We absolutely love this monthly newsletter sent by the talented folks at Dublin based Spoiltchild Design.

Not only is the design absolutely gorgeous and easy to read, the newsletter also degrades gracefully in email environments less supportive of modern standards.

Stop listening to me waffle on, go and check it out!

Designer:  Alan O’Rourke (and Diana)  |  See the complete design

"I set up an account so I could test your service out. We were so impressed that the company I'm working for is now starting to use this for all of our client's mailings. I can't tell you enough how great this software is. Thanks and keep up the good work."

Colin Grigson, Trademark Media

Nope. Sorry, but Campaign Monitor has been specifically built not to support attachments. We did this for a number of reasons.

1. We ensure that your campaigns are unable to send viruses that propagate through attachments.
2. You're not forcing an attachment down every recipients throat. Large attachments + slow connection = angry subscriber.

If you have a file that you'd like to give to your customers, we recommend that you host the file on your own server and then place a link to the file within your email. This also means you won't clog your subscribers inbox with attachments they may not even use.

Here's a quick example of how one customer of ours promotes a PDF document in their emails instead of actually attaching it.

When putting together the design for a client's email newsletter, the last thing we usually think about is importing their list into Campaign Monitor. What we fail to realize, is that the quality of our client's list is going to have as much impact on the success of the campaign (and the perceived quality of our creative) as the design itself.

As we've stated before, a smaller permission based list is ALWAYS going to out perform a larger unsolicited list. If you or your client has an existing list you'd like to import, make sure you review the following scenarios to ensure your list is permission-based and OK to use with Campaign Monitor.

Today we’re featuring a great looking email campaign from the folks at UK based Connectpoint Advertising.

The newsletter features all of the creative ingredients for a successful email. Short, concise text. Check. Bullet points where possible. Check. Clear call to action. Double check. Bundle all of this into a great looking design and you’re clearly on to a winner.

I know where I’d like to be heading for a weekend some time soon.

Designer:  Adam Knowles  |  See the complete design

If you send lots of test campaigns for your clients (which you should) then you'll love today's update. We've now made it easy to delete any test campaigns that might be crowding your interface from your account.

As we mentioned earlier, we were hesitant to give you guys this functionality because it provided an audit trail against any potential complaints, plus keeping a record of everything is just plain old best practice.

We think we've found a happy medium with the new approach. You can remove test campaigns from your account, but we'll keep an archive of everything on the server just in case. If you ever require this data, just let us know and we can chase it up in the archives.

Ryan Heneise from Art of Mission has just posted his thoughts on a recent Campaign Monitor experience.

Thanks Ryan.

If you’ve got a subscribe form on more than one page on your site, Campaign Monitor provides a really simple way of tracking which pages or forms your subscribers are signing up from.

Here are the steps:

1. Add a custom field to your subscriber list called “source” (or something similar).
2. Head into Create a subscribe form and make sure you select the new “source” custom field to be included. Save your changes and copy the supplied code for your subscribe form.
3. Add the subscribe code to your site, but change the text for the source field from <input type=“text” to <input type=“hidden”.
4. Place this code on each of the pages on your site, and give the hidden field a value. For example, the front page could use value=“frontpage” and the contact page could be value=“contactpage”.
5. Every time someone completes these subscribe forms, they’ll be added to your list and the hidden form value will passed into the “source” field.

This gives you an easy way to find out which pages on your site are converting the most subscribers.