Campaign Monitor Blog

Our improved help section makes searching for answers easy

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-11-20T04:20:48+10:00

If you’ve accessed the help section of your Campaign Monitor account lately, you would have noticed that we’ve made some rather pleasing visual tweaks to our search. We’ve aimed towards making the process of finding the information you and your clients need much more accessible, not to mention, more natural:

The results say it all – pleasant summaries of most help articles, category links and well, just a good, clean look. Note the new list of most popular questions in the right-hand column:

Clients see pretty much the same interface as designers see, however with fewer help categories. Not all help categories that are open to resellers of Campaign Monitor are available to clients – categories that are exclusively accessible to resellers are marked with a padlock in the right-hand column of the resellers’ Help interface. Also, should a client not find the answer they seek, they are prompted to contact the reseller via email, not Campaign Monitor directly.

We hope you find these changes to the help section of your account as excellent as we do. We’re paying close attention to common search terms too, so look out for improvements such as more relevant content and ‘smarter’ customer support in the near future. Please leave your comments and suggestions below – we’re always looking for ways to improve!

A better approach to spam complaints for you and your clients

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-11-19T05:12:59+10:00

After some very insightful discussion with our community, we’ve made some improvements to our spam complaint notification process for resellers of Campaign Monitor.

Initially, if a single client sent a campaign which attracted a sufficiently high number of spam complaints, then everyone’s accounts – including the reseller’s – would be locked. This undoubtedly caused a lot of trouble, especially for designers who had resold Campaign Monitor to multiple clients. Now, if a single client sends a campaign that attracts a high number of spam complaints, then the client’s account only will be locked. The result – resellers of Campaign Monitor are now protected in the event that a single client sends a dud campaign. For all other customers, the process has not changed.

What happens if my client’s campaign receives spam complaints?

If a client sends an email campaign which receives spam complaints from more than 0.3% of email recipients and the actual number of complaints exceeds 20, a white-label warning email will be sent to them:

An email will be also sent to you letting you know that your client’s campaign has received a high number of spam complaints.

Should the complaint rate reach 1% of emails delivered and the actual number of complaints exceeds 20, we will lock the clients’ account, but not those of other clients. The client will see the following message if they try to send further emails:

You will also see the following message next to the client’s name on the dashboard:

Although both you and your client will be able to login, neither of you will be able to send emails on behalf of this particular client. Note that if multiple client accounts have been locked at the same time, then your account will be locked, too. In this instance, neither you, nor all your clients will be able to send email.

Re-opening a locked account

In the instance that either your account, or that of one of your clients is locked, you will need to contact us immediately. We will require as much detail as possible about the campaign that resulted in the account being locked, including the origin of the subscriber list and how subscribers opted-in to receive email from the designer or client.

If it has been shown that you and your client have operated within our anti-spam policy, terms of use and have made every effort to meet our guidelines, then in many cases, we can re-open the account.

Will this ever happen to my campaigns?

If you pay attention to our permission policies there is very little chance that you, or your clients will ever reach the threshold required to receive a warning email, let alone face account closure. Ultimately, your complaint goal should be zero, however we do understand that people will often hit the ‘Spam’ button instead of unsubscribing. Typical email campaigns get very few to no spam complaints, so reaching the 0.3% warning threshold for a given campaign is certainly worthy of a red flag.

Spam complaints are taken very seriously here, as they not only affect the deliverability of specific campaigns, but can impact sender reputation, the deliverability of other customers’ campaigns and even get our mail servers temporarily blocked by unhappy ISPs. Read more about how spam complaints are recorded - we have a similar, white-label resource that your clients can read in the Help section of their accounts.

Overall, this is a great improvement to the spam complaint process, which for resellers of Campaign Monitor, will ultimately reduce a lot of the risk in taking on new clients. Please do share your thoughts on this change in the comments section below.

Getting started with our free email templates

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-11-17T22:11:12+10:00

If you’re new to coding HTML email or short on time, our 30+ free email templates are a great place to start preparing a campaign. In this post, we’ll go through the fundamentals of downloading and editing a template, then uploading your email masterpiece to a campaign. We’ve tried and tested our email templates in all the major email clients, so most of the hard work has been already done for you.

Although this walkthrough requires no assumed knowledge, we highly recommend that you understand the fundamentals of coding in HTML and have experience using a visual HTML editor. Check out our help topic for more information.

Lets get started

Getting started with a template is easy. Simply visit our template gallery and download your template of choice:

You will notice that when you download a template from Campaign Monitor, it will come with an assortment of other files – don’t worry about these for now. Simply open ‘template-basic.html’ (or similar) in your HTML editor of choice and enjoy the show:

For the purposes of this guide, we’ll be using Adobe Dreamweaver as our HTML editor.

Editing the template

You have two options when it comes to editing our templates – you can either use your own HTML editor, or once you have set up tags, our WYSIWYG editor, however we’ll stick to the former option for now.

In your HTML editor, you will either be able to view the email template visually, or as lines of HTML code. If you are not confident with HTML code, we recommend viewing the template design as a visual layout (called ‘Design view’ in Adobe Dreamweaver):

In most visual HTML editors, you will be able to type directly over the existing text and even drag-and-drop images into your layout. Play around with text and color… Just don’t forget to save your work regularly:

At this point, it’s essential that you delve into the code – you will see that we’ve used a few of our tags to add the ever-important ‘unsubscribe’ and ‘forward-to-a-friend’ links. You can edit the existing tags in the HTML code, or add some of your own:

Once you’re happy with your template, compress all the images and CSS files you need for the campaign into a .zip file (don’t zip ‘template-basic.html’) and login to your Campaign Monitor account.

Adding a template to your campaign

To add your updated template to a campaign, simply create a new campaign in Campaign Monitor, define the campaign details and sender, then when you reach ‘Step 2.2: Define the HTML content for this campaign’, select, ‘Import the campaign from my computer or network’. At Step 2.3, choose ‘template-basic.html’ as your HTML page and check, ‘Move a copy of my CSS inline’. Also, select your new .zip file in ‘2. All other files in zip format’:

Once you click, ‘Get my Campaign’, you will be able to preview the campaign, continue or re-import it. If you’re satisfied with the result, click the ‘Next’ button, edit the plain text version of your email using our editor and you’re done!

This is our first post in a series on getting started with Campaign Monitor’s templates. Next, we’ll look at tags and consequently, creating templates for use in our WYSIWYG editor. Stay tuned to this blog for more!

Want to do more with our templates? This post covers the quickest and most simple way to set up an email campaign using our free templates. If you’re after something more advanced, please take a look at our comprehensive resources, or even create your own email template.

Writing effective email copy

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-11-16T01:37:20+10:00

When you’re elbows-deep in applying visual tweaks to your HTML email design, it’s very easy to forget how important writing quality, punchy copy can be. Tailoring email copy to your audience is not a matter of ensuring your message is readable even with images turned off, but presenting it in a style that your readers will respond to. In this post we’ll highlight some considerations when writing effective email copy, including tone, personality, keeping it concise, offering value to the reader and testing.

Start the conversation

You don’t have to be an expert copywriter to engage audiences, simply someone who understands the objectives of your campaign and can adapt their language to suit. We do this in everyday life – how you talk to a new client will, in most cases, be very different from how you address your partner or friends. And just like real life, being authentic and conversational is key to creating dialogue, regardless of whether you’re selling fashion to teens or life insurance to retirees.

With this in mind, consider the unique voice of your email communications and keep it consistent. Will your campaign convey the personality of a marketing team, senior management, a product user, or a friend? Each of these roles (and many more) will use their language differently and have a different kind relationship with the reader. Flipping from one persona to the next simply doesn’t work.

Get to the point

The Internet has many times over been blamed for turning us into lazy, keyword-seeing readers. Whether or not this is a result of mental shortcutting or backlit screens, keep your copy clear and concise. The majority of readers will not read the entirety of your email, let alone large blocks of text. So, highlight key points in your copy, use visual devices like colour and space and ensure that the message is immediately tangible – after all, you only have a few initial seconds before your reader decides to discard your email… Or read on.

Inspire action

At this point, it’s worth considering the importance of a strong call-to-action - what’s in it for the reader, anyway? Sell with value - outline the benefits of your product and the useful ways in which it can be used. Identify common pain-points and how you can overcome them. As many clients look towards fostering a level of engagement that goes much deeper than simply counting click-throughs to a landing page, compel recipients to explore your site, request more information, try new things and return for more.

Test, learn and improve

Finally, test and refine your email campaigns. Proofread, run your email copy past another set of eyes, ask for opinions. Progressively refine your copy using A/B testing, by comparing subject lines, differing calls to action and body content, all while delivering the most attractive email to your subscribers.

The quality of copy is critical to the success of a campaign, yet with the visual attraction of HTML email, often gets simply relegated to a design afterthought. Remember your objectives and ultimately, how you’re going to measure the success of the campaign - you can define your brand's relationship with the reader, inspire action and learn more about your audience, simply by giving your copy some consideration and seeing it from recipient's point of view.

Have a tip to add? These are only a few hints as how you can improve your copy and ensure more responsive subscribers, so please add your own tips and suggestions below.

Shopify app for Campaign Monitor

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-11-13T01:00:48+10:00

Lucid Design, a New Zealand-based graphic design and web development studio, have just released their Shopify web application for Campaign Monitor.

With their Shopify + Campaign Monitor app, buyers can opt-in to receive email communications from your Shopify online store at the checkout stage and be added to an existing Campaign Monitor subscriber list. You can then design and send your customers email newsletters, offers and other marketing material, all from within Campaign Monitor’s powerful interface.

Shopify integration with Campaign Monitor can be achieved within a matter of minutes - all you need to provide is your Campaign Monitor API key. You no longer have to worry about manually uploading files to your web server, simply install their app via the Shopify App Store, complete the short setup process and start collecting customer email addresses.

The Shopify + Campaign Monitor app is currently free of charge, so give it a shot and share your thoughts on this nifty integration.

Who pays the price when your client doesn’t have permission

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-11-12T05:14:24+10:00

One of your clients has just come to you with a really snazzy new subscriber list – a few-hundred email addresses – and is itching to have his regular monthly newsletter sent to these contacts. “Where did you get these email addresses?” you ask. “Oh, they’re from business cards I picked up at a trade fair”. What could possibly go wrong?

Declaring permission

Permission can be a minefield for both new and experienced email marketers alike. The problem is only compounded when clients bring along their own subscriber lists. Unless your client has explicit permission to send them email, a number of unfortunate situations can arise.

This is why at Campaign Monitor we have a strict anti-spam policy to ensure your list is legitimate. In short, there are some lists we will not accept, including:

Lists where your client does not have explicit, provable permission to contact the recipients in relation to the topic of the email being sent
Lists that have been bought, loaned, rented or in any way acquired from a third party - these include tradeshow and chamber of commerce type lists, where people have signed up to an organisation or group, not the individual sender
Lists which have not been contacted via email in the last 2 years - subscribers may have forgotten providing their details 2 weeks ago, let alone 2 years down the track, and;
Lists scraped or copy and pasted from the web.

We also have an approval process prior to sending your first large campaign. Have a look at our help topic to see how this works.

What happens if my client doesn’t have permission?

We can’t ensure that all contacts that are imported into subscriber lists have stated their consent to be emailed. In the case of your clients providing lists, make sure you read this handy reference to help you better check your clients have obtained permission. If it all sounds a little tricky, here are some good reasons why you should ensure your clients’ subscriber lists know what they’re in for:

Your client doesn’t want to be a spammer - Did you ever ask for all those ‘v1agra’ emails? Unsolicited email in any form is very poorly regarded and will jet junked… Or worse.
It’s a legal requirement - In the United States, the CAN-SPAM Act sets the rules for commercial email and serves to protect the rights of recipients. Similar rules exist across the world. Breaking these laws can be not only costly, but can damage your reputation… And business.
Your client’s campaign deliverability will suffer - These days, recipients are more frequently treating the ‘Report Spam’ button as the way to unsubscribe from an undesirable mailing list. If an excessive number of spam reports are received as a result of an unsolicited email being sent, then the domain, or IP from which the message originated can be blocked by email service providers and ISPs.
Everyone’s campaign deliverability will suffer - The problem gets infinitely worse when you consider how much email gets processed by our mail servers. All it takes is one rogue client to get our mail servers temporarily blocked, to the detriment of everyone who has sent a campaign around that time.

So, who pays the price when a campaign is sent to a subscriber list, without seeking the recipients’ permission first? The answer is - Everyone.

Starting on the right foot with new subscribers

Now you’ve verified that your clients’ new list is legitimate, you may not want to go gung-ho into emailing them at any time of day or night. Here are some smart ways to engage your new subscribers:

Consider an introductory email - Introducing the client and explaining how they received their contact details is always a safe way to start the relationship. After all, your new subscribers may have forgotten passing their details at the trade fair. This is also a great time to request that new subscribers update their preferences or other custom fields you may have. As always, subscribers should be given the opportunity to unsubscribe immediately.
Permission also covers frequency of email - If your client has asked new subscribers to sign up for a monthly newsletter, this does not give your client permission to email them updates on a weekly basis. Be honest and suggest they sign up to your other relevant mailing lists.
Take particular care with competition lists - A disproportionate number of spam complaints are the result of lists being sourced from competitions. Read this article on how to treat these lists.

Emailing your subscribers for the first time is like a real-life introduction - first impressions count, so take the right steps to ensure a harmonious and lasting relationship.

Finally…

As you can see, gaining permission is not rocket-science if you understand the process from the get-go. Plus, it only makes sense – with a combination of best practice and an understanding of our approvals process, your client will be sending to their happy, responsive list in no time. Ignoring permission simply leads to a dead-end.

Are your clients permission-savvy? We would love to hear of your experiences, good and bad alike. Add them below as a comment, or send us your questions!

Giving the Jelly a stir: Casual coworking for designers

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-11-11T03:11:28+10:00

What do you get when you throw 15 designers, coders and web-types into an open room, with workspaces, couches, fast Internet access and a good supply of coffee? Jelly.

The notion of casual coworking in a Jelly, or plainly, spending the odd weekday with a like-minded group of people, has gained a lot of momentum amongst designers and web developers. Under the auspices of the Sydney-based design and development house, Agency Rainford, I decided to experience the Jelly phenomenon for myself.

Why Jelly?

Regardless of whether the idea of spending the day amongst your fellow designers sounds like inspiration-heaven or an infinite string of distractions, Jellies have gained appeal for number of reasons:

It’s a refreshing day out-of-the-office with like-minded individuals
It’s a day in the office for freelancers, home-based designers and people who don’t work in a regular office environment
It’s a great opportunity to mix and network, while actually getting some ‘real work’ done
The coffee is consistently fabulous

For most designers, attending a Jelly is simply a unique way to get into a different headspace, share ideas and do it all amongst great company.

But… Do you actually get work done?

The amount of work that occurs at a Jelly is as much dependent on your personal working style, as that of your coworkers. One of Agency Rainford’s Jelly regulars reflected on how little work occurred at their first Jelly, citing that the pure excitement of launching one of Sydney’s first code-and-design Jellies, combined with sharing the space with a diverse, energized crowd, had a predictably negative effect on productivity. However, once a routine had been established, complete with recurring participants and standardized coffee breaks, the Jelly environment turned from novelty to one of constructive cooperation.

In attempting to commit to my regular day-to-day at the Jelly, I quickly discovered that I was only able to maintain concentration by leveling the surrounding conversations to ambient noise, no matter how interesting they were. Yes, there were silent stretches of 10-15 minutes, but the majority of the time the room was filled with fascinating chatter - often, directed at you. For designers used to operating in busy agencies, this may be no shock, but for the rest of us there were simply two options - either tune out and work, or sport a serious pair of headphones.

Another consideration soon arose. I was away from my desktop machine – and didn’t have access to my drives or the intranet. Although there was no critical need to access either resource, it did highlight that a degree of readiness is necessary, especially if you don’t regularly work away from the office.

After a hectic morning of people walking in and out with laptops, various introductions and a collective curiosity as to what everyone else was working on, things did settle into a steady hum. The conversation continued to ebb in and out for the rest of the day, but with more purpose and less YouTube breaks.

It is possible to get a solid day’s work done at a Jelly, but for most participants, that’s not entirely the point – just as important are the social and collaborative benefits, from brainstorming a new idea, learning how you can do something better, or simply meeting other designers.

So, how do I get started?

Interested in giving casual coworking a try? Jellies have spread to over 100 cities worldwide. Check the list of locations to find one near you.

I asked Tim Lucas, the organizer of Agency Rainford’s Jelly for his advice to those planning on starting their own Jelly. His response was to keep it simple, regular and genuine. If you limit the scope of your Jelly to a manageable number of participants and simple workspaces, maintain a regular Jelly schedule, mindful of meetings and other work commitments you have on, and foster a genuine sense of community, then your Jelly will soon populate and often, maintain itself. Read more on how to host your own Jelly.

Casual coworking may not be for everyone, but if you’re a designer who enjoys being able to work remotely and is open to spending a day collaboratively working, then there’s a good chance that you will be hooked. Personally, I found that not only was it a great way to meet a diverse and engaged group, but learn more about my craft and still get a satisfying amount of work done, too. After all, what’s not to love about Jelly?

Many thanks to our friends at Agency Rainford in Sydney, Australia. Follow them on Twitter.

Do you host, or are you planning on organizing or attending a Jelly? We support a number of events for designers and developers via our Giving Back program and are keen to get behind your Jelly or event, too.

Using the preference center to retain and target your subscribers

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-11-09T05:51:02+10:00

Not sure if your subscribers prefer to receive campaigns about soccer or snooker? Would they hang around if they received updates on country music, over calypso? There are immense benefits to knowing your subscribers’ interests, desired email frequency or even location, two of them being better targeting of your subscribers and less unsubscribes. Plus, in order to reduce email churn, you will want users to be able to update their active email address. Thankfully, you can achieve this and more, simply by using Campaign Monitor’s preference center feature.

Quick jump:

The preference center in a nutshell
Setting up the preference center
Customizing the preference center
Adding a link to the preference center to your email
Editing your subscribe form
So.. How do I get my subscribers to edit their preferences?

The preference center in a nutshell

Even if you’ve had an existing subscriber list for a while now, collecting preference information and giving subscribers the option of changing their preferences instead of simply unsubscribing is easy, with a little know-how as to how segments work. In an earlier blog post, we discussed how useful segments can be – if you haven’t tried segmenting your lists yet, do give this post a read.

Setting preferences is akin to allowing your subscribers to subscribe and unsubscribe to sub-lists - a subscriber to a widget store newsletter may be interested in Arduinos, but not Faraday cages, and therefore may only want to receive newsletters solely about Arduinos. Having a preference center allows the subscriber to state this:

Another benefit to setting up a preference center is a reduction in email churn, being the number of emails in your list that become inactive as people discard their email addresses. On average, 15-25% of all valid email addresses are discarded each year as people move to a different ISP or change jobs – with a preference center, subscribers can change their subscribed email address without completely unsubscribing from your list.

Setting up the preference center

In this example, we will set up a preference center with the three interest categories above, being ‘Arduinos’, ‘Faraday Cages’ and ‘Gewgaws’.

In your account, click on ‘Manage Subscribers’, then your subscriber list, then click ‘Custom Fields’. Under ‘Edit field’, create a new field with Data Type, “Multiple Options (can select many)’ and enter your desired preferences. Ensure “This field should be visible to recipients when they edit their settings in the preference center” is checked:

Subscribers will now be able to subscribe to these preferences, and you will be able to segment your subscriber list accordingly:

Customizing the preference center

To change the colors, header graphic, message and language of the preference center, click on ‘Client Settings’, then ‘Preference Center’. You can also preview the preference center:

Adding a link to the preference center in your email

Linking to your preference center is as easy as adding the following tags to your email content. When we send your campaign, we’ll convert this into a personalized link for each of your subscribers.

HTML emails - <preferences>this will be a link</preferences>

Plain text emails - [preferences]

Note that the preference center is only available to subscribers once the campaign is sent – in order to test the preference center link, you will need to send the campaign to subscriber list that includes you as a subscriber.

Editing your subscribe form

When creating a subscribe form, you can also add custom fields so that subscribers can state their preferences when they sign up for your email. In ‘Manage Subscribers’, click on your subscriber list, then, ‘Create a subscribe form’. Check the custom field you wish to add, generate the code and you’re off:

So.. How do I get my subscribers to edit their preferences?

Using our above example, say you wanted to start sending the special-interest newsletters (‘Arduinos’, ‘Gewgaws’...) to your subscribers. Here are some tactics you could try:

For existing subscribers - Consider sending an introductory email, suggesting that your subscribers update their preferences in order to receive more relevant updates on their favorite products. Also remind them that they can change preferences or their subscribed email address at any time. All future emails should contain a link to the preference center.

For new subscribers - In the confirmation, or welcome message, make sure the subscriber is made aware that they can change their preferences, or unsubscribe at any time. It doubly helps if you have already edited your subscribe form to reflect the preferences on offer.

Finally…

Preference centers are a very powerful addition to any email campaign as they not only encourage subscriber retention, but allow you to profile your subscriber list by interest, gender, or whatever field you please.

If you’ve created a great preference center, or have seen one you like, do tell us about it below. Whether it’s a cool customization or a neat way to segment your lists, we’re always keen to know about the creative ways that designers have used preference centres for everyone’s benefit.

A new look for system emails

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-11-06T02:35:02+10:00

If you’ve been receiving invoices, email delivery confirmations or password reset emails in the last few days, you may have noticed that we’ve made some changes to the look of these system-generated messages. They’ve been given a delectably modern cut-and-color, with clean lines, nice icons and more information:

In our previous blog post, you may have noticed the new invoice design; these now include customizable address fields, which can also include VAT number and any other relevant information:

The invoices to both you and your clients have been updated to be consistent with the look and feel of the application, which undoubtedly is a great improvement.

Please send us any comments or feedback regarding this redesign - we’re always looking to improve!

Email Bacon’s Matt Adams on why email goes better with bacon

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-11-04T04:49:34+10:00

Email Bacon has combined all the best elements of a successful Campaign Monitor rebrand – a striking design, sense of humor, business-savvy and the smell of bacon. Matt Adams from factor1 spent a moment apart from the fry pan to tell us about offering affordable email marketing services and being a ‘purple cow’.

First things first - why is everything better with bacon?

It’s consistently advertised that bacon makes everything better. You can’t watch an hour of TV without seeing at least one commercial with bacon. When we market to a potential customer, we can count on the bacon concept being reinforced all day long. Hopefully customers will find Email Bacon to be memorable.

The Email Bacon site is brilliant, how did it come together?

We try to align all of our factor1 branded sites to a minimalist, core message approach. We like to have fun, and want things to be simple for our visitors and clients. Everything we create has the aim of keeping the heavy thinking on our end, so clients simply receive the content they came looking for. People are busy, and the last thing they want is to read 3 pages on why they should use Email Bacon.

How did you come up with your pricing model?

We wanted Email Bacon to be affordable, but we didn’t want to give the farm away. We also wanted to dissuade anyone not serious about using it. Thus, we don’t offer free setup (even with a stock template), since even account setup and walking clients though the product takes time.

We are pretty fast coders, so we kept the setup fee small and manageable for most clients, yet enough to cover the development costs even if a client never sends a single email. In addition, we make a profit from clients sending their campaigns via Campaign Monitor. It’s our goal to have some automated income without tons of handholding.

How have you been spreading the word?

We are keeping Email Bacon semi low-key. With so many players in the email marketing services arena, we can’t justify spending much on ad campaigns. So we have been sticking to our current client base. With over 100 unique visitors to our factor1 site daily, we hope to see some of them convert to Email Bacon. Many of our existing clients ask us about email marketing – viewing the Email Bacon website is 10 times better than any brochure we can send them.

What are your plans for Email Bacon in the future?

Right now, we are letting it cook a bit longer. We have some other big projects hovering around factor1 - all these projects cross-promote our additional services. So, as we sell full web or branding services to our clients, we promote Email Bacon.

In the future, we’re planning to reduce our setup cost (to as low as $99), and further automate our sign up process, potentially with the API. But that’s a bit down the road. We also have plans to include video demos, as we understand the power of video to promote our message. We already have the equipment, we just need the time to record and edit.

Any tips for other designers considering reselling Campaign Monitor?

Be remarkable. There are thousands of email systems out there, but most do not have the great features that Campaign Monitor has. This should be a huge advantage, but you will still have to be competitively priced, as email marketing is considered to be a commodity these days. If you are remarkable, a ’purple cow’ as Seth Godin says, at least you have a shot. We hear daily that Email Bacon is fun, light hearted, and looks like a great service. People are talking, and it’s not about how low-cost Email Bacon is, but how they remember our brand.

Campaign Monitor has generated over $2 million in profits for designers like yourself. Find out how you can use our white-label product to set your own prices and make money when your clients send their own campaigns.

Keep the tax man happy with detailed invoices

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-11-03T04:55:24+10:00

Felt that your invoices were lacking important information? You can now add additional details like your address and VAT number to both the invoices we send to you and the invoices sent to your clients.

It’s easy to customize the invoices we send to you, simply head into your Account Settings and add any additional details you require in the new Address field:

You can also customize the invoices that are sent to your clients. In a similar fashion, click on Client Settings and click ‘Edit Client Details’. You will also see a new Address field:

The updated invoices to your clients will feature all the details in the Address field, including any tax information you enter:

This new feature shouldn’t just keep the tax-man happy, but also means more professional invoices for you and your clients. As always, do feel free to drop us a line if you have any suggestions as to how we can further improve our billing and invoicing facilities.

Set and Profit: Clients can now purchase their own email credits

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-11-02T06:42:33+10:00

If you have been poking around your account this morning, you may have noticed that under ‘Client Settings’ and ‘Account access and billing’ that there is a new billing option for clients to purchase their own email credits.

What this means is that if you have clients sending their own campaigns via your Campaign Monitor account, they will be able to top up their email credit balance at their own discretion. Even better, you have the choice of either charging your clients for email credits at the base rate, or charging at your own set rate and pocketing the difference as profit!

For example, if a client plans to purchase 50,000 credits for their upcoming campaigns and you have set the price of email credits at 3 cents per credit, your client will pay $1500 for the credits and you will pocket $1000 in profit (base rate is 1 cent/email).

Allowing your clients to purchase their own email credits

Setting up the facility for clients to purchase their own credits is simple. Simply head to the ‘Client Settings’ tab and click ‘Account access and billing’ to edit. Ensure that alongside the ‘Create/Send’ tab, ‘Create and send their own campaigns’ is checked, then click the ‘Billing’ tab:

Now, you can you can allow your client to purchase credits, either at the base rate or at a price set by you:

Once you’ve set the rates that you want to charge for email credits, click ‘Save Access and Billing’ and you’re off!

What does the client see?

So, say you’ve set the price of credits at 3 cents for the first 50,000 purchased. When the client clicks on ‘Billing’, then the ‘Buy credits and save’ link, they can now enter the number of email credits they want to purchase and click, ‘Calculate cost’. The total bill and credit card facility to pay for them will be displayed. You will also see the pricing structure for email credits, as set by you:

Client Settings, now prettier

You may have also noticed that as part of this update, we’ve cleaned up the ‘Account access and billing settings’ section to make it much cleaner and easier to navigate:

If you have any suggestions or comments regarding the new design, please feel free to comment below.

How can I get my clients sending their own campaigns? Offering our white-label product to your clients is a great way to add value to your existing services and bring in additional revenue. Take control and set the prices, bill clients automatically and make some sweet coin. In fact, we’ve already raised over $2 million in profit for designers like you!

Wildfire integration brings promotions, social media and Campaign Monitor together

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-10-29T03:15:29+10:00

Wildfire, a web application that brings together interactive promotions with social media sites such as Facebook and MySpace, has announced integration with Campaign Monitor. In a few easy steps, you can now synchronize your Wildfire campaign leads with a Campaign Monitor subscriber list - simply plug in your Campaign Monitor API key, configure your Wildfire account and you’re on the road. Take a look at Wildfire’s simple tutorial on how this is done.

Using Wildfire, you can not only set up branded and customisable promotions such as contests, quizzes and coupons, but push them to your website, or impressively, to a variety of social media properties. For example, you can set up a quiz in Wildfire and quickly publish it to your site and a Facebook Fan Page. After completing the quiz, registrants can then send invitations and reminder notifications to their friends via Facebook, as well as publish quiz details to their newsfeed.

By integrating with Campaign Monitor, Wildfire offers an additional marketing channel. New and existing Wildfire campaign registrants can be automatically synchronized with a Campaign Monitor subscriber list. As Wildfire clearly requests permission during the promotion signup process, you can send your registrants email communications such as reminders, offers and newsletters, all with the email delivery and reporting functionality that you love Campaign Monitor for.

Wildfire has also created a range of pricing plans to suit the features and creative control you require. Find out more about Wildfire on their feature tour.

Style Campaign lifts their click-through rate by 26% with A/B testing

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-10-27T05:14:43+10:00

The following post comes courtesy of our guest blogger, Anna Yeaman, from Style Campaign, an email marketing and design agency based in Los Angeles, CA. Through a combination of A/B testing with Campaign Monitor and use of animation, Style Campaign discovered that it could lift an email campaign’s click-through rate by an additional 26%.

I recently ran an A/B test on an email campaign on behalf of our client, Dressed Up!, to determine if embedding an animated image increases click-throughs. In order to do so, I prepared two emails with a slight variation (click to view emails in a new window):

Email Version A featured a static video screenshot
Email Version B featured an animated GIF

The animated GIF in Email Version B consists of six frames and plays in the majority of email clients:

Testing the waters

Initially I stuck to subject line tests. These take seconds to set up and the payoff can be substantial. For example, here are the subject lines we used for our September newsletter:

Subject line A: ‘[firstname,fallback=Check out] - Mobile & Animated Emails’
Subject Line B: ‘Texting (SMS) & Email :: 360 Product Photo :: Animated GIFs’

My money was on the short, personalized subject line. However, I couldn’t have been more wrong! Subject line B increased our open rate by 250%. Bolstered by the discovery that a five-year-old could set up an A/B test, I started to test email content.

Setting up the A/B test

Under the A/B split campaign tab, I was given three choices:

Subject Line
Email Content
From Name

I selected Email Content for use in this A/B test. At this stage I also entered the subject line, ‘VIDEO: Susan Boyle Makeover :: Fall Tadashi Gowns Modelled’, which would be used for both versions:

As normal, you are prompted to import your HTML email creative. The only difference is that you do this twice. Then, after selecting my recipients, I moved on to defining the A/B split.

I’ll admit that the segmentation feature intimidates me, so I was relieved that this part of the process was so intuitive. Dragging the bar, I set it up so that 25% of Dressed Up! subscribers received Version A and 25% received Version B. The remaining 50% would receive the winning version.

Underneath I selected, ‘Total clicks on selected link’. This allowed me to determine a winner based on the number of clicks the video graphic received, rather than total unique clicks:

Finally I set the A/B test to run for 5 hours, after which time the winner would be sent to the remaining subscribers.

It takes only a couple of minutes to set up an A/B content test. I had no problems on my first run though, without reading any documentation!

The Results

Overall, Version B generated a 26% increase in the click-through rate, in comparison to the non-animated version of the email. One explanation is that the animated GIF draws the eye, further acting as a visual cue by crudely simulating video.

My client was thrilled by the results, which I presented to him as a PDF, via the Campaign Snapshot page.

I’ll be doing more A/B tests to refine this technique, such as testing three animated frames vs. nine frames, to see if more images result in higher conversions. On top of this I’ll be testing a horizontal vs. vertical layouts, after being inspired by this unique Abercrombie & Fitch email.

I’d love to hear from other Campaign Monitor users, what A/B tests have you carried out?

- Anna Yeaman, http://www.stylecampaign.com
Follow Style Campaign on Twitter (@stylecampaign)

To learn more about embedding video into email, visit our resource, ’The Current State of Video in Email’

Using A/B testing to boost your email response

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-10-26T05:44:18+10:00

The A/B testing feature was released earlier this year atop an amazing wave of excitement and anticipation. Many of you may have already had a chance to run A/B tests on your campaigns, however if you haven't, you will find that its a very effective way to maximize your campaign results and learn about your subscribers. Secondly, it ensures that the message the majority of your subscribers receive is the most relevant choice - this is a win for everyone.

What is an A/B Test?

An A/B test involves two differing emails being sent out to a small portion of your subscriber list, with the most successful ('winner') email being chosen from the two after a defined period of time. The winner is then sent to the remainder of your subscribers.

You may have heard this practice being described as '10/10/80 split' or 'multivariate' testing (however the latter involves changing multiple parts of your campaign). Perhaps you have heard reasons why people don't use it, such as 'it's too hard to do', or, 'by the time I get the results from the initial test, it will be too late'. The good news is that we've set up a very powerful and easy-to-use interface for your to conduct A/B split campaigns. As the results arrive in real-time, you don't have to wait until the following day to select your winning email; in fact, we'll send the winner out automatically.

So… Why test?

There are a number of great reasons why you should optimise your campaigns using A/B testing, including:

The chance to experiment and learn from different subject lines - what will produce the better open rate, 'Receive 20% off all products at ABC Store', or 'Discounts on all products at ABC Store'?
The opportunity to decide what email content is most relevant and responsive - Is layout A better than B? What call to action will work best?
Deciding which From name is best - Do you go corporate 'ABC Store', or personal 'Bill Storeowner'?

No matter what you decide to test, A/B testing will always provide you with useful feedback on your campaigns. For example, you will soon find that the process of choosing the 'perfect' subject will rapidly become less of a guessing game and more of an empirical study.

Creating an A/B test campaign

Creating an A/B test campaign is similar to creating a regular campaign - after you click the 'Create a new campaign' button, you will see two tabs beneath 'Step 1: Define the Campaign and Sender'. Click the 'A/B split campaign tab' and you will be on your way:

In this example, we’ll be selecting two different subject lines. You will be required to enter differing subject lines for Version A and B of this campaign. You can also personalize the subject line with the recipient’s first name, last name or full name:

Once satisfied, complete 'Step 2.1: Select the format for this campaign' as you would on a regular campaign. If you have chosen to send two differing emails, you will be presented with the option to include both of them on this step. Next, you will move onto defining recipients. At 'Step 2.1 - Select the recipients for this campaign', select your subscriber list as you would for a regular campaign, then click the 'Define A/B Split' button:

In 'Step 4.1 - Size of test and how you'll decide the winner', you can define using the slider what percentage of your subscriber list will receive the initial A/B test emails, then what percentage will receive the winning version. These percentages (A/B/Winner) are entirely up to you, however they cannot be smaller than 1/1/98%, or larger than 25/25/50%. Commonly, 10/10/80% splits are used:

Secondly, you can define what criteria will be used to select the winner. You can select from Open rate, Total unique clicks, or Total clicks on a selected link. This will map back to how you will finally gauge the success of the email campaign, for example, if you are looking to drive visitors to your online store, you may want to select ‘Total unique clicks’ as the criteria for selecting a winner.

Finally, you can select the number of hours or days across which you want to run the A/B test. The default is to 'Select a winner after 6 hours', however depending how time-sensitive your campaign is, you may want to select more or less. Note: Setting a testing period of less than a few hours may impact the reliability of the test, as there may be insufficient click and open data generated to accurately determine a winner.
Once you're done, click 'Next'.

You will then be presented with a snapshot of the email campaign, including the two subject lines defined earlier. Review, then click 'Test and define delivery':

In 'Step 5.1 - Test your campaign', you will have the opportunity to test your campaign prior to sending it just as you would a regular campaign. Likewise for 'Step 5.2 - Schedule campaign delivery'. It's time to get sending!

Sending and monitoring an A/B test campaign

The excitement all happens once you’ve sent out your email campaign - and at this point, you will see the real-time presentation of results to be quite different from that of regular email campaign sends:

Not only will you be able to see how each version of your creative is performing in the test, but upon completion, you will be able to view the total benefit gained from running the test. This is an excellent way to admire your own handiwork, as well as learn how differing approaches to subject line, content and the from line can alter the results of an email campaign.

This is the first in a series of posts on A/B tests, which we hope will assist you in making your email campaigns more effective (and maybe even make testing fun). Feel free to discuss this post via the comments below, or visit our always-buzzing forums if you have a particular question in mind.

Next: Anna Yeaman, our guest blogger from the Los Angeles-based agency, Style Campaign, will show us how they dramatically lifted the click-through rate of their Dressed Up! email campaign using an A/B test. Stay tuned!

Guestlist synchronization with Campaign Monitor

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-10-23T03:13:08+10:00

Guestlist, an online service for managing event registration and ticket sales, has recently announced integration with Campaign Monitor. This means that collecting registrations is now easier than ever - as soon as you plug in your Campaign Monitor API key into Guestlist, all current and future attendee contact information will be synchronized with your existing Campaign Monitor subscriber list.

The following short video demo outlines how easy this process is:

Too simple. What's better, Guestlist is currently free to use while in beta, so do check it out. Find out more about Guestlist's Campaign Monitor integration.

Segments are good for you

Ros Hodgekiss — 2009-10-21T15:33:55+10:00

Although previously considered to only be in the realm of expert email marketers, segmentation of your subscriber list is something that everyone can do - and should. In this post we will cover some of the great reasons why you should apply segmentation to your campaigns, how to segment your lists and finally, mention that segmentation should be used to promote engagement, not kill it.

What is a segment?

A segment is a subset of one of your existing subscriber lists. Simply speaking, it’s a group that can be defined by you, based on criteria such as:

If the subscriber clicked a link in a previous campaign
If the subscriber joined your list prior or a specific date
A match with any of your custom fields (eg. Subscriber lives in Berkeley)

Lets say you’re running a coffee club meet in Berkeley. Your list may contain a lot of other coffee club subscribers from across the country, but your email is only relevant to subscribers living in Berkeley. That’s where list segmentation can come to the rescue.

But that’s not all...

There are oodles of other reasons why you should use list segmentation, including:

Sending introductory offers to, or asking for feedback from new subscribers
Re-awakening subscribers that have not responded to your last few campaigns
Limiting your subscriber list when sending a campaign to subscribers who responded to a previous campaign
Testing a new subject line or call-to-action on subscribers who did not respond to a previous campaign
Sending nice notes to subscribers on their birthday

Segmentation can create more personal, targeted interactions between you and the subscriber, as well as minimize list fatigue. Secondly, it’s a great way to get in touch with specific groups such as inactive subscribers, who may simply need a different kind of prompting.

So, where do we start?

We’re going to pick up again with the example of a coffee club meet in Berkeley. Lucky for us, our subscriber list includes the custom field, ‘Suburb’, so we will be able to filter and segment our list using ‘BERKELEY’ as criteria.

Start by clicking the ‘Manage Subscribers’ tab and in the ‘List’ column, click on your subscriber list. You will now be able to view all the subscribers in your list. To define a segment of this group, click ‘Segments’.

On the ‘Manage segments’ page, click ‘Create a new segment’. You will then be asked to enter a name for your new segment. Make it something meaningful, like ‘Subscribers in Berkeley’. Now we will create the first rule for our new segment. From the ‘Create your first rule based on…” drop-down, select ‘Suburb’ and click ‘Add Rule’.

We now want to specify that we will be selecting subscribers from Berkeley only for this segment. To do this, beneath ‘Suburb’ we will select Suburb Equals ‘BERKELEY’. You also have the opportunity to add further rules, as well as OR conditions to the rules you specify (e.g. Suburb Equals ‘BERKELEY’ OR Equals ‘OAKLAND’). Once satisfied, click ‘Save and refresh count’. The number of active subscribers that match the criteria and thus, will populate this segment are displayed.

You can now use this segment to send your email to, or alternately, you can view the subscribers’ details or export the list as a CSV or text file. To send your email campaign, simply check the segment you want to send to when defining your recipients.

And voila. 87 Berkley coffee drinkers and a list of subscribers happy to receive one less irrelevant email.

So… It all looks like win to me.

Not so fast. While there are countless advantages to clever segmentation of your subscriber lists, the above-average delivery and response rates for certain segments may tempt you to send these groups plenty of email, while ignoring the rest of your subscribers. Remember to share the load - even if a subscriber hasn’t responded to your last two campaigns, that’s no reason to segment them out of your next send. These dormant subscribers may be simply waiting for a more compelling offer. Plus, you may run the risk of fatiguing your most valuable subscribers.

I recommend reading Mat’s previous article, “Creating and using segments”. This easy guide covers the mechanics of setting up segments in depth. Also, make sure you visit the forums if you have any specific questions, want to share your experiences, or just want to know how others are using segments to their advantage. Happy segmenting!

Gary Vaynerchuk has advice for web designers

Mathew Patterson — 2009-10-19T18:00:23+10:00

Have you ever "brought the thunder", hussled or "crushed it"? If you have, you'll know Gary Vaynerchuk, the wine business guru who has exploded into the internet and social media world over the last couple of years. If you are an awesome designer but struggling to find new clients or build your business, he's an excellent source of advice and motivation.

Gary's personal style is hugely excitable and passionate, he's like what Australia's Crocodile Hunter would have been if he was hunting $10 bottles of Merlot instead of crocs. At Campaign Monitor we've watched Gary's videos and talks and been impressed with the way he approaches marketing and branding. Although his delivery is a bit different to ours, his advice and direction really match the way we like to work.

So it was awesome to get the chance recently to ask Gary a question. We wanted to know what he would say to web designers about building up their business. Watch the short video below to hear his advice. You may already know the theory, but hearing it from someone who has actually done it, and who is a consumer of design services is really valuable.

That's quite a challenge, to dedicate a good chunk of your day to doing things which are not the actual design work. If you've got your passive income happening, you might be able to spend a bit more time listening to what people are looking for, and working out how you can provide it.

Gary also dropped in an extra special plea on behalf of Fix Outlook:

All the design chops in the world won't help you if you can't get the attention of client's who need them. If you need to get pumped up about building your brand and your business, definitely check out Gary's new book, Crush It! which focuses on turning your passion into real money.

Did you find the video helpful? Or maybe you have some advice to share on building up your web design business. Leave us a comment below and we'll send a sweet Campaign Monitor shirt, plus a copy of the book to our favorite commenter over the next week.

New Java wrapper for our API

David Greiner — 2009-10-15T04:25:55+10:00

Yesterday we released a brand spanking new (and much requested) Java wrapper for our API. Written by our very own James Dennes, it's a SOAP-based wrapper that makes getting started with the Campaign Monitor API crazy easy for any Java developers out there.

The wrapper works in a very similar way to our SOAP based Ruby wrapper by allowing you to call native Java methods to access all the functionality in the API. The wrapper is free to use and available at GitHub, so fork away if you spot any changes or improvements you'd like to make.

If you don't work in Java often, you might also be interested in our wrappers for PHP, Ruby, Perl, Python, .NET and Flash.

HTML5 and video in email

David Greiner — 2009-10-14T05:01:39+10:00

As momentum quickly builds behind HTML5, the new version of HTML and XHTML, we've had a close eye on what impact this might have on HTML email in the years to come. While the finer details of HTML5 are still being finalised, Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera have offered support for much of the new technology for some time.

One particular area of interest to me was the HTML5 <video> tag. The aim of this tag was to provide native video support using a single codec across all browsers without the need for third party plugins like Flash. While the dream of a universal codec appears unlikely, one clever project has surfaced that uses the <video> tag for browsers that support it and falls back on traditional video options for those that don't.

Current approaches to video in email

This isn't the first time we've had a close look at support for video in email. In our previous research we were looking for an approach that would allow video in email clients that support it and a clickable fallback image for those that didn't (that would then play the video in the browser).

The results were disappointing. Only Apple Mail supported decent video playback via Flash, and there was no consistent way to provide fallback content for those clients that don't support Flash. To me, this is the crux of the problem. If video doesn't work, you better have a backup plan that works well for everyone else. Because most email clients strip the <object> tag used to insert video, a backup plan wasn't available.

There had to be a better way, and maybe HTML5 was the answer. Turns out I was half right.

A simple approach using HTML5

Using Kroc Camen's very cool Video for Everybody as a starting point, I quickly saw that the approach for the browser would be very different than for email clients.

Kroc's technique provided multiple layers of support (seen here). So, if HTML5 <video> isn't available, you can fallback to QuickTime or Flash and almost always guarantee the video will work. Because we know that Flash and QuickTime are universally blocked in email, I stripped these backup options to keep it simple.

Due to the codec battle I mentioned earlier, you need to provide your video in both H.264 (supported by Apple and Google) and Ogg Theora (supported by Mozilla and Opera). This isn't the case with email. The only popular email client that uses Gecko (the Firefox rendering engine) is Thunderbird, which currently chooses not to display HTML5 video. So, just like the Flash/Quicktime fallback, Ogg Theora is also out. If a big number of your recipients were clicking on the web version of your emails then you could consider adding it back in for any subscribers using Firefox.

The final code

After cutting out all the video options made redundant by email, here's the final code that gave the best results.

<video width="640" height="360" poster="fallback.jpg" controls="controls">
        <source src="http://mysite.com/videoname.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
        <a href="http://mysite.com/"><img src="fallback.jpg" width="640" height="360" /></a>
</video>

As you can see, you provide a fallback image (which is conveniently loaded as the poster for the movie before playing for email clients that support video) in the <video> tag along with the width and height of the video. Within the <video> tag you call the H.264 encoded video using the <source> tag, remembering to fully reference the file on your server.

Finally, add the backup content you'd like to be displayed in any email client that doesn't support HTML5 inside the <video> tags. This would normally be a clickable screenshot of the video that would play the video in the browser when clicked.

The results

Working on a Mac, my first stop was Apple Mail. The video rendered perfectly. Next stop, my iPhone. Holy crap! Video played beautifully on the iPhone email client too.

I then turned to the popular web-based email clients - Yahoo!, Gmail and Hotmail. Unfortunately, it looks like web-based email clients are choosing to disable HTML5 video from playing. While this was disappointing, the news isn't all bad. In place of the video I was able to display the provided backup content. In this case, a clickable fallback image where I could link to the video on my web site. This facility was never available with any of the previous attempts at true video in email and was a welcomed improvement.

As I continued to test, the same results were experienced on desktop email clients on the PC. The video didn't play, but the fallback option appeared in every single client I tested. here are the full results.

Desktop email clients	Result
Apple Mail	Video plays
Entourage 2008	Video plays
Lotus Notes 6, 7 and 8.5	Fallback content displayed
Outlook 2007	Fallback content displayed
Outlook 2003	Fallback content displayed
Thunderbird	Fallback content displayed
Windows Mail	Fallback content displayed
Web-based email clients	Result
AOL Web	Fallback content displayed
Gmail	Fallback content displayed
Hotmail	Fallback content displayed
MobileMe	Video plays
MySpace	Fallback content displayed
Mobile email clients	Result
iPhone	Video plays

See it in action

To give you a feel for how HTML5 video renders in a few of the popular email clients, here are some screenshots from my testing. You can checkout the test page I used here.

Apple Mail 4

When I opened the email in Apple Mail, the fallback image I specified in the poster attribute was displayed while the movie started streaming in. After a few seconds the video controls appeared and I could see the progress of the movie loading and start to watch it.

iPhone 3.1.2

The iPhone doesn't support video streaming in the browser or email client and instead provides a clear prompt that clicking the poster image will let you watch the movie. Clicking the image then loads the movie in the iPhone's QuickTime player. At the conclusion of the movie you're taken back to the email.

Outlook 2007

Like all email clients that don't support HTML5 video, Outlook 2007 displays the fallback content we specify within the video tag. This can be any HTML you like and isn't limited to a single image. In most cases, this would likely be a screenshot from the movie and perhaps a play icon overlaid to entice the recipient to click the image and view the video in their browser.

The result was the same for all email clients that didn't support HTML5 video, making this a handy way to provide a consistent experience for every recipient.

Should you use this technique?

First off, I think this approach is the best option available for including video in email. The fact that you can reliably provide fallback content that works in every email client out there is a huge positive that no other technique I'm aware of offers. The obvious limitation is that right now it only works for your subscribers using Apple related products.

Making a decision on the suitability of this approach really comes down to your subscriber list. For example, 50% of our own customer list open our monthly newsletter using one of the supported Apple email clients (you can find this out for your own list using our handy email client reports). If we wanted to include video in an email, this technique would mean that half our subscribers can watch the video right in their email client, and the other half will see a perfectly acceptable fallback image they can click to watch it in their browser.

Whether you should be sending video in email at all is another question entirely, and perhaps something we'll tackle in a later post. I didn't get a chance to test this technique in every email client, and I'd love to see the results in Palm Pre if anyone has one handy (purely because like the iPhone it also uses Webkit to render HTML emails). You can grab a copy of the test email here. I'd also love to hear everyone's thoughts on this approach and if you think it's a useful technique.