Wayde Christie

wrote on October 5, 2007 4:10 PM

GOLD!!!

This will be as useful for email developers, as the FireBug toolbar is for web developers.

xtfer

wrote on October 5, 2007 4:28 PM

Did i tell you how much you guys rock!

Chris Abad

wrote on October 5, 2007 4:30 PM

What a life saver! Doing QA work for emails has always been _so_ much more difficult than doing QA for a website. There are more browsers to test, the differences between browsers are great, and there is the spam element to consider (and the thousands of different variables when it comes to spam). A tool like this is a giant leap forward. Great work.

Mike Bowzeylo

wrote on October 5, 2007 4:34 PM

Sweet. I can't wait to use it on my next design.

Your brief sidebar description really puts it in perspective (and funny at the same time):

"Total cost, just under $10,000.
Or, you can click your mouse once and we'll do the lot for you."

I love it... now I can spend more time fine tuning rather than testing.

Cheers

Damien Buckley

wrote on October 5, 2007 5:17 PM

Absolute Killer Feature, can't add any more.

Damien Buckley

wrote on October 5, 2007 5:20 PM

No sooner had I hit the 'post' button than I realised I could add something. Any chance of seeing this in Mailbuild any time n the future - preferably as an enable/disable option for administrators.

Dave Greiner

wrote on October 5, 2007 7:16 PM

Thanks for the great feedback guys, it's awesome to know this is something you'll find useful. Damien, this will certainly make it into MailBuild if we have enough requests and if it's popular enough. That's something we can decide on in the next few weeks.

Tim

wrote on October 5, 2007 7:28 PM

Please add me as another request for MailBuild! This looks amazing. Thanks guys.

Adam

wrote on October 6, 2007 1:11 AM

Best news ever!

Definitely something I'd love to see in MailBuild - I've already had more than a few customers asking me about these kinds of capabilities.

Ali

wrote on October 6, 2007 2:28 AM

Definite yes please for MailBuild! As someone who currently creates newsletters for about 10 different clients and with more on the way it would be such a time saver for me.

I didn't think MailBuild could get any better but this would be the icing on the cake!

Mark Wyner

wrote on October 6, 2007 9:40 AM

Absolute perfection. It's like you people are magicians. Your products answer the call for every web designer who is creating HTML emails.

Man, this is good.

Mark Wyner

wrote on October 6, 2007 9:46 AM

You know what would be really awesome? If we could download all of the screen shots together as a PDF or a zip file. I have many clients who want to see how things look across the board.

Is that too insane?

Dave Greiner

wrote on October 6, 2007 2:12 PM

You know what would be really awesome? If we could download all of the screen shots together as a PDF or a zip file. I have many clients who want to see how things look across the board.

Great suggestion Mark, that's something we've been considering too. As always, we're listening to all the feedback and suggestions we can get which will shape the direction we take for any future improvements.

Jason

wrote on October 9, 2007 12:32 AM

Awesome feature!

Another vote for MailBuild integration.

Matt

wrote on October 9, 2007 1:25 AM

Love the new feature, but I feel the cost is too high. A one-time test on an email for $10 is fine, but what happens when you make the changes and have to run another test to make sure they worked? Now it's up to $20...Each new test is $10? I think $10 per campaign with unlimited tests for that campaign would be better. Or, what if there was a one-time fee to add unlimited testing to an account?

I would think that you're going to test an email an average of twice. Once to see if there a problems, twice to confirm they were fixed.

One of your main competitors has pricing at about $55/month for an individual with unlimited testing of 8 active emails. Assuming you have 8 active campaigns in one month here, that's at least $80 to test those emails.

Great feature and love it integrated into Campaign Monitor, but I don't see myself using it much until the pricing comes done.

Dave Greiner

wrote on October 9, 2007 11:45 AM

Matt, thanks for the thoughtful feedback. I wanted to touch on a couple of your points to try and clarify how we see this feature being used.

I would think that you're going to test an email an average of twice. Once to see if there a problems, twice to confirm they were fixed.

As I touched on in the post, this isn't the sort of tool you'd typically use for every campaign you send. In most cases, our customers are re-using a template with modified content for each campaign they send. This tool is ideal for making sure that template works perfectly across all the major email clients. Once you've established that with a few tests, you can add the new content for each campaign knowing it will still display well across the board without the need for any further tests.

From my own experience and watching our customers use it the last few days, two to three tests is usually enough to get the desired result. If you identify a particular client that's giving you hell - say, Windows Live Hotmail - you can always use our free preview tool to send yourself tests to a Hotmail account for free to get that issue resolved. Once that's sorted, you might run another test to make sure you're in the clear.

One of your main competitors has pricing at about $55/month for an individual with unlimited testing of 8 active emails.

They sure do, but they also only test in a few email clients, whereas we'll give you results in 17 of the major email clients plus show how your email will look in the preview pane. Not to mention that we'll also run your email through 8 of the most popular spam filters and tell you what to fix if you get blocked.

Based on the feedback we've been getting so far and how popular the tool has already been, we think we've set a very fair price point. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts.

Paul

wrote on October 9, 2007 7:21 PM

I totally agree with Matt - this is far too expensive. A fee per campaign would be really attractive to our agency.

Matt

wrote on October 10, 2007 4:40 AM

@Paul: how is what they're doing not a fee per campaign?

Mark Wyner

wrote on October 10, 2007 4:54 AM

Why all of the ball busting about the fees? This is a phenomenal service for a modest fee. As David pointed out, you can run your template through the system and then use the free utility they provide to test repeatedly for problematic email-clients. And once your template proves successful, you should only need to run each edition through this utility one time.

Given how much time it takes to test emails across the board, I think $10 is quite reasonable. Even if you run it through three times, that's only $30. You can easily add that to your fees so the client pays for it. It's a valuable service you're providing to your clients, so it's a reasonable and logical expense.

Ultimately, Campaign Monitor is providing a service for a fee they (and many others) believe is reasonable. They're not selling a used car or having a garage sale. So why the negotiation on fees? Hell, if you're marking up your campaigns you're even making money off of Campaign Monitor.

I think they have a really good system in place, and this utility is no exception. In fact, I believe this significantly increases the value of their entire system.

Matt

wrote on October 11, 2007 1:07 AM

This tool is ideal for making sure that template works perfectly across all the major email clients. Once you've established that with a few tests, you can add the new content for each campaign knowing it will still display well across the board without the need for any further tests.

Completely agree. However, once the email template is finalized, I'm still going to want to run new campaigns through the test to check spam filters. But I'm still paying for the email client previews, which at that point, you're right, I don't need. If you could split the tests in two, seems that would be another approach. $5 per test for email clients and $5 per test for spam? To me, they really are two separate tests that are done at different points during the development process.

@Paul: how is what they're doing not a fee per campaign?

You pay per test, not per campaign. So if you test one campaign three times, that's $30 versus a one-time $10 fee per campaign.

Don't get me wrong, I think the service looks great and I was very excited when I saw it introduced. It's just that my excitement dwindled some after seeing the cost. I think Campaign Monitor has the best email service, in terms of interface, ease of use, from customization down to support, up to and especially including--the cost. To me, this cost per test just seems slightly out of line with the actual cost of sending the campaign.

Mark Wyner

wrote on October 12, 2007 3:32 AM

@Matt:

In hindsight, I realize my comment may have seemed like an attack. It wasn't. It's good to question things. Anyway, I hope I didn't offend.

Jason Grigsby

wrote on October 12, 2007 5:28 AM

I'd like an easier way to share the results of the tests with customers as well. I don't know that a pdf is necessary as Mark suggests although that would be pretty slick. An alternative would be to add the testing view to the client interface for Campaign Monitor. Maybe you check a box selectively publish a test to the client interface.

Jason

wrote on December 20, 2007 5:11 AM

How long does it take to receive the reports?

Jason

wrote on December 20, 2007 5:29 AM

Nevermind... it begins processing almost immediately. This is completely amazing! I would love to know how this works.

Lublin

wrote on April 18, 2008 3:33 AM

This is good product, perfect and very useful. Thanks David for this article.

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