Below are some usage guidelines and notes for the templates above.
Using
these newsletter templates does require some familiarity with HTML or
use of a WYSIWYG editor. A simple program such as Netscape Composer
or Frontpage Express will suffice for basic editing. A
working knowledge of HTML is helpful to avoid editing mistakes.
Customizing your e-mail newsletter
Please review use of all of these tools with your Account Executive,
and please remember to always send a test email to yourself before
sending to all affiliates.
The top
of the newsletter templates feature this message:
If you can't view HTML, go to: http://www.merchantserver.com/affiliate/newsletters/currentissue.html
For this to be applicable in your newsletter, you must post the HTML
newsletter to a URL on your website and then replace the given URL with your URL. We suggest keeping an archive available
for affiliates. If you do not plan to post the HTML newsletter on your
website, please remove this line of text.
The templates
provide customized linking code,
as well as use of customized "direct
links" to the affiliate interface to retrieve more links. Furthermore,
you may customize these emails by utilizing certain "symbols"
that are automatically populated by our system upon sending.
If you do plan to use the Custom Link feature to provide linking
code within your newsletter to affiliates, we strongly suggest that
you use the "Find/Replace All" function to replace the 11-byte affiliate
code in the link type example to "[SITE.CODE]" (sans quotes). This
will reduce the likelihood of an error.
Regarding Hotmail:
Hotmail edits all link HREF's for found in all emails (not just LinkShare emails). If you provide customized linking code and an affiliate receives it in Hotmail, the email may not have the correct syntax for your linking code and should not be used by affiliates. Hotmail does this to make sure all link HREF's from an email viewed in Hotmail will open in a new window. It edits the URL so it opens in a framed page, resulting in a longer and escaped URL like this:
To accommodate this situation, we recommend you include this language, which is provided in our newsletter templates, at the top of your email before any HTML:
(The reference to "Please go to the URL above..." is the online URL you would provide to view your newsletter as described above on this page.)
If you can't view HTML, go to: http://www.merchantserver.com/affiliate/newsletters/currentissue.html For the links provided, be sure to enter your own 11-byte code where you see "(SITE.CODE)". Your code is [SITE.CODE]. *Hotmail users: Hotmail edits all HREF's found in emails, so your provided linking code will not be correct. Please go to the URL above or log in to LinkShare for accurate linking code.
Internal & External Use / File size
Due to the increase in character/file size limitation for sending internal e-mail to 32k (~32,000 characters) from 3k (~3,000 characters), you may now be able to utilize these templates internally as well as externally, depending on the length of your email.
Use a character count feature in your HTML or text editor program to be sure of the file size before sending. E-mails over the limit will be truncated at the limit. This may cause HTML e-mails to be entirely blank to recipients due to loss of necessary coding.
If you send these templates internally, please remove the local links in the "Contents" section. You may keep the table of contents listing, but these local or relative links will not function properly in LinkShare's internal e-mail for affiliates due to other coding on the interface.
Using images in e-mails
All images
within the newsletters (aside from link type examples hosted by LinkShare)
must be hosted by the merchant on a live web server.
All images
within the newsletters must have full URLs. For example:
