-mail.


    See if that helps ya out.


    Thanks,


    Phil  
  • Grace Rose Khalsa
    Grace Rose Khalsa
    Ninth Anniversary 10 Comments 25 Likes Photogenic

    Philip Nawrocki:

    Hi Gurukarm,


    Are you, or is someone on your team, switching the e-mail from the plain-editor to the WYSIWYG editor somewhere through the development process? If so, that will add the <tbody> tags and a bunch of other unnecessary code to your e-mail.


    See if that helps ya out.


    Thanks,


    Phil  

    Um. Well. Yes, guilty as charged - I work primarily in the code, but as a very visual person, I really have to see what the email is going to look like in the WYSIWYG (not Preview, which is really terrible, btw), even before I start sending test reviews to myself. Also, we use specific banner images at the top of most emails, and I haven't found the easy and quick way to change out a banner when I'm copying and repurposing last year's version of the same email, in the code (it usually involves uploading a new image to the library, too). That's one action that's very fast in the WYSIWYG.


    All that said, I'm disappointed - earlier someone told me that using the Plain Text editor (instead of the HTML view) would make sure <tbody> tags stayed deleted - but didn't mention they'd come roaring back if I looked at the email in WYSIWYG. Sigh.


    Thanks!


    Oh, and - I did add an Idea about this!

  • Philip Nawrocki
    Philip Nawrocki
    Ancient Membership 500 Comments 100 Likes Photogenic
    :-) We figured that one out the long way too. 


    I would say to test the e-mail from your HTML editor and then you don't need to use Luminate WYSIWYG. I use Notepad ++ and use the preview option from there to view in Chrome/IE/Firefox. Of course this isn't the perfect way to test your e-mail for layout since we all know Chrome vs. gmail are extremely different. So we use Litmus(separate e-mail testing software) to generate previews to make sure our coding is correct and the e-mails look correct in the major e-mail clients. Their new component Builder, lets you code in it and do previews in almost real-time, which is really awesome. I have been moving away from Notepad ++ and just using Builder.


    We also use ftp to send images to the Lumiante server so we can get to them quickly. I have a folder structure on there for e-mails and just put the new images in the right folder. Then we reference them for each new e-mail. That might be a bit quicker, but is probably the same amount of time. It just won't add those annoying <tbody> tags. 


    Thanks,


    Phil
  • Grace Rose Khalsa
    Grace Rose Khalsa
    Ninth Anniversary 10 Comments 25 Likes Photogenic

    We also use ftp to send images to the Lumiante server so we can get to them quickly. I have a folder structure on there for e-mails and just put the new images in the right folder. Then we reference them for each new e-mail. That might be a bit quicker, but is probably the same amount of time. It just won't add those annoying <tbody> tags. 


    Thanks,


    Phil

    Thanks for all this, Phil. I'm just now seeing this as I was out of the office last week and through yesterday. I appreciate your comments about Litmus as well, as we've used it in the past, and another member of my team likes it a lot, but we're waiting for our manager to re-up our account with them so we can use premium features. I can see a lot of value in delving more deeply into those, based on what you said.


    Could you expand a bit more on setting up a folder structure for images in Luminate, and then ftp-ing images there?? That would be so appreciated by my OCD :-)


    Best,

    Gurukarm

  • Philip Nawrocki
    Philip Nawrocki
    Ancient Membership 500 Comments 100 Likes Photogenic
    No problem! That is what the community is all about. :-)


    We are on Litmus Plus. That, combined with Luminate's e-mail statistics gives us a good idea of how our e-mail campaigns are performing. It's really cool to see how many people read/glanced/skimmed your e-mails and what clients are used the most. 


    You can get ftp access to your site to upload files. Here is the link in the help section:

    https://www.blackbaud.com/files/support/helpfiles/luminate-online/help/luminateonline.html#../Subsystems/Fundraising/Content/Concepts/Admin_eCommerce_UploadProducts_ConfigureFTP.html?Highlight=ftp


    So you will need to contact support for your username/password, but then its just like using windows explorer once you connect. We use FileZilla to transfer files to/from the Luminate server. This way you can reference your images/docs/etc. It depends on what you like though. Some people want all their images in the Image Library. We know that we will only use a most of our images one time on an e-mail, so why muck up Image Library? 


    Also, it's up to you how you want to build your folder structure, but we have it setup so we know which area is TeamRaiser, which is e-mail and which is donation forms. So three folder structures that then branch out from there.


    Example: In the root directory, /resources-email/<interest name>/<year>/<name of email>/images


    Let me know if that helps.


    Thanks,


    Phil




     

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