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Do you manage your business across multiple web apps? Wish they could all talk together? Just as the Babel fish from 'Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy' served as a universal language translator between alien races, OneSaas is an online service for transferring contacts and financial data between multiple web apps. That's right, by acting as a bridge between APIs, it can push new and existing contacts from say, Highrise and Google Contacts, to a Campaign Monitor subscriber list. And you don't even have to stick it in your ear to use it.

Which web apps can you sync with OneSaas?

It's not uncommon for folks to have customer details scattered across multiple web apps. For instance, you might have paying customers in Highrise that you want to invoice in Freshbooks. Additionally, you want to add these same customers to a Campaign Monitor subscriber list, so you can send them post-purchase email newsletters and updates. Exporting and re-importing new and existing contacts/subscribers across two or more services can be a real chore, so OneSaas has done the legwork for you.

With OneSaas, you can automatically push new and existing contacts from one or more of the following apps to a Campaign Monitor subscriber list:

• Basecamp
• Business Catalyst
• Freshbooks
• Google Contacts
• Highrise
• Saasu
• EventBrite (Coming soon!)
• SalesForce (Coming soon!)
• WordPress (Coming soon!)

In addition, OneSaas' Financial Management accounts can be used to migrate and synchronize orders and transactions between apps like Business Catalyst, FreshBooks, OneSaas, and Saasu. We'll focus simply on managing your contacts for now.

Getting started

Setting up OneSaas to push contacts from the web app of your choice to a Campaign Monitor subscriber list is fairly simple. And don't worry, it's all documented within OneSaas itself. In this example, we'll race through getting an existing 37signals' Highrise account to integrate with Campaign Monitor, so buckle up.

Say you have an existing Highrise account and list of contacts:

The first thing you'll need is your Highrise account's API token. Now, lets say you already have a OneSaas account. In the 'My Cloud' tab, create a 'new connection' by selecting 'Highrise HQ' and adding your API token and domain name when prompted:

So far, so good. Now, lets do the same for Campaign Monitor. There's no need to get your API key in advance - OneSaas displays your Campaign Monitor account page in the app, so you can get your key on the fly. You'll also be given the option to select which Campaign Monitor subscriber list you want to push new Highrise contacts to.

If everything has gone to plan, your 'My Cloud' tab in OneSaas should look like this:

All up, this process takes no more than 5-10 minutes and only needs to be done once.

Pushing contacts to a subscriber list

The neat thing about One Saas is that you can set-and-forget. Either you can wait for OneSaas to push new contacts to your Campaign Monitor subscriber list on an hourly/daily basis (depending on your plan), or you can click 'Synchronize' under 'Active connections' to manually push your Highrise contacts to Campaign Monitor. You probably want to do this on your first run.

And well, the bottom line is that it simply works. After clicking 'Synchronize', our Highrise contacts were automatically added to our Campaign Monitor subscriber list of choice:

Note that at this point, it's possible to transfer names and email addresses via OneSaas, but not custom fields. We'll put this one on our wish list to the developer.

Our verdict

The skinny is that OneSaas does as labelled on the tin. It's also fairly easy to setup, thanks to a fair amount of in-app documentation. Plus this setup process only needs to be performed once for as long as your account details remain the same, as OneSaas will push contacts indefinitely until told to do otherwise.

OneSaas has a range of simple pricing plans, based on the number of contacts you wish to synchronize, how often you want synchronization to happen and the number of applications you want to connect. There's even a free plan to help you kick the tyres at absolutely no cost. Included is in-app email support, as well as support channels via Skype and Twitter (@OneSaas).

Perhaps most endearingly, OneSaas are Australian-made. And as we know, all the best web apps find their roots in the surf and sun Down Under!

On the downside, it's only possible to synchronize your contacts with one Campaign Monitor subscriber list. Also, the transfer of custom fields is not yet supported, so you can't segment your single subscriber list by whatever contact details you have stored in Highrise, or elsewhere. OneSaas plan to support custom fields sometime in the future, but if multiple list or custom field support is something you're specifically after, please feel free to let us and the developers know in the comments.

We've been in touch with the friendly folks at OneSaas for a few months now, so its been great to watch this service move out of beta and onto the public stage. Now it's in the wild, it seems that they're not planning to rest on their laurels any time soon. Alongside further improvements to their service, integrations with WordPress, SalesForce and EventBrite also in the works.

So, if you're after an automated way to push your contacts from apps like Freshbooks and Highrise to a Campaign Monitor list, then give OneSaas a go. It's a simple, affordable solution to what has long been a tricky problem... And you don't have to like fish to use it.

As much as we all have a discerning eye for typography on the web, the truth is that a lot of folks are very conservative about its application when it comes to designing for email. Hey, I’m included in this category - even after years in the trade, a sprinkle of the Georgia font seemed quite the luxury. So in this post, we’ll look at some interesting font-stacks and examples, then touch on font use in foreign-language campaigns.

Let’s get creative with fonts, already!

The first obvious question is, ‘Can I use the regular mill of web fonts in HTML email?’. Thankfully the answer is a resounding ‘yes’, with the exception of those declared using @font-face. What’s better, if you check our our guide to CSS in email, you will also see that a lot of text-related CSS is also supported, including the all-important line-height, font-weight and more.

Another point is that declaring a good font-stack is just as important in email, as it is on the web. However, as much as font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; is a safe choice (and a Dreamweaver default), the point of this post is to show you that there are a lot of other nice combinations that you can use, even at small font-sizes. Here are some stand-out examples:

Made for Mac: Lavagraphics

Headings & body copy: ‘Gill Sans’, Corbel, Tahoma, sans-serif

The use of Gill Sans for really small font-sizes may not be to everyone’s taste, but it sure makes an impression. Note that although Gill Sans is not commonly used in email, it is present on almost 92% of Mac machines and is largely present on PCs with Windows XP and later. Corbel is an unusual fallback, however Tahoma is solid, with Windows coverage of over 99%. Another fallback we could suggest adding for the Windows folk is ‘Gill Sans MT’, as it’s pretty much the same as Gill Sans, but more common on PCs.

Safety first: Charlie Pratt

Headings: Helvetica, ‘Helvetica Neue’, Arial
Body copy: Georgia, ‘Lucida Grande’, ‘Lucida Sans’

I’ve always been a huge fan of matching a serif font for paragraph copy, with a sans-serif heading or vice-versa. Serif fonts in particular just give email designs so much personality. The font stacks used here are very safe, with Georgia being present on 94/99% of Mac and Windows machines respectively. If Helvetica doesn’t work out for the headings, there’s always plain-jane Arial to back it up.

A classical look: Pulse8

Headings: Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif
Body copy: ‘Trebuchet MS’, Helvetica, sans-serif

Talking about personality, here’s another pairing of serif and sans-serif fonts that we can appreciate. Using Trebuchet MS and Helvetica for the body copy instead of Arial (see design) makes a considerable difference. For the benefit of Windows users, they could also consider a font like ‘Segoe UI’ (shipped with Office ‘07) for that ‘Humanist touch’, although at this small font size, it could be considered as splitting hairs…

A new look at old fonts: Cabedge

Really large text: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif
‘Hit song’ headings: Georgia, ‘Times New Roman’, Times, serif

Finally, here’s two fonts you know and love: Arial and Georgia. I wanted to throw in this example as it shows you how two rather generic fonts can take on a different aspect when really big, or in all-caps. Notice how the differing font-weights are used for emphasis and interest, while line-height has been used for to ensure consistent leading/line spacing.

With multiple fallback fonts, can’t we try anything?

All these examples have featured fairly common fonts, but how about if you want to add the font of your dreams to the top of the stack? As we’re defining fallback options, it’s more than okay to give any font a shot, as long as you define a common font at the bottom of a stack (or at least a generic font family as last resort). For example, font-family: Futura, ‘Century Gothic’, AppleGothic, sans-serif; is most likely fine for most folks - whereas Futura may not be the most common font in the world, the Windows and Mac Gothic equivalents are a fairly solid fallback.

We also tested how long-winded a font-stack can be. Except in the case of Lotus Notes 6 & 7 which allow for a maximum of 5 fallback options, all the other major email clients allow you to add fonts to the stack to a seemingly indefinite length. We gave up trying to break our test campaign after adding up to 25 fallback fonts to the stack!

So, how about foreign language campaigns?

The good news is that most popular web fonts contain a lot of the characters required to send email newsletters that don’t use the Latin alphabet (we use UTF-8 encoding, by the way). However, thanks to our friends at Email Marketing Voodoo, we’ve been told that ‘Arial Unicode MS’ works best for Chinese campaigns… And most certainly, a lot of other languages, too. Of course, there are a lot of very exotic font-stacks for regional campaigns (like: font-family: “メイリオ”, “Meiryo”, “ＭＳ Ｐゴシック”, sans-serif;), but for the most part, folks will still use and read Verdana, Arial et al.

Well, hopefully I’ve inspired at least some of you to try the less-generic font-stack combinations out there. If you’re still curious, I recommend you check out this gorgeous roundup of popular fonts on Mac and Windows and this thoughtful post on creating better font-stacks. There’s also this sweet table of common Windows/Mac font equivalents for you to enjoy!

Using a less-than-regular set of fonts can not only make your email stand out from the rest, but potentially convey your message with greater expression. We’d love to know some of your combinations, so feel free to share some of your favorite font stacks below!

Like a blanket for taking convenient naps, there are some innovations that we get very excited about. This includes the Salesforce Connector for Campaign Monitor by SNB Apps, an integration which allows you to export your Salesforce contacts to one or more Campaign Monitor subscriber lists in only a few clicks.

The connector is available via a limited 30-day free trial, which you can use to kick the tyres on up to 5 Salesforce licenses. All you need is either a paid Salesforce Enterprise Edition or free Developer Edition account, plus your Campaign Monitor API key & API Client ID.

What can I expect from the trial version of the connector?

The trial edition of Salesforce Connector for Campaign Monitor does two things really well. First of all, it allows you to select contacts to add to one or more Campaign Monitor subscriber lists. And no, this doesn't mean that folks can mass-dump sales leads to an email list - you can only transfer contacts in batches of 10 at a time, plus the usual permission policies apply. Secondly, it allows you to manage your Campaign Monitor account from within a Salesforce tab, providing a unified, white-label email campaign workflow for you and your clients. The full, paid version of the connector extends this even further, which we'll discuss in a moment.

Note that due to limitations on the use of Salesforce's Apex Code, you cannot use this connector with 30-day trial accounts, or anything other than Enterprise and Developer Edition accounts. If you want to try Salesforce and this connector for free, sign up for a Developer Edition account.

Installing the connector

Unless you're the type of person that regularly solves Rubix cubes in 18 moves or less, you're going to find the installation and setup of a Salesforce connector to be relatively complicated, if not downright overwhelming. In anticipation of this, SNB Apps have provided an absolutely essential installation guide. The need for a guide (and at least 15 minutes of your time) isn't necessarily the fault of the developers - Salesforce really does try hard to do every task conceivable for salesfolk and marketers alike. And it results in setup screens like this:

Note that the setup options on display extend two across two page-heights and widths respectively. Don't know what you're looking for? As they say in developer-land, RTFM.

Adding contacts to Campaign Monitor

We fired up our Developer Edition of Salesforce to give the Salesforce connector for Campaign Monitor a go. Sure enough, after following the installation guide to the letter, we got it rolling. Our first taste of success was when we added a new Campaign Monitor tab to Salesforce:

You can name this Salesforce tab whatever you like, which is great news for resellers. Barely a few clicks later, we were also successfully adding contacts to our Campaign Monitor subscriber lists:

Just to double-check that the Salesforce Connector did as is marked on the tin, we took a look at our Campaign Monitor account. Lo and behold, the names and email addresses of our selected contacts had been added to a specified subscriber list:

One notable downside is that updates to subscriber details do not automatically sync between Salesforce and Campaign Monitor. If for instance, you change the email address of one of your Salesforce contacts, you have to add them again to your subscriber list and manually unsubscribe the original subscriber within Campaign Monitor. This is something that we've let the developers know about and hope to see improved in future releases.

The paid version of this connector includes unsubscribe management between Salesforce and Campaign Monitor (ie. 'unsubscribed' Salesforce contacts are marked as so), as well as the import of email campaign and subscriber activity reports into Salesforce. Although full-version pricing has yet to be announced, SNB Apps have noted that it will probably not cost more than $20 license/month. To try a full version of the connector, or to request further customizations, contact SNB Apps.

Given the considerable number of requests for Salesforce integration with us, we're expecting this will be well met by all manner of marketers. The ability to import and manage contacts and campaign results will hopefully improve the email campaign workflow by removing the steps between signup and sending email newsletters and updates to your active customers. At last, the power of Salesforce, combined with all the campaign creation, delivery and reporting goodness that you know Campaign Monitor for!

So if you've been hanging out for Salesforce - Campaign Monitor integration for a while now, we'd love to know how you go with the trial version of Salesforce Connector for Campaign Monitor. Please feel free to leave your comments and feedback below, or get in touch with the contact SNB Apps directly. And finally, happy customer relationship managing! At least, I think that's the term.