The growth of services like YouTube and Vimeo, and the availability of cheap video cameras and editing software has created an explosion in the use of online video.

Your clients will start asking you soon if they can put their video into your emails, if they have not already. So can it be done? The answer is "no, not really". Technically, videos just don't work in email - most of the video players use Flash, which won't play in your email client.

That's probably a good thing in reality, because email inboxes are already very crowded and busy, so adding even a genuinely fascinating video is not going to be welcome.

However, email can be an excellent way to encourage people to visit your website and watch a video. Instead of trying to embed it right in the email, just take a static screenshot, and link that to your video page.

This really works - in the recent Email Standards Project newsletter, we did exactly that for our Gmail Appeal video (see the image above). We linked the screen grab, as well as providing a text link in a couple of other prominent places.

In our reporting, we can see that the screen grab was clicked on more than 5 times as often as the text link. People love to click on images, particularly images that look like they do something.

This is a really simple technique, but it can be a great way to convince your clients not to keep trying to embed the videos directly.

Have you ever seen an HTML page or email where everything looks fine, except instead of apostrophes there are odd question marks, or square blocks? You might also see other characters replaced similarly.

Most commonly, this occurs when importing HTML that has been created by Microsoft Word. For generating HTML, Word uses a specific character set called "Windows Latin 1" that has special characters like 'smart quotes' and trademark symbols.

When you view the email on your own machine, those characters will show up, but then when imported into Campaign Monitor they might disappear or be converted into incorrect characters.

Character encoding makes the difference

The reason is that Campaign Monitor sends in UTF-8 encoding (which covers a wide number of languages), and the special characters are not in the same location in UTF-8 as they are in Windows Latin 1.

So what to do about it? Well the first (and most thorough) option is to just not use MS Word to generate HTML. Word tends not only to cause character problems, but also adds vast amounts of unnecessary HTML to even simple pages.

If you view the source you will see rampaging hordes of span tags and CSS with oddly named classes everywhere. It can also tend to break tags that Campaign Monitor uses like <unsubscribe></unsubscribe> by inserting other tags inside them.

There are much better options for simple HTML creation out there, even at little or no cost — look at tools like NVU, Coffee Cup (free and paid) and First Page.

Of course, you can go right up to tools like Dreamweaver if you have the need.

Another alternative is to do some 'find and replace' work in notepad or similar to remove Word's smart characters and replace them with the correct unicode characters. Some common ones to look out for are:

• For “ Left double quotes: Use &#8220;
• For ” Left double quotes: Use &#8221;
• For ’ Apostrophe: Use &#8217;

That way you can have the typographically correct characters show up in your email. Character encoding can be a tricky area, and you have to keep an eye on it in your HTML, in your subscribe form pages and in the subscriber lists your import.

Always keep in mind that Campaign Monitor will send in UTF-8 no matter what, so you want to import everything in UTF-8 to begin with, so no conversion occurs.

For more information on HTML and character encoding, read The Definitive Guide to Web Character Encoding at SitePoint.

Recently we mentioned our Google Analytics integration, which is excellent for keeping up to date with what your subscribers do after they read your emails.

How about knowing when people signup to your lists though? You can already grab the new subscribers RSS feed (find it at the bottom of each list's details page in your account), but today we've spotted a great way to keep an eye on your lists, while watching the rest of your sites vital statistics.

Campaign Monitor customer Mark J Reeves has developed a plugin for Shaun Inman's popular Mint software. Mint is a tool for seeing recent page visits, referrals, searches and all kinds of statistics about your website right now. We use it ourselves on all our sites.

With Mark's plugin (called 'Peppers' in Mint terminology), you can see a list of people subscribing to a specific list in the last 24 hours. All you need to do is plugin your API key and ListID to get started.

Checkout the Campaign Monitor subscribers Pepper to download it. Thanks go to Mark for his development, it looks like he has plans to do more in the future.

The Campaign Monitor API is something we are always working away on, and as part of possible future changes we'd love your feedback.

In a forum thread, our developer Jason asks "do you use the PHP wrapper?". We have an API sample for PHP in our documentation, but we'd like to know how it is working out for you.

If you do [use it], do you find it comprehensive enough, or have you been using it mainly as a starting point?

More importantly, if you don't use it, why not? Is it too hard to understand? Does it make use of server components you don't have access to?

This is your chance to let us know what you use, and also what you would love to see. So if you use PHP and the Campaign Monitor API, or would like to, have your say.

Visit the PHP wrapper forum thread and post your thoughts

A week ago I posted to encourage you all to make some suggestions in our featured forum thread about how we could help you bring more clients to Campaign Monitor. Today, after quite a few great suggestions and responses, we have a winner, selected at random from the non-staff posts in the thread.

That winner is the intriguingly named 'dod', who posted this suggestion:

For me, it would more functionality through the API, for example:

Creation of campaigns
Sending of campaigns
Recipient Segmentation

This could then allow developers to "plugin" their custom CRM systems into CM, create their own complex segmentation rules as well as implement transactional emails.

This is actually something we have had a quite a few requests for in the past, and we'll add another vote for dod. Thanks to everyone who posted their thoughts!

We'll be sending dod some Campaign Monitor shirts and hooking him up with plenty of free email credits. Although the prize has been given away, it's not too late to add your own suggestions if you have not yet.

We are always interested in ways we can improve Campaign Monitor for you and for your clients.

If you've been keeping up with the Email Standards Project you will know about our Project Gmail Grimace, where we asked designers to send us photos of themselves experiencing the frustration of designing for Gmail.

We gathered them all together, and created a short, fun little video to try and get the attention of the Gmail team. That video has been posted today, and we'd love for you all to go and check it out.

If you would like to help spread the message of the Email Standards Project, this is something you might blog about very easily, or send your designer friends too, it all helps.

Watch the 2008 Gmail Appeal video.

Having reviewed many, many thousands of email campaigns sent through Campaign Monitor and MailBuild, we've noticed that a lot of designers like to try and hide the unsubscribe link away, to make it like a little game of 'find the link' for their subscribers.

We've always encouraged people to do the opposite, make it easier for people who don't want your emails to unsubscribe than it is to hit the 'spam' button and cause you trouble.

The always helpful Mark Brownlow agrees with us in his post "Time to move the unsubscribe link? recently.

If it's there in the preview pane, then more people are likely to use it instead of reporting you as spam. Less spam reports means a better sender reputation and less chance of ending up on a blacklist

The best way to find out of course is to measure it - does having the link at the top actually lead to a significant increase in unsubscribes? A reduction in spam complaints? If more people do unsubscribe, does that leave you with a more responsive and passionate subscriber base?

Email marketing has plenty of room for testing and experimentation, and another great post on Email Marketing Reports links to information about the big impact small changes can have.

We've posted before about working with your subject lines, and you can also experiment with positioning your 'key action' links, use of images in your newsletter and the 'introductory' text above your headers.

There's no end to the possible layouts, all it needs is some creativity and a willingness to make small changes. We'd love to hear about any changes you have found useful, so leave us a comment.

Campaign Monitor has always been well known for its great reporting features, because they make it so easy for you and your clients to see very quickly the results of your email campaigns.

Today we released another new feature based on a lot of your suggestions and requests that can help extend that email campaign reporting right into your website. All you need to get started is a free Google Analytics account and a few moments in Campaign Monitor.

If you aren't already aware, Google Analytics is software for tracking your visitors as they move around your site. By placing a small piece of code on each page, you can see great reports about the number of visitors, where they came from, what they did and how long they stayed. With a little extra work you can even track conversions and sales data so you can see exactly how you're generating customers and revenue.

With our new integration feature, you can follow your visitors all the way from your email newsletter into your site, and hopefully right through to 'conversion' - an ecommerce sale, a consulting enquiry or whatever other action you might want to measure. Best of all, it is super easy to setup.

Getting started with Campaign Monitor and Google Analytics

We'll assume that you've already got your Analytics code working on your website (or your client's site), tracking away on that end. Setting it up on Campaign Monitor is a snap.

To get started, jump into your 'Manage Clients' tab, and pick the appropriate client, and click the blue 'Edit client' link to access the Google Analytics setting. Here's a complete walkthrough of the process if you need help.

Now whenever you send a campaign for that client, Campaign Monitor will automatically add Google Analytics tags to each link to the domains you selected. During the campaign setup process, you can enter a useful title (the campaign name by default) and source name to help you find that campaign in Google Analytics later.

What can Google Analytics do for me?

Some pretty cool stuff! Being able to connect the data from your email campaign with the same people's data on your site gives you some great insight into how your campaigns convert into web site traffic, customer conversions and even sales.

Here are a few quick examples that show you the power of integrating with Google Analytics. For a complete walkthrough on how to access these reports in your analytics account, check out our complete guide.

See exactly how much revenue your campaign generated

As well as the total revenue generated, you can also see exactly how many transactions your campaign generated, the average value of each subscriber and the percentage of subscribers that converted into a sale. Learn more about tracking revenue with Google Analytics.

Track how many subscribers converted

By setting up conversion goals in Google Analytics, you can see how many subscribers completed a desired action, such as completed an enquiry form or adding a product to their shopping cart.

Can I track individual subscribers?

Unfortunately, the short answer is no - Google updated their Terms of Service to disallow the collection of any information which can be used to personally identify subscribers. So, the tracking and reporting of clicks by name, email address etc. in Google Analytics is no longer an option.

This new feature is live in your account now, so if you're already using Google Analytics for yourself or your clients, you can access these reports in a snap. We'll be putting together a series of posts here moving forward to show you how to get the most out of this feature and hopefully some interesting case studies on how some of you are using it to improve the effectiveness and return on investment for your email campaigns.

We came across a great 'first-look' review of Campaign Monitor from New Jersey consulting firm Benkard Online Marketing Programs. In the article, Andrew describes his search for "the right email broadcast service for small- and medium-sized firms with a monthly newsletter".

Andrew has checked out a lot of the options available, "kissed a lot of frogs" as he vividly calls it, but was not satisfied. However, his intial impressions of Campaign Monitor are great for us to hear, including:

Fabulous user interface. Here is where they really shine. As you assemble an outbound email, the pages flow naturally together in a wonderfully linear way. How did they do this? Information is chunked together well, button colors chosen sensibly and applied consistently, labels are consistent, and there is white space to set the important material off... a solid UI means less chance of a mistake and less time spent building the email.

We're glad to see that all the time and effort put into the interface has made an impression. Of course, we're not standing still — there's plenty of improvements to make and great new features coming. If you have your own suggestions, jump into our forums and let us know.

You can also read the full article Nifty Email Broadcast Service: Campaign Monitor at Benkard.com.