Astadia's Proper Pasting Party

Our friends at Astadia have maintained a great series of Eloqua tips, based on their work with 1000s of great marketers around the world. They covered a very important topic - Pasting in order to avoid Microsoft Word formatting - and I wanted to share that tip with you as it is a quick win that can save a lot of time and headaches.

I encourage anyone interested to sign up for Astadia's tip of the week, view all the past Eloqua tips, or visit their marketing best practices blog.

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You're invited to the Proper Pasting Party!
Where: Your Eloqua install
When: Now and Forever
Why: To avoid looking like you lack attention to detail by blasting out emails from Eloqua that look unclean and unprofessional because of your bad, improper pasting habits.
BYOC (Bring Your Own Content or Cocktail if you'd like)

There's an often-overlooked button in Eloqua's email editor toolbar: Paste:

In this Tip of the Week, we're going to show you how to make use of this unsung hero to avoid pasting bad content into your Eloqua emails.

Your usual workflow probably goes something like this:

1. Write the text for your email in Microsoft Word and receive revisions and approval from your team.
2. Create a new email in Eloqua.
3. Open your Word document and select all of your text. Click CTRL+C (or right-click and select "Copy") to copy all of the text.
4. Click over to Eloqua and click CTRL+V (or right-click and select "Paste") to paste all of the text into your email. NOTE: DO NOT DO THIS! Read further to learn why...

But when you run the email checker in Eloqua, you get this annoying error:



You may also notice some strange characters or empty boxes in a few places in your email when you test it on a non-Microsoft email client. Not testing on multiple email clients? Well saddle up cowgirl/boy and get 'er done! It is a best practice to test your emails in various email clients since your readers are not likely to be using the same one (no, not everyone uses Microsoft Outlook). The ugly email content is caused by some of the HTML formatting in Microsoft Word which is not compatible with all email clients.

But fear not friends – there's a solution!

Steps 1 through 3 above are all the same. But when you get to Step 4, you need to make a small yet muy importante change (that's very important for you non-Spanish readers):

In Eloqua, click the small black arrow next to the Paste button on the email editor toolbar.
From the menu for Paste Options, select Paste Plain-Text.




Now, all of your text will be dropped into your email, but without the problematic Microsoft Word formatting. If you choose Paste Formatted Text, it will continue to create the problematic Microsoft formatting.

Party on, Pasters!

Security Popup - Get Rid of It

We've all seen the popup that appears whenever you edit any marketing content in an email or landing page editor. It adds an unnecessary click to your day as you allow it to display the non-secure content that you are editing.

The great thing is that there is a quick and simple setting you can use to get rid of it entirely.

Before I start, I should admit that I am borrowing this tip from the folks at Astadia, who came out with it in a Tip of the Week a few months back. However, it's too good not to repeat.

Simply go to the Tools->Internet Options menu in Internet Explorer, and choose the Security tab. For each of the "Internet", "Local Intranet" and "Trusted Sites" zones, go through the following process:

Select the zone

Click "Custom level..."

Scroll down to the setting for "Display mixed content"

Choose "Enable"

Click "OK"

That's all you need to do - but remember to do it for all the zones, and be sure to add https://secure.eloqua.com as one of your trusted sites.

You may need to close and restart Internet Explorer before the changes take effect, but once you do, you will no longer see the security popup when you edit content.

Experts in the Field - Astadia

Over the past 2 years we've put a lot of effort into developing our partner community, and as we approach our upcoming internation partner conference (next week - Jan 7-9th), it's a great time to highlight them. Each partner brings unique expertise to the table and some great experiences in marketing that make them valuable partners in your Eloqua journey. However, the thing I really enjoy highlighting is the contributions that each of them make to the community of knowledge around demand generation.

Astadia, a partner we've been working with for some time, has been a great example of this. They freely share their expertise with a long-running series of Tip-of-the-Week pointers that are well thought out and a great read. If you're an Eloqua user and looking to grow your expertise, I highly recommend signing up for their tips.


They are available as an RSS feed here:

http://tips.astadia.com/feeds/EloquaTipoftheWeek/subscribe


Or as a regular weekly email here:


http://tips.astadia.com/forms/EloquaTipsSubscribe




And whether you're an Astadia client or not, they would be glad to have you sign up.


Thanks to the folks at Astadia for putting these tips together. If there are other resources that anyone finds valuable and wants to suggest, please don't hesitate to add them to the comments. We all do better by sharing knowledge.