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Recently, one of our customers sent in a ream of despair, which essentially amounted to: "If I send a campaign to my entire list at once, my inbox is instantly swamped with bounce notifications and out-of-office replies. What do I do?"

Given that using a no-reply address is an email marketing no-no, it's essential that replies to your campaigns end up in a monitored mailbox. This means pointing the From: and Reply-to: email addresses in your campaigns to a real email address, read by real people. After all, even the most humble announcement can attract important emails, like sales leads, customer feedback and regularly, unsubscribe requests.

Dedicate an email address to replies

Of course, receiving a squillion replies and bounce-backs to your regular work address can be immensely frustrating, especially if they trickle in over a period of hours, or days. So setting up a new, From/Reply-to email address to handle replies (like info@yourdomain.com) is always a good idea. If you're already using Google Apps, this is dead-easy to do yourself - otherwise, ask your tech team for a hand.

Once you've set up an email account, you can set it up in your regular email client and sift away. Note that replies can go to either the From: or Reply-to: address (depending on the recipient's email client), so you can count on bounces, out-of-office replies and more going to either specified address.

Rules rule

Once you've got a unique email address for replies, it's time to separate the wheat from the chaff (or human from robot-generated email). Doing this manually can be a laborious (read: boring) process, so often the best thing to do is to create a folder in your newly-minted email account and siphon all automated 'robot replies' into it, leaving only the important emails in the inbox. This can be done using rules (or filters), which can be created in many of the major email clients, like Gmail, OSX Mail, Outlook and more. For example, you may create rules like...

IF email subject includes:

THEN move the email to my 'Robot Replies' folder.

This isn't a definitive list and ultimately, you'll find yourself adding and refining rule criteria as you go along. Rules can also come in handy for highlighting or flagging important messages, such as those with "unsubscribe" in the subject line.

Make it a morning ritual

The final step is of course, regularly checking your reply address. Back when I was a hand at a marketing agency, we sent multiple campaigns / large email volumes every day and had a dedicated 'reply machine' for dealing with bounces. While with smaller sends you will most probably be able to deal with replies from the comfort of your desktop email client, you may want to take a more distant approach if you're a massive sender (as we were) and simply check in once or twice a day. Make it a routine, cup of coffee in hand, even if its been days after your last send. Sometimes relevant emails get filtered out too, so remember to give your 'Robot Replies' folder a skim before you hit 'Delete All'.

We'd like to know your approach to automated responses - do you have a killer tip for dealing with replies? Let us know in the comments below.

We're lucky enough to get a constant stream of feedback and feature requests from customers. We record every little piece of it, and this forms a crucial part of how we decide what features to add next to Campaign Monitor.

When we made the call to offer some kind of RSS to Email support, we sat down to review the hundreds of requests, some going back years. Personally, I was expecting everyone to ask for the traditional RSS to Email functionality—you update your site or blog, we send that new content to your subscribers on a recurring basis. To my surprise, this only accounted for around half of the votes. Of course, we still built this feature, which we announced a few days back. It turns out the other half were looking for something else.

Instead of automatically sending your content, many of you wanted an easy way to get that content into your existing newsletters. Nobody likes writing something twice. Maybe you want to include specific blog posts, or it's secondary content like a sidebar of upcoming events you'll be hosting. The important thing is, that content exists somewhere else and you want to use it in a campaign.

If that's you, you're going to love One-Click Content. Here's a quick video of it in action...

How it works

If you caught our recurring RSS announcement last week, you would have seen that we've added a new kind of repeater to our template language. Known as a datarepeater, it lets you reference an external RSS feed and then display the content any way you see fit.

The cool part is, you can actually add datarepeater's to any regular email templates too. Just point the datarepeater to your blog or RSS feed, design how you want the content to appear in the email, and with a single click your content is imported into your campaign and ready to send. You can even have multiple datarepeater and regular repeater tags in a single template.

Let's say, for example, that you publish a blog called Signal vs. Noise. You occasionally send a newsletter, and would like to include some of your blog content in each issue. Just add the following code to your template...

<datarepeater type="rss" src="http://www.37signals.com/svn/">
    <rsstitle/>
    By <rssauthor/>
    <rssbody paragraphs="1"></rssbody>
    <rssitemlink>Read more...</rssitemlink>
</datarepeater>

In this code we're referencing our blog with the src attribute, and then displaying the title of each post, plus the author and the first paragraph of the post itself, followed by a "Read more" link that points to the full post on our site. There are lots of other content options, such as images, enclosures, dates, comments and more, which are all covered in our lovely new documentation. You can even use alternating designs for each item in the feed via our layout tag.

What you'll see in the editor

Whenever you create a regular campaign and select this template, you'll see this nice blank slate in the editor. You can click the image for a larger version.

Click, Choose, Send

Clicking the the "Load posts" button will show the most recent posts from this RSS feed in the sidebar of the editor. You can also see an instant preview of how this content looks in my campaign.

You can then choose exactly which posts I'd like included, click "Done" and my campaign is good to go. Because of the ubiquity of RSS, there are so many ways you can use this feature. Here are a just a few quick examples of the sort of content you might want to automatically import:

• The last 4 posts from your blog
• Your upcoming events on Eventbrite
• Your 5 most recent tweets

Getting started is easy, and we've put together a sample template to help you get started even faster.

View the RSS template language and download a sample template

Leave your options open

If you're using One-Click Content for a client, we recommend making it crazy simple by specifying the address of their site or RSS feed in the datarepeater tag. As I mentioned earlier, you do this via the src attribute, for example:

<datarepeater type="rss" src="http://www.client.com/rss">

If you'd prefer to leave options open for yourself, or a more savvy client, you can leave out the optional src attribute. If you leave it blank, we'll let you choose an RSS feed right there in the editor. Here's the code:

<datarepeater type="rss">

Because an src hasn't been provided, clicking on the "Load posts" button will let you enter the web site or RSS feed you'd like the content to come from:

As soon as you enter the web site, we'll grab the feed contents and let you select what you'd like included. Again, click the image for a larger version.

We're also working hard on supporting other data formats on top of RSS to open even more possibilities for importing your content into your campaigns. We've got big plans, and more details on this will be coming soon.

In a little under two weeks, we'll be making a subtle change to the way we handle email authentication in Campaign Monitor. For those of you new to the concept, email authentication tells your subscribers it's OK for our servers to send email on your behalf. It can help you avoid spam filters, and also proves your email isn't a forgery. All good things.

Right now, email authentication is an opt-in kind of thing. It's not on by default, but we've tried to make it as painless as possible to set up. The problem is, it's still pretty painful. For starters, you need to have access to the DNS records for your domain. In many cases that can rule this process out, or at the very least start your eyes glazing over.

The trouble is, this stuff is important. So, we're taking a different approach. Starting Monday, March 26 we'll be turning on email authentication for everyone.

A small change in Outlook

If you've already set up your own authentication, we're not changing a thing. For those of you that haven't, there's one small change that we want you to be aware of. Because we'll be authenticating on your behalf, we add a couple of new details to the header of any emails you send. To the vast majority of your subscribers, this won't change a thing. But, there is a subte change your Outlook subscribers may notice. Here's what they'll see:

It's the extra from address and on behalf of that I highlighted in yellow that's new here. Because we're authenticating for you, we need to include our own domain in your mal headers/ Outlook lets their users know this at the top of the email. It's also worth pointing out we'll only ever use our white label domains when sending on your behalf - there's never any mention of Campaign Monitor. It's also worth adding that this small snippet is something any Outlook user would already have seen at the top of countless emails in the past. We think it's a small price to pay to help avoid spam filters and ensure your email never appears to be a forgery.

Alternate options

If you're not crazy about the "on behalf of" snippet, we've made it nice and easy to opt-out of us authenticating for you. Remember, we won't start this until March 19, so you have some grace time. To change this setting, just head into "Client Settings" and click on the new "Authentication Settings" in the sidebar. Here's what you'll see (click for full-size):

By default, "Authenticate all emails for me" will be checked. If you'd like to opt-out, you have two options...

Set up your own authentication

Authentication is a great thing. If you don't want us to do it for you, we recommend you do it yourself. This is the same approach we've always supported, and it will mean your domains are authenticated and no "on behalf of" text will appear in Outlook or "via" snippet will be shown in Gmail. The only drawback is that you'll need to have access to the domain's DNS settings to complete the process.

Don't authenticate my emails (not recommended)

If you don't have access to your DNS settings and you really don't like the "on behalf of" text in Outlook, you can disable authentication entirely. It's not something we recommend, but it's the easiest way to avoid any Outlook subscribers noticing a change. This is the default for how we've been sending email for you to date, so you won't see any negative impacts, you just won't experience the positive impacts of letting us sign for you.

Update

After further testing, we've confirmed that the "via" text in Gmail isn't impacted by letting us authenticate your email for you. Even if you turn authentication off, the "via" text will still appear for all your Gmail subscribers. This is exactly what they would have see before this update, so nothing is actually changing here for your Gmail subscribers.

The only way to avoid this "via" snippet altogether is to set up your own authentication by following our step-by-step guide to updating your DNS.