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News, tips and all things Campaign Monitor

Email design inspiration time

Posted by Travis Bell on May 12, 2008

The collection of great gallery entries continues to grow! If you're having design block, consider browsing through the gallery for ideas and inspiration.

Subscribe to the email design gallery's RSS feed to see them all.

Posted in Email Newsletter Design0 comments so far

New feature: Send campaigns via the API

Posted by Mathew Patterson on May 9, 2008

This is an update that has been requested quite a lot since we first introduced the Campaign Monitor API, and it is finally here: The ability to both create and send campaigns completely through the API.

That means that if you have the development skills available, you can completely integrate Campaign Monitor into your existing applications, and have no need to login to the Campaign Monitor website to send emails.

We've added two new methods: Campaign.Create and Campaign.Send, which are both now included in the API documentation.

All you need to do is make sure that your account has a payment card setup, or sufficient credits, and the campaign will be sent. After that, it will appear in your reports just like your other campaigns.

We're looking forward to hearing about the cool ways all you guys and girls will make use of this new functionality, so make sure you let us know! Over in the Campaign Monitor forums there's already been a little bit of discussion of the API updates. The API developer forum is an excellent place to ask questions and post about your ideas and plans.

We're also working with some Campaign Monitor customers on creating an all new PHP wrapper for the API, to make it even easier to get started. Watch out for some news on this over the next few weeks. Check out the existing API samples in the mean time.

Again, thanks to everybody who has variously suggested, requested, demanded and pleaded for this feature!

Posted in New Features & Updates4 comments so far

New feature: Let your subscribers manage their own email preferences

Posted by Mathew Patterson on May 8, 2008

Have you ever had one of your subscribers change their email address, and ask you to update it for them? In the past, they either had to get you to do it, or unsubscribe themselves and resubscribe.

Or have you had subscribers who are happy to hear about your toy store's new soft toy range, but are not at all interested in your BMX bikes? You don't want them to have to unsubscribe totally, right?

That's why we've launched a new feature for all Campaign Monitor users today, which we call the Subscriber Preference Center. The idea is to give your subscribers more fine grained control over the information you store about them, including their name, email address, and custom field values.

By adding a simple tag to your HTML and plain text, you can create a link to a preference page pre-filled with the subscribers existing details. They can change their details, add or remove subscriptions or unsubscribe completely, all without contacting you.

Here's an example we've created, just for demonstration purposes. Imagine that Twitter offered a variety of different newsletters - their preference center could look like this:

Giving your subscribers this kind of control doesn't only mean less work for you; it can reduce the amount of subscribers who completely unsubscribe, by letting them opt out of just a part of your emails. They might also feel more confident knowing they can check exactly what they are subscribed to at any time.

To find out how you can setup these kind of 'interest' sub-lists for your clients, check out the full Preference Center help.

How to get started with a Subscriber Preference Center

It's easy - all you need to include a link in your campaigns to the preference center is a simple tag:

<preferences>this will be a link</preferences>

and

[preferences] for plain text

That's it. You can also jump into your 'Manage Clients' section and on each client's page you'll see the "Preference Center customization" link. That's where you can change the background color, text colors and add a logo.

There's plenty you can do to make good use of preference centers, and for more ideas and details check out the help topic. Thanks to everyone who has requested this feature, we hope you find it helpful!

Posted in New Features & Updates6 comments so far

"The best email solution I can find!"

Posted by Mathew Patterson on May 6, 2008

You guys are really a great company. I enjoy the warm personality of your brand, the ease of your interface, and the control that you give designers in creating campaigns. Thank you so much for the best email solution I can find!

Geoffrey Graham, Punctuate!

Posted in Happy Customers/Press

Campaign Monitor Drupal module

Posted by Mathew Patterson on May 5, 2008

A completely open source content management platform, Drupal is a popular choice for large scale, flexible websites.

A key feature of Drupal is the ability to add on modules, plug in code that extends the core functionality to do any number of different things. Sydney based Campaign Monitor user Stephanie Sherriff has written a cool Drupal module to integrate Campaign Monitor newsletter signups with your Drupal website.

Stephanie describes it in this way:

a fairly simple module that just adds the ability to subscribe and unsubscribe from a newsletter using the API. It also creates a page that displays prior campaigns

Here is how the module's configuration page looks in Drupal:

Once the module is up and running on your site, you can place the newsletter signup easily, creating something like the form shown here.

If your site visitors are logged in, then the form will even be pre-filled for them using the details from their user account on your website. This could be an excellent way to grow your list, and also something to implement on websites you are building for your clients.

Stephanie is still planning some further improvements to the module, and we look forward to seeing those too.

Visit the Campaign Monitor Drupal Module page to find out more, and to download it.

Posted in Articles/Tips2 comments so far

Quick Tip: Choosing Google Analytics tags

Posted by Mathew Patterson on May 1, 2008

Now that you can automatically add Google Analytics tags to your emails, we wanted to remind you how you can easily edit the tags used for each campaign.

Once you have setup Google Analytics integration (see the help topic) you will have an extra option when importing your HTML for a campaign.

Screenshot showing Analytics Tagging options for source of traffic and campaign name when importing campaign

You can change the tag used for the source of traffic, and for this specific campaign. If you are using Analytics for yourself, you might use "Campaign Monitor" as the source, so you can tell which people came from your Campaign Monitor emails.

However, if you plan to show the Analytics reports to your clients, it would be best to choose something more generic like 'Newsletter', or the name you use when rebranding the software. When you login to your Google Analytics account and browse by traffic source, you'll see the name you set when sending the campaign:

Browse by source in Google Analytics

We recommend keeping the source the same for each campaign you send so you can easily see an aggregate for all Campaign Monitor campaigns in your Analytics account. Of course, you can also tweak the campaign name tag to make things easier to recognize too - for example, to remind you this was the campaign where you changed the subject line, or sent later in the day.

That can make it easier to understand the impact changing different elements has on your eventual results. Let us know if you have any of your own Google Analytics tips and tricks for use with Campaign Monitor.