Campaign Monitor Blog

Campaign Monitor in 30 seconds

Mathew Patterson — 2009-07-17T00:23:29+10:00

As part of the Campaign Monitor Giving Back program, we're sponsoring Ignite Portland, which is on right about now. As part of the deal, we were invited to create a 30 second promotional video that will be played at the event.

With only a day or so to make it happen, we had to make the most of our available tools. We put together a video for web designers who haven't really heard of Campaign Monitor before:

Special thanks to the office whiteboard, our Flip Mino HD and a couple of free sound effects for their contributions!

Sending a final message to Microsoft about Outlook 2010

David Greiner — 2009-07-14T06:43:20+10:00

It's been just shy of 3 weeks since we launched fixoutlook.org, and it's safe to say the project has been a phenomenal success. Almost 25,000 people have joined the chorus to send a unified message to Microsoft about their lack of web standards support in Outlook 2010. On top of this, there has been considerable coverage across the web from small blogs to major news sites. We've even had some fantastic, thoughtful responses from another member of the Office team (who officially filed a bug about the lack of standards) and a Microsoft MVP.

To bring this great project to a close, we wanted to make sure the Outlook team had a constant reminder of just how strongly we all feel about their lack of standards support. Trending topics on Twitter come and go, we wanted something a little more permanent we could send their way.

The fixoutlook.org Mosaic

In his reply to the fixoutlook campaign, Microsoft's William Kennedy told us that there "is no consensus" about what standards apply to email and that he'd work with the industry if a consensus arises. Luckily for us, these standards already exist. They're called web standards.

To make sure William got the point, we figured we'd send him a "consensus" from 25,000 of us, many of who (myself included) are Outlook customers. From this idea, the fixoutlook.org mosaic was born. In a single image, it includes almost all of the 25,000 people who joined us in asking Microsoft to fix standards support in Outlook 2010.

Here's a preview of the mosaic. You can click it for the full sized version, which is a rather large 20MB and might take a while to download.

We've used the different colored avatars from everyone who contributed to spell out a final message to Microsoft. We figured saying please this time couldn't hurt our chances.

As I write this, the 2m x 1m mosaic is just boarding a plane on it's way to Redmond, personally addressed to Mr Kennedy on behalf of everyone who contributed.

To give you an idea of scale, here's a shot of us holding the mosaic.

A big final thanks to everyone who helped spread the word about the importance of the fixoutlook campaign. On a more personal note, it was a pleasure to be involved from start to finish, and hopefully it will contribute to making life easier for email designers and Outlook users alike.

Update: 17 July A few clever people have taken the mosaic to a whole new level creating zoomable versions you can easily move around in.

The first is an AJAX-based version from Kyle Mulka.
Here's a fullscreen version using Deep Zoom from LobsterPot Solutions (requires Microsoft Silverlight). Make sure you zoom in about the "l" in fixoutlook to see a special message.
The last one is also full screen and a slick combination of Deep Zoom on Colaab and also requires SilverLight.

It's interesting to note that all 3 of these projects were built with Microsoft technology.

Reselling Campaign Monitor to a niche market: Meet Scoutmailer

David Greiner — 2009-07-14T01:21:01+10:00

It seems like every day of the week we're seeing an interesting new approach to reselling Campaign Monitor. While the majority of rebrands are small to large design firms and marketing agencies selling their own email marketing platform on to clients, a recent standout for me was ScoutMailer. ScoutMailer is a rebranded version of Campaign Monitor targeted specifically at the scout industry.

This approach resonated with me because of our original decision to target Campaign Monitor specifically at web designers. Looking back, this decision was one of the best calls we made. Selling something to a niche market with unique needs makes it much easier to target both the feature set, and your message to that market.

Chris Monnat, the brains behind the rebrand realized this and was very careful to make sure ScoutMailer was pitched to the needs of his audience. Here's what Chris had to say...

Scouts don't do "email marketing" so I needed to present Campaign Monitor as a more generic tool to help them communicate with their members.

It's a smart approach. So smart that I recently caught up with Chris to ask him the full story behind the rebrand. Check out the the full interview.

How to add a newsletter signup form to your Facebook fan page

Mathew Patterson — 2009-07-10T00:53:47+10:00

It has always been easy to put a signup form onto a standard web page, just by copying and pasting the form code from your account. Now it is almost as easy to add the same signup form to your Facebook fan page, and let your Facebook friends join your list. Our thanks go to the Return on Subscriber blog for providing the general instructions.

Here's what you'll need:

The Static FBML application
The signup form for the list you want people to join. See our help page for where to get it

Add the Static FBML application to your page

Go to the Static FBML application and choose to add it. It will ask you which page you want to add it to:

Basically it is just a container you can add your own HTML into.

Edit the FBML application and rename it

Click on 'edit page' from your pages profile, and find the FBML box. Click the pencil edit icon in the header.

Now you can paste in your form code, and add any introductory information, images or other design touches to your form.

Add the signup form as a tab on your page

To make it easier for your fans to find the form, you can add it as a navigation tab. Just click the "+" icon in the top navigation list, and select your new form from the list.

Now it is a standalone tab, and people can signup at any time.

To see it in action, visit the Campaign Monitor fan page. When we have our new shirts we'll give a few away to our Facebook fans too, so it could pay off to add us. We're not too proud for blatant bribery!

Easily email your contacts with TactileCRM integration

David Greiner — 2009-07-09T01:04:51+10:00

The fine folks at Tactile CRM have just announced a fantastic new integration into Campaign Monitor. Tactile CRM is slick web-based contact and sales management system that lets you easily share your sales, contacts and notes within your organization.

One of our biggest problems with CRM integration to date is that just because someone is in your contacts, doesn't mean they've given you permission to send them commercial email. Simply dumping all your contacts into a Campaign Monitor list and sending away can land you into all sorts of permission problems (we've seen this happen on many occasions).

The awesome thing about Tactile CRM's approach is that you can just sync subscribers that have been tagged in a certain way. For example, you might have a tag called "newsletter", and only sync those contacts that have this tag present to ensure you're only ever sending to those contacts that have specifically opted in.

Here's a quick demo video the Tactile CRM crew put together so you can see it in action, and you can read more about the integration on their blog.

Right now, they are looking for feedback and suggestions on any improvements customers might like to see, so head on over to their feedback form if you have any ideas on what might make this integration even better.

How Performative Web uses our API to build and send dynamic emails

David Greiner — 2009-07-08T06:03:04+10:00

Hot on the heels of our latest API updates released yesterday, I figured now is a good a time as any to highlight some of the interesting ways customers are using the API for their own benefit.

Performative Web is a powerful tool built for design agencies who want to offer dynamic web sites (such as a CMS, blog or web app) without the need for an in-house development team. The Performative Web team recently integrated Campaign Monitor into their suite allowing their customers to quickly build newsletters using content from their web site and automatically deliver it to their subscribers via Campaign Monitor.

By combining a simple editor with the power of the Django templating system (the framework their system is built on), users can create beautiful emails that combine their own content with dynamic content from the site. For example, recently added products or the last 3 stories from their blog.

In effect, the Performative Web team have built their own version of our editor to make it easy for their clients to build emails based on existing content in a couple of clicks.

They even complete the integration by including basic campaign reporting right in the Performative Web interface such as the number of opens and a list of everyone who bounced. If you're interested in reading more about this integration, Ben Eliott from the Performative Web team has put together a much more detailed post on their blog.

If you're doing anything interesting with the Campaign Monitor API and would like use to share your hard work here, we'd love to hear from you.

Winning slogans from our t-shirt competition

Mathew Patterson — 2009-07-07T04:56:37+10:00

Votes have been cast and tallied in our recent t-shirt slogan competition, and we have your winning favourites. Over 1,000 votes were cast, and in the end the results were very tight.

We'll be taking the top 3 ideas, and turning them into t-shirts that are actually worth wearing. If you've seen our existing shirts you know we aren't going to cover them in Campaign Monitor branding.

Thanks so much to everyone who voted, and double thanks to those who made suggestions, funny, quirky, nerdy and downright odd as they were. Our winning authors were:

Please unsubscribe me from this conversation — This was actually my entry, but I promise there was no vote fixing!
You are reading the text only version of this t-shirt — by Doug Neiner
G'day [firstname,fallback=mate] — by Ricky Cox

We'll be sending Doug a Flip Mino HD video camera, copies of each shirt when printed and also setting him up with a nice chunk of Campaign Monitor email credits too. Ricky will be receiving one of each shirt too, as well as his choice of awesome Blik decals and some Campaign Monitor credits.

As for me, I'll be receiving a pat on the back and a temporary increase in social standing. I'll also award myself some bonus ranking points in our internal ping pong tracking application. Watch out on the blog for the shirt designs over the next couple of weeks.

Keep in mind we won't be selling these ones, only giving them away to people we spot sending great campaigns, helping out in the forums or otherwise grabbing our attention.

Automatically manage templates via the API

David Greiner — 2009-07-07T04:36:28+10:00

Since we added the ability to manage your clients via the API back in February, we've seen a huge stack of customers creating clever, automated ways to manage their clients. One of the most popular uses was to automate the process of letting new clients sign up to your rebranded version of Campaign Monitor. This included a simple sign up form on your site, creating the client, setting their billing options and the features they can access.

The only thing missing from this process was the ability to load templates in that client's account. Today I'm happy to announce the final piece of the puzzle has been added with the following new methods now available in our API:

Template.Create - Add a new template for any client.
Template.Delete - Delete an existing template for any client.
Template.GetDetail - Get the full details of a template, including a preview and screenshot URL
Template.Update - Make any changes to an existing template.
Client.GetTemplates - Gets a list of all currently installed templates for a client.

To make it as easy possible to get started with these new methods, we've also updated the PHP API kit and .NET API kits to support all of these new methods right out of the box. A big shout out to new Campaign Monitor developer James Dennes, who was responsible for these handy new methods from start to finish.

New SOAP-based Ruby Gem available for the API

David Greiner — 2009-06-29T23:40:31+10:00

All you Ruby developers out there will be pleased to know that a new SOAP-based Ruby gem has just been released for the Campaign Monitor API. The gem is the work of clever Campaign Monitor customer Marcelo Menezes, who was kind enough to open source his code and make it available to all at GitHub.

You might remember that we already have an existing Ruby gem available for the API. This gem uses the HTTP protocol to interface with our API and covers most, but not all of our API methods. Marcelo's gem instead uses the SOAP protocol and also covers every method currently available in the API. A big thanks to Marcelo for his hard work and generosity in sharing it with the Campaign Monitor community.

The last 24 hours on fixoutlook.org

David Greiner — 2009-06-25T06:14:35+10:00

It's been an amazing 24 hours for the Campaign Monitor team since we launched fixoutlook.org on behalf of the Email Standards Project yesterday afternoon (Sydney time). In less than a day, we hit an incredible 20,000 tweets from the community who shared our position on Microsoft's lack of standards support in Outlook 2010.

Just as impressively, we received an official response from Microsoft before the day was out. While this wasn't exactly the message we'd been hoping for, there were certainly some positives to be taken from it. We posted a follow up to Microsoft's response on the Email Standards project blog not long after.

Twitter is by no means a vacuum, and the amount of tweets and interest in our approach resulted in coverage across the web on a huge scale. Here are some of the highlights.

Microsoft, Outlook Is Broken, Says 6,000 Tweets (And Growing). Fix It. - Techcrunch
Users Pressure Microsoft to Fix Outlook - Reuters
Microsoft defends Outlook HTML decision - CNET News
Microsoft: Outlook's not broken and we aren't 'fixing' it - ZDNet.com
Outlook 2010 not winning fans. . .on Twitter - CNN.com
Sour Outlook - zeldman.com

This coverage combined with the relentless flow of tweets resulted in more than 100,000 page views on fixoutlook.org in the first day.

The story behind the site

The moment we heard the news about Outlook 2010 and tested it for ourselves, we knew it was important to act fast. If there was any possibility of getting Microsoft on board before Office 2010 then we couldn't delay any longer. After a brainstorming session, the idea to use Twitter to spread the word was born and developed quickly from there.

Ever since the site launched, we've had loads of enquiries from people interested in how the site was actually built. The site was created in less than a week by the talented guys at Newism, which we've worked with on loads of projects before. I think we can all agree that they did an amazing job.

It was a completely home grown solution the guys built out of the box using the Twitter search API. The Newism team have told me they plan on doing a more comprehensive post on the nuts and bolts of this process, so I'll be sure to share that when it eventuates.

While Twitter has been used to encourage change in lots of different ways before, there were a few unique additions that I think contributed to our success. Todd Zeigler summed it up perfectly in his post today.

What's next

We've already been back in touch with Microsoft since the site launched, and are hoping that the continued pressure from the community will lead them to re-assess their position on standards. In the mean time, we'll keep trying our best to spread the word through the ESP blog and the newly created @fixoutlook account on Twitter.

Thanks again for the amazing level of support we've had to date. 20,000 people coming together to encourage change in 24 hours is something we can all be proud of.

Microsoft to ignore web standards in Outlook 2010 - enough is enough

David Greiner — 2009-06-24T02:20:30+10:00

As most of you know, our motivation for starting the Email Standards Project two years ago came from the release of Outlook 2007. Specifically, because of Microsoft's decision to avoid using a browser to render HTML emails in place of a word processor. This immediately took standards-based email design off the table, forcing designers to abandon web standards for tables and font tags. You can read our original reaction and the subsequent call to arms that followed.

Since that time, we've had the pleasure of working with teams at Yahoo!, Apple, IBM, Google and even the Microsoft Entourage team. However, the elephant in the room was always Outlook. For a time things were looking good and we had the chance to chat with a number of passionate Microsoft employees who agreed with our position on standards and to try their best to improve future versions of Outlook. I'm sad to say, it looks like these efforts failed.

After testing the latest beta of Outlook 2010 and seeing the same poor standards support as 2007, a senior member of the Outlook team confirmed they plan on continuing to use Word to render HTML emails. Not only that, but early tests indicate that HTML support in the Word engine has not been improved in any way. Same bugs. Same quirks.

To demonstrate just how bad the Word rendering engine is in Outlook 2010, here's exactly the same email rendered in Outlook 2000, and then Outlook 2010. Click the image for a full sized version.

Microsoft explain their position

When Outlook 2007 was released there were lots of theories thrown around about what motivated the switch to the Word rendering engine. Many stipulated that it was a security related decision after the problems they'd been having with previous versions of Outlook. As it turns out, it was much simpler than that.

This was confirmed last week in a discussion with Outlook Product Manager Dev Balasubramanian. When asked why Outlook is using Word to compose HTML emails, this was his response:

"The reason for this lies in the benefit Outlook users gain by having Word as their e-mail authoring tool; rich tools like SmartArt, automatic styles and templates, and other benefits found in Word 2007 and 2010 enable Outlook users to write professional looking and visually stunning messages."
"I am aware of where this decision on our part places Outlook from a standards perspective - at the same time, we ask that you consider the benefits Outlook users get from having Word tools in their e-mail authoring experience."

When asked why Word is also used to render HTML emails, Dev explained:

"Having multiple HTML engines could reduce performance, as well as create an inconsistency in terms of what type of content the user is able to create vs. consume."

Basically, Microsoft are using the Word rendering engine so emails composed in Outlook will look consistent when viewed by other Outlook users (also confirmed in this Microsoft white paper).

Email is not a walled garden

Microsoft's decision to move away from the pre-2007 approach of using Internet Explorer to render emails clearly demonstrates they are not confident that emails composed using Word will render correctly in a web browser. Remember, for a second, that every other email client on the market today uses a web browser to render HTML email.

Surely Microsoft understand that if an Outlook 2010 user sends a Word formatted email to a friend using Apple Mail or Thunderbird and it's unreadable, both sender and receiver suffer a poor experience. By aiming to please Outlook-to-Outlook senders, they are punishing Outlook customers who send to those using other email clients. Given the fact that Outlook 2007 only commands around 7% email client market share, it's easy to see how short-sighted this is.

An obvious solution

To us, the solution couldn't be more clear-cut. By updating the Word engine so it can compose and render standards based HTML, all of these problems are solved. Microsoft can have its pie and eat it too.

Outlook customers can receive email from outside sources without formatting problems. They can also rest assured that any emails they send to friends and colleagues not using Outlook will display as intended.

As the market upgrades from Outlook 2007 to 2010, HTML email design can move out of the pre-standards era of the 90's bringing all the benefits that come with it.

Microsoft want your feedback on this decision

Outlook 2010 is still in beta and a year away from public release. Either we make it clear this is a bad decision now, or the disconnect between Outlook users and the rest of the email world will continue to grow. Email designers will be stuck building emails using the same clunky combination of tables for layout, inline CSS and font tags for many years to come.

Thankfully, Microsoft want to hear your feedback about this. From the Outlook Product Manager Dev Balasubramanian:

"The Office team, and Microsoft in general, is always open to and interested in customer feedback so we can prioritize the various needs of our diverse user base in product planning and development."
"This conversation alone has reignited the topic within the Outlook and Word teams and in and of itself will contribute to future design considerations... We want to hear feedback on this position, and I'm sure you and your readers will provide it."

It's time for us to send the strongest message yet to Microsoft, and we need your help to get started. To make this happen, we've built fixoutlook.org.

All you have to do is tweet your thoughts about this issue, and make sure you include the fixoutlook.org URL somewhere in the tweet. We'll be pulling together every tweet that includes this link on the fixoutlook.org site to send a unified message to Microsoft. The more tweets, the more impact, so please start spreading the word today and encourage your friends and colleagues to do the same.

To get started, head to fixoutlook.org for all the details.

New API method: Delete a campaign

Mathew Patterson — 2009-06-18T03:58:21+10:00

Thanks to suggestions from you guys, and the hard work of the development team, the Campaign Monitor API continues to get more powerful. Today's update adds the ability to delete campaigns from your account via the API.

You can delete both drafts and already sent campaigns, which comes in handy when you've sent a few test emails, or created a draft campaign that didn't work out. Find out exactly how it works by reading the Campaign.Delete method documentation. Thanks to our new developer James who made it all happen.

Add that to the bunch of API methods added earlier this year, and we are starting to see some very cool API integrations happening. Not everyone can write API integration code themselves, but there might be a plugin you can use to hook your Campaign Monitor account up to your other tools.

Keep an eye on the blog for more plugins and integrations over the coming months.

Campaign images now served from 15 key locations worldwide

David Greiner — 2009-06-15T03:19:59+10:00

While some of the team have been putting the finishing touches on our new A/B split testing feature, we've also been hard at work on a range of speed improvements we plan on making across Campaign Monitor.

We've been consistently growing at more than 1,000 new customers each week for the last year now. While this is nothing short of awesome, it also means we need to be conscious of our own infrastructure. Today we completed a significant database upgrade that brings with it a host of speed improvements across the application as well as much improved scalability.

Serving your images from 15 key locations

On top of this upgrade, we also pushed a big improvement to how we render images in your recipients email clients. Traditionally, all images in HTML emails were served from our main data center in North Carolina. As of today, all campaign images are now served from a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Here's a quick map to show you the locations your campaigns are now being served from.

Whenever you import a HTML email campaign or template, we'll automatically cache copies of that content across 15 key locations around the world. Whenever a recipient opens your campaign, we'll choose the optimal data centre and serve your image content directly from there. This results in a dramatic reduction in email load times for many of your recipients. The best part is, it's completely automated, free of charge and available now.

For those customers using custom domains, your images will also be served from the CDN by default (which uses the createsend domain). All tracking links will still use your custom domain, and you can have the CDN switched off in your account at any stage by getting in touch with our support team and requesting it.

A better experience for your subscribers

This update ensures image-based campaign content will now render significantly faster for all subscribers. A reduction in load times reducing the chances of a recipient getting impatient and moving on to the next email in their inbox.

Added redundancy

As well as a big speed increase in rendering times, this update also provides additional redundancy for your campaigns. If one data center is unavailable, the content will be served from the next closest location. Think of it like 15 backups of your campaign in highly secure, reliable locations around the world, not to mention the addition backup procedures we have place in our main data center.

Lots more to come

Now that your email campaigns are rendered faster, we're moving on to more speed increases to the software itself. The first step will be serving all Campaign Monitor assets (images, CSS files, scripts, etc) from the CDN too. We're also switching to a much slimmer JavaScript library and optimizing the majority of files to keep the footprint of the software to a minimum.

While this is happening, we're also warming up a second data center location that we'll be load balancing between. This will give us another nice speed boost, add an extra level of redundancy to every layer of our platform and give us an additional range of IP's to deliver campaigns from. We'll be sharing more details about the benefits of this soon, but I wanted to keep you all in the loop about some of the exciting behind the scenes improvements coming to Campaign Monitor over the coming months.

Scheduled downtime this Sunday 14th June

David Greiner — 2009-06-12T04:23:15+10:00

We'll be performing a database upgrade this Sunday which will result in a 3 hour downtime period for Campaign Monitor this Sunday evening (June 14) at 5pm US Eastern Daylight time (see this in your own time zone). This upgrade is part of a sweeping round of speed improvements we have planned for Campaign Monitor over the coming weeks.

What will this mean for me?

This maintenance period will have the following effects:

You and your clients will not be able to login to your Campaign Monitor account. If your client does try and log in they'll see a non-branded "Down for maintenance" page letting them know when they should come back and try again.
Campaigns scheduled to be sent during this period will not go out, but will be sent automatically as soon as the application comes back up. However, subscribes, unsubscribes and bounces will be captured during the downtime and processed into your reports afterwards. Images will continue to load in emails, and clicks and opens will also be recorded.

We will update this post once the application is back up and running and we'll also be updating our Twitter status throughout the maintenance to keep you in the loop. Thanks in advance for your patience while we complete this upgrade.

Update: The maintenance has been completed and was a success, and we have re-enabled account access. Thanks for your patience everyone.

More flexibility when removing subscribers from your lists

David Greiner — 2009-06-12T03:30:44+10:00

We just pushed a nice little update live to give you more flexibility when removing subscribers from your list.

Previously, when you wanted to remove a subscriber, the only option was to unsubscribe them from that list. Whenever someone is unsubscribed from your list, we also add them to your client-wide suppression list by default. This is a nice safety measure to ensure that subscriber is never accidentally imported into another list again and sent to.

In most cases, this is just how you want the remove subscriber feature to work. We've since discovered many of you using our subscriber lists in unique ways where you need a little more flexibility.

For example, let's say you divide your subscribers between a list of members and a list of non-members. When a non-member decides to join your organization, you need to move them across to your members list. On the flip-side, some people let their membership lapse and should be move in the opposite direction. Previously you'd need to unsubscribe them from one list, remove them from the suppression list and re-add them to the members list.

This new update makes this problem a thing of the past. Whenever you're removing one or one thousand subscribers from a list, you now have the option of just deleting them from that list, instead of unsubscribing them (highlighted in yellow below). Now you can add them straight into the other list without the suppression list messing with you.

In the example I gave above, you could also use our custom fields and segments feature to work around this problem. Just set up a custom field to indicate if they are a member or non-member and then update that custom fields by re-importing any subscribers with the new membership value.

In our experience, it can often make more sense for some customers to keep separate lists, so now you have the option of easily moving members around no matter how you approach your list management.

A/B Testing for the Rest of Us

David Greiner — 2009-06-05T00:59:06+10:00

This one has been hard to keep under wraps, but after loads of customer requests and a few months of hard work, I'm happy to announce that we'll shortly be adding support for A/B testing to Campaign Monitor. This is one of those features that we always wanted to add, but were never completely satisfied with the best way to implement it.

Testing is one of the great strengths of email marketing. Almost everything is measurable, making it easy to compare multiple approaches and quickly figure out what works best for your subscribers. It's a guesswork killer.

That's the theory anyway. In reality, most of the A/B testing systems we've seen are bloated and hard to use beasts that require a manual just to get started. That never sat well with us, so we went back to the drawing board. We knew that if running an A/B test wasn't as quick and easy as sending a regular campaign, it was never going to get used.

We plan on releasing this in the next month or so, but wanted to give you all the heads up on what's coming. The testing feature will be available for everyone, including your clients if you've given them access to send their own campaigns.

Choose the test, we'll do the rest

Instead of forcing you to create segments of lists, send multiple campaigns and scour over pages of statistics, our testing tool does all the heavy lifting for you.

All you need to do is choose what to test (subject line, from name or different email content) and how to decide the winner (open rate, link clicks, etc) and we'll take it from there.

Campaign Monitor will then send both versions to a small subset of your recipients, see which version wins and automatically send that winning version to the remainder of your recipients. In a couple of clicks you've guaranteed that the best version of your email is being sent to your subscribers, and you've learned something doing it.

While we'll be sharing more details when A/B testing goes live in the next month or so, here's a sneak peek at how the process will look in your account.

A new type of campaign to send

When you create a new campaign, you'll notice a new tab for running an A/B split campaign. Clicking that will let you choose what test you want to run and get started.

Setting the test parameters

A simple slider makes it easy to choose the size of your list you'd like to test on. Next choose how to pick the winner and how long the test should run for.

Watching a test in progress

For all you stats junkies out there, this sweet report gives you a bird's eye view of a test as it's running. When the winner is decided, we'll send it to the rest of your list automatically. If you like, you can pre-empt this and send any time during the test.

Post-test report with benefit estimates

After the test is run and the winning version sent to the remainder of your recipients, you can access the full results of the test. We'll also extrapolate the performance improvement of the winning version to give you an idea of the total benefit of sending that version to the remainder of your list. It's a great way to justify testing to your client or boss.

When will this be available?

We're putting the finishing touches on this feature now before running it through our usual phase of heavy testing (thanks to our new QA engineer Trish). While we can't give an exact date just yet, we're hoping to have this available in all accounts within a months time. We plan on sharing more as we get closer to launch.

If you have any feedback (positive or negative) or questions about this new feature, we'd love to hear them below.

Promoting your product or service with banner ads - is it worth it?

David Greiner — 2009-06-02T03:41:55+10:00

Back in April of this year we decided to have a look at running some banner ads on a number of high profile design-related sites. Over the last couple of years, advertising in our little corner of the web has come a long way. There are loads of highly trafficked design sites with excellent content and affordable ad slots. On top of this, the rise of targeted ad networks such as The Deck and Fusion Ads has made it much easier to get in front of the right crowd.

While we've dabbled in some banner advertising before, I decided to take a more thoughtful approach this time. We put together a number of banners, dedicated landing pages and put conversion tracking in place to measure the results. When looking into this process initially, I didn't come across many write-ups from advertisers on what worked, what didn't and just how effective the ads had been for them. In the interest of helping fill that void, here's the process we went through, and some of the surprising results that eventuated.

Coming up with the ad creative

As part of the merger between Campaign Monitor and MailBuild last year (more on that here), we added a stack of new features to make it easy for designers to earn passive income off their clients through email marketing. In a nutshell, you can create a sub-account for each client, set the price they should pay and earn a profit every time they send.

We figured this was something that lots of designers might find useful and it became the focus of our banner ads and associated landing pages. Here are the 3 ads we ran with initially.

For the final design of these ads we enlisted the help of the clever team at Newism, the same team that coded the current version of the Campaign Monitor site. We couldn't have been happier with the results.

The Landing Pages

As well as testing multiple ad creative, we decided to put together a number of dedicated landing pages for the campaign. We'd randomly display a different landing page for each visitor and measure which one converted best. We bought in the amazing Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain (who designed our web site) and Brad Hayes to help with the design.

Landing Page 1: Earn money in your sleep

This key for this page was to promote the idea of earning money in your sleep. We highlighted the 3 simple steps involved (rebrand, resell and then profit) and included an inline signup form allowing those interested to signup and start using the app on the spot.

Landing Page 2: Are you a designer?

This was definitely the most controversial landing page of the four. We took the fact that Campaign Monitor is built for designers to the extreme by including a modal window that overlays the landing page asking the person if they are a designer or not. If they clicked "You betcha", they'd be shown the page below that highlights how easy it is to resell Campaign Monitor.

If they clicked "Nope", the landing page behind the modal would fade out with a message explaining that "It's not you. It's us." We then linked to a number of other Email Service Providers that they might consider checking out that are built for a less targeted audience.

Unexpectedly, this approach stirred up a lot of conversation on Twitter. Some called us ballsy and classy for linking to our competition, others asked if we were breaking up with them. I personally received a number of emails from people complimenting us on being open and honest with people. The truth is, we've always referred potential customers to our competitors when we know they're not the right match (see this post from 2 years ago). It's how we'd want to be treated, so it's only fair that we do the same to our customers.

Landing page 3: Modal-free just for designers

In the interest of testing what sort of impact the modal window might have on conversions, we also tested it against the very same landing page modal-free. The page was exactly the same otherwise, so should provide a nice comparison.

Landing page 4: Our home page

In the past we've just pointed people to our home page, which in itself is a landing page aimed at converting people to give us a try. Will it out-perform the dedicated landing pages that have a clearer connection to the ad creative?

The Results

Over April and May we booked advertising spots with The Deck and Fusion Ads along with Smashing Magazine, Six Revisions, Webdesigner Depot, Webresources Depot and CSS Elite.

We set up a redirect script on our servers that would choose one of the 4 landing pages above for each visitor and pass through any of the required parameters in the URL so we could track everything with Google Analytics. We have a number of goals set up so we can track important things like a customer signing up, sending a test campaign and becoming a paying customer. If you're interested, our designer Dave Martin has written about our Google Analytics setup in more detail here.

We judged the performance of each banner ad and landing page on the number of visitors that signed up to Campaign Monitor, as opposed to basing it purely on revenue. Because of the nature of our pricing, it can be weeks or even months before a customers starts paying for our software. We'll use the revenue numbers internally over the coming months to get a true idea of ROI.

The best performing banner ad

The blueprint banner ad outperformed the other two with a conversion rate of 3.5% resulting in 370 people signing up for Campaign Monitor. Here are the full results.

Banner Ad	Conversion Rate
Blueprint	3.51%
Post-it Note	2.36%
Chalkboard	2.09%

The best performing landing page

This one surprised everyone. Personally, I was concerned the modal window would result in a lower conversion rate because of the barrier of an additional click. I was pleasantly surprised to see this page gave us 25% more conversions than the next best performing page. Possibly the biggest surprise of all was that the "Earn money in your sleep" page with the inline signup form didn't give us one new customer. Not one! Here are the full results.

Landing Page	Conversion Rate
Landing Page 2: Are you a designer?	4.34%
Landing page 3: Modal-free just for designers	3.48%
Landing page 4: Our home page	1.52%
Landing Page 1: Earn money in your sleep	0%

The best explanation we could provide for this is that people like to check out a product more before signing up (there was no link to the product from the page, the focus was on the signup form). The other landing pages provided links back to the site where an interested customer could take a feature tour, check out the pricing, etc before signing up. On top of this, the form had a total of eight required fields. Reducing this to the bare minimum and asking for the customer data after they signed up might have helped convert more. But still, not one?

The best performing advertiser

From the day we turned these ads on, Fusion Ads has consistently been our best converter. This includes visitors who have signed up right through to total revenue to date. We've also seen good conversion rates from other advertisers, which you can see in the results below.

Advertiser	Conversion Rate
Fusion Ads	3.17%
The Deck	2.62%
Smashing Magazine	2.46%
Six Revisions	2.05%
CSS Elite	2.03%
Webdesigner Depot	2.02%
Webresources Depot	1.9%

It's important to keep in mind that these are conversion rates only, and don't give any indication of the true return on investment. For example, while The Deck has been our second best converter, it's also more expensive than any of the other ad slots. Because of the rates we've managed to negotiate with some providers, I'm afraid I can't share the costs associated with each ad spot, but most are easily found on each respective advertiser's site.

Was it worth it?

Right now it's too early to tell just how long it will take for this campaign to pay for itself and then turn a profit (don't forget the cost of designing the banners and landing pages as well as the ongoing advertising fees). To date we've only recovered around 25% of all expenses in revenue from new customers. Having said that, a large percentage of our customers continue to use our software for an extended period of time. Looking at how revenue has been growing from these customers in the last few weeks, it certainly seems that in the longer-term this exercise will be well worth it. The nature of our business model means that it will be a few more months before we'll really know.

To me, the most important element was actually testing everything as we went. By putting in a little extra work, we could quickly gauge which ad creative, landing page and advertiser was giving us the best results and react accordingly.

Our next steps will be to continue to refine the winning landing page using Google Website Optimizer to improve conversions further. On top of this we'll be trying some new ad creative and throwing a few new advertisers into the mix. I'll try and put together a follow up in a few months time with anything else we might have learned in the mean time.

Creating an AJAX subscribe form

David Greiner — 2009-05-27T23:42:56+10:00

Adding a subscribe form to your site has always been a simple matter of pasting some supplied code from your account. Recently we've had more and more customers asking how they can go about turning this standard form into an AJAX based form that could submit without refreshing the page.

We've just put the finishing touches on a simple code sample you can use to achieve just that. The best part is, we've built it so you can just drop in the supplied subscribe code and you're done. The code will also check to make sure the email address entered is valid before it processes the form. Once a submission has been made, the form will be hidden and a confirmation message shown in its place.

This example was put together using jQuery and PHP. The concept is fairly simple and the code is well commented, so it could easily be adapted to another programming language.

You can download the code here. You'll find a zip file with two documents, a small PHP file that acts as a proxy, and the HTML page containing the form and JavaScript. Feel free to modify them both to suit your needs.

On a side note, this sample code was put together by David Martin, Campaign Monitor's new designer extraordinaire. You'll be seeing much more of Dave's work over the coming months when we release some exciting new features he's been hard at work on.

Setup a client demo account

Mathew Patterson — 2009-05-25T00:18:52+10:00

Landing a new customer for your rebranded Campaign Monitor can sometimes be tricky, especially if the potential client already has a newsletter system.

One of the best ways to sell them on the idea of Campaign Monitor is by letting them actually use it for themselves, and see how easy it is. Of course, you don't want to end up paying for their 'test campaign' which goes out to their entire 20,000 person list! Fortunately, there is a simple way to set up a demo account that won't let them spend your money.

First, create a demo client (you might want to set it up with their company name to make it feel customized to them). Add a subscriber list of 5 or less people, so emails sent to that list will be free. Now you have a couple of options for how to limit this demo account.

Under 'client settings', you'll want to hit 'Edit Access and Billing'. Check the 'Create and send their own campaigns' box. At this point, you could simply set the client to pay for their own campaigns. So if they do decide to go ahead and send to a larger list, they'll have to add their own card details and pay themselves.

Sometimes, this will be fine. In other cases, you may not want to allow that at all. So your other choice is to pay on their behalf. To make this work, you'll need some email credits in your account. Once you have them, click 'Allocate email credits' under client settings. Now you can allocate a small number of credits to your demo client.

The key is to given them either an amount you are happy to let them spend (like the 1,000 credits above), or an amount that will only let them send free campaigns (i.e less than 500 credits). Then make sure you have selected 'Don't allow them to send until I allocate more credits to them' under 'When their credits run out'.

Now your demo client has a hard limit on how many emails can be sent. Your potential client can login, manage subscribers, send test campaigns and view reports, but not spend any money. If they try to send a larger campaign, they'll see this message:

You can give out the details to your demo account without having to worry. We'd love to hear about how you demo Campaign Monitor to your clients, so if you have a trick you are willing to share, post a comment.

Time to add your vote for the new Campaign Monitor shirts

Mathew Patterson — 2009-05-17T22:42:16+10:00

After a huge 122 suggestions, the time has come to pick some winners for the latest Campaign Monitor t-shirts. We've got together and picked out some finalists for you all to vote on, so now it is your turn.

What we were looking for was something fun, something related to Campaign Monitor or email marketing, but also something that wasn't just a promotional shirt. There is enough of those around already.

We wanted something people would actually enjoy wearing, not just a billboard for your chest. It should also be something that lends itself to a t-shirt design, and isn't too insulting.

We've also added in some of the popular suggestions that didn't quite win last time, to give them another chance at glory.

We'll leave the voting open for a week or so, and announce the winning shirts some time after that.

Thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions. Now go add your vote!