Written By:
Eddie Howard, iContact Product Manager
I’m very proud to introduce one of iContact’s newest features: the Campaign Message Archive!
The Campaign Message Archive is a public-facing page that shows a list of your emails, so your subscribers can see past newsletters, special announcements, updates, and more. You can share this page on your website, in your newsletters, on social networks, or anywhere else online. And best of all, you can select which mailings you would like to show on the archive page!
We’ve taken this new feature a step further: We have broken down the pages by campaign. That way, for example, you can separate your monthly newsletters message archive page from your upcoming events page. This added flexibility lets you decide which campaigns you want to keep private, and which you want to make publicly accessible.
This Campaign Message Archive is currently free and available for all clients.
HOW IT WORKS
To publish a public archive of your emails, go to Campaigns settings in the account drop-down menu.
Press the “Post to message archive” button on the far right for the campaign(s) you would like published. This button is used to publish the message archive list for that campaign, and can also be used to unpublish the message archive if you no longer want a public-facing message archive.
When the campaign message archive is published, any emails in that campaign that have been published to the Social Tools Archive will appear in the list.
To remove a single message from the Campaign Message Archive, simply press the “Remove from message archive” button next to that message on the Sent Messages page.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Does the URL change for the Campaign Message Archive if you publish or unpublish the archive?
- No. The public-facing URL stays the same no matter how many times you publish or unpublish the archive. When the page is unpublished, anybody going to that URL will be given an “oops” page.
- Is there a way to have all published messages on one page, regardless of campaign?
- At this time, we can only show messages on one page for an individual campaign. We may add future functionality that will show all messages on one page, regardless of campaign.
- Do I need to re-publish the Campaign Message Archive every time I add a new public mailing to the campaign?
- No. The Campaign Message Archive page will update automatically anytime a message has been published. You do not need to do anything extra to show that mailing on the Campaign Message Archive page.
- I changed the name of my campaign but the new name is not reflected on the Campaign Message Archive page. Why is that?
- To reflect any campaign name changes on the Campaign Message Archive, you must manually unpublish and then republish the Campaign Message Archive page. As mentioned above, this will not change the URL for this archive page.
- Can I customize the style and color of the Campaign Message Archive page?
- At this time, the page is not customizable, but we are planning to add this functionality in the future.
- Can I include the Campaign Message Archive page in an iframe on my website?
- Yes, you should be able to add this page as an iframe embedded on your website.
- Are these pages indexed for increased SEO rankings?
- Currently, these pages are not indexed, but we are considering this addition for SEO optimization.
- A lot of my emails from the past few years were published to the iContact Community, which is now retired. How can I get my past messages published to this new archive?
- If your messages were published to the iContact Community, they should already be migrated to the Social Tools Archive. Any mailings published on the Social Tools Archive will show on the page for their respective Campaign Message Archives.
