Campaign banners

A banner is an image injected above or below every rendered signature while its window is open. It needs no template edit, and it removes itself when the window closes. A signature can be set to never carry one; see keeping banners off a signature.

This is the marketing surface. An event, a campaign, a seasonal message: set the window and forget about it.

Create a banner in the Banners view. It needs a campaign name, an image, a position relative to the signature, and a window. A click-through link and alt text are offered alongside them and neither is required.

The image follows the same rules as any signature image: PNG or JPG, no SVG, sized sensibly since it is attached to every message anyone sends while the window is open. It is chosen from the images already uploaded, so upload it under Images first if it is not there yet.

The campaign name is how the banner is listed and how its clicks are reported, so it is worth naming for the campaign rather than for the file.

A banner with no link is a picture rather than a call to action, which is the right shape for an announcement nobody is meant to click. Leaving alt text blank falls back to the campaign name, so a recipient reading with images switched off sees something rather than nothing.

You need a role with campaign banners (Admin, Marketing, or a custom role given it), and the image must already be uploaded under Images. The Image list is read from Images, which needs the templates capability that the Admin and Editor roles hold, so somebody with the Marketing role alone sees an empty list and cannot create a banner. Give them the Editor role as well, or have an Admin create it. Once it exists they can preview it, test it, and edit everything about it except the image.

Open Banners in the portal sidebar.
Choose New banner.
Enter a Campaign name.
Pick the image from the Image list.
Enter a Click-through URL if the banner should be clickable, and Alt text if the campaign name is not the right description of it.
Under Placement, choose Below the signature or Above the signature.
Pick the Time zone the window should be read in.
Set Starts and Ends. The end has to be after the start.
Choose Create banner.

The banner appears in the list with its Status alongside, Scheduled until its window opens. It goes live at the start time and signatures pick it up immediately.

Scheduling

A banner’s start and end are authored as a wall-clock time in an IANA time zone that you choose.

That matters more than it sounds. A campaign can be scheduled for a region other than the one the administrator sits in, and daylight saving is handled correctly: a banner set to end at 23:59 on a date does so at 23:59 local to the chosen zone, whichever side of a clock change that falls on.

The portal shows the window back to you in the zone you chose, rather than converting it to yours.

Opening or closing a window takes effect immediately. The active banner is part of the rendered-signature cache key, so there is nothing to wait for and nothing to purge.

Any banner can be changed after it is created, whatever its status: the name, the image, the link, the alt text, the placement and the window.

Open Banners in the portal sidebar.
Choose Edit on the banner’s row.
Change what needs changing. Starts and Ends show the window in the time zone the banner was scheduled in, not in yours.
Choose Save changes.

Editing a banner whose Status is Live asks first, in a dialog titled Edit a live banner, because the change reaches signatures straight away. Confirm with Save changes. A banner that is scheduled, paused or ended saves without asking.

The portal confirms with “Banner saved”, and the edit is written to the change log with what moved.

Moving the window of an ended banner so that it covers now puts it back on signatures immediately, the same as creating it would.

Somebody with the Marketing role alone can edit a banner but cannot give it a different image, for the same reason they cannot create one: the Image list is empty for them. Leave Image alone and the banner keeps the picture it has.

This page used to say a banner could not be edited in the portal and had to be deleted and created again. That stopped being true in October 2026.

A scheduled banner used to be invisible until the moment it reached recipients. There are now four ways to see one first, and none of them needs its window to be open.

Where	What it shows	Who can use it
Preview on the banner’s row	The banner on your own signature, in the portal	Anyone who can manage banners
Send test to me, in that preview	The same thing as an email in your own inbox	Anyone who can manage banners and has a mailbox in the organisation
The Banner choice on Send a test	The banner on any colleague’s signature, sent to an inbox in your directory	Anyone who can send test emails
Banner date in the designer’s live preview	Whichever banner runs on a date you pick, under the design you are working on	Anyone who can edit templates

To preview a banner:

Open Banners in the portal sidebar.
Choose Preview on the banner’s row.

The dialog shows your own new-message signature with the banner attached, and names the mailbox and the template underneath. The banner appears whatever its schedule says, so this works for one that is scheduled, paused or ended. Links in the preview go straight to their destination and are not tracked, so clicking one does not count against the campaign.

To see it in a real mail client, choose Send test to me in the same dialog. The portal confirms the address it went to, which is always your own. The message is the same one a test email sends, and its grey line above the rule names the banner it carries. The send is recorded in the change log as a test email, like any other.

Both are fixed to the person who is signed in. A preview never renders as a colleague and a test never goes to one. The Marketing role reaches banners without reaching templates or the directory, and letting it name a mailbox would hand it a way to read colleagues’ details. To see the banner on somebody else’s signature, use Send a test on the Templates view, which needs the template capability.

If your account has no mailbox in the organisation, which is the usual case for partner staff working in a client’s portal, the preview uses sample data on the live new-message template and says so. Send test to me is unavailable then, because there is no signature of yours to send.

Unlike the preview, a test email behaves like the real thing: the banner’s link is tracked, so a click in a test counts towards the banner’s total.

Keeping banners off a signature

A banner goes on every signature by default. Each template has its own switch that stops that, so a signature you want kept plain stays plain whatever campaign is running. The usual case is a reply signature: a short reply template, or a blank one that sends no signature at all, would otherwise go out carrying the campaign banner on its own.

The switch belongs to the template, not to the banner, so it holds for every campaign anyone creates later. It also follows the template wherever it is used, including when an assignment rule routes a department to it.

You need the templates capability to change it (the Admin and Editor roles, or a custom role that includes it). The Marketing role cannot, because the decision is about the signature rather than the campaign.

Open Templates in the portal sidebar.
Open the menu at the end of the template’s row.
Choose Turn campaign banners off.

The portal confirms with “Campaign banners off for this signature.” and the row gains a Banners off chip. Choose Turn campaign banners on from the same menu to undo it.

The change reaches users as fast as a publish does: the template’s cached signatures are thrown away and rebuilt, so the next compose picks it up. It is recorded in the change log as “Toggled campaign banners”, with on or off. It does not add an entry to the template’s version history.

A template created from Blank canvas starts with banners off, since the only reason to send an empty signature is to send nothing. The New template dialog says so. Every other template starts with banners on. Blank templates created before October 2026 were not changed and still carry banners until you switch them off. The compliance footer is a separate switch and starts on for a blank template too; see keeping the footer off a signature.

The switch is copied when a template is duplicated, and an exported template carries it into the organisation it is imported into.

Where the switch does not apply

Seeing a particular banner on purpose overrides it. Preview and Send test to me on the Banners view, and a test email with a banner picked by name, all show that banner even on a template that keeps banners off, in the same way they ignore the banner’s window and paused state. A test email left on Live banner, if any honours the switch, because it answers what a real send would carry.

The designer’s live preview honours the switch too. With Banner & footer turned on it shows no banner, and hovering over the switch says “Campaign banners are off for this signature, so none is shown”.

Position

A banner sits either above or below the signature.

Below is the usual choice. It keeps the signature immediately under the message body, where readers expect it, and treats the banner as an appendix. Above works when the campaign is the point and the signature is context.

Click tracking

Where a banner carries a link, its click-throughs are always tracked. Banner links are routed through tracked links automatically, and there is no opt-out.

No IP address and no recipient identity is logged, so a banner tells you how many clicks it drew, not who made them. Somebody who clicks twice counts twice.

Totals appear in the Link clicks view, rolled up per banner rather than per URL, so a campaign pointing at three destinations reads as one number. Security scanners that pre-fetch every link in a message are counted separately and kept out of that number, which matters most for a banner because a banner is measured on its click rate.

Who can manage banners

Admins, the Marketing role, and any custom role given campaign banners. A partner’s Owners, Admins and Technicians can manage them too when working in a client’s portal.

Marketing reaches campaign banners and link click analytics and nothing else, which is usually the right level for a marketing team: they can run campaigns without being able to change the signature templates or reach billing. The one catch is that picking a banner’s image reads your image library, which Marketing cannot see, so a Marketing-only user can preview, test, edit, pause, resume and delete banners but cannot create one or change a banner’s image. See creating a banner.

The Editor role does not reach banners. Editors own the template a banner is attached to, but a campaign is a separate thing with its own schedule and its own owner, so the two are granted separately.

Practical notes

Keep the file small. A banner is attached to every message sent while the window is open, so a 500KB image is a real cost at organisational volume.

A banner has no width setting. It shows at the image’s own pixel size, shrinking only where the reading pane is narrower, so export it at exactly the width it should appear, ideally no more than 600 pixels. Design it to sit comfortably under a signature rather than across the full width of an email client.

Set meaningful alt text. Some recipients will see only that, and the campaign name it falls back to was written for your banner list rather than for them.

Look at it before the real window opens. See checking a banner before it goes live. There is no longer any need to create a throwaway copy with a short window.

Overlapping windows

A signature carries at most one banner. Two campaigns cannot stack on the same message.

When more than one window is open, the one that started most recently wins. A new campaign therefore takes over from a running one for as long as it lasts, and the older banner reappears if its own window is still open when the newer one closes.

That is a deliberate behaviour rather than a tie-break to rely on. Overlapping windows still make it harder to say what any given person received on any given day, which matters when somebody asks later.

The Status column shows which banner is winning at the moment.

Status	Meaning
Live	This is the banner signatures carry right now
Scheduled	Its window has not opened yet
Superseded	Its window is open, but a newer banner is winning
Ended	Its window has closed
Paused	Switched off by hand, whatever its window says

Ending a campaign

Do nothing. The window closes and the banner disappears from every signature at once.

If you need it gone sooner, pause it or delete it. Both take effect immediately. Pausing keeps the banner in the list and can be undone with Resume. If the window is still open when you resume, the banner goes straight back on. Deleting cannot be undone.

To pause a banner:

Open Banners in the portal sidebar.
Choose Pause on the banner’s row.

Its Status changes to Paused. Choose Resume on the same row to put it back.

To delete a banner:

Open Banners in the portal sidebar.
Choose Delete on the banner’s row.
Confirm with Delete in the Delete banner dialog.

The dialog says that signatures stop carrying it immediately.