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I've been using Campaign Monitor for two years now for all Applied Language's outbound email campaigns. The tools developed are far and above anything I could ever expected at such a great price. The reporting and segmentation tools are amazing and I recommend it to everyone I know who works in Marketing.

Richard Michie, Head of Marketing & PR
Applied Language

No doubt your clients will be reminding you of this shortly, but the time for those seasonal promotion emails, thank you notes and last minute offers is marching towards us like an army of Santas.

For the last couple of years we have run a Christmas email competition showcasing some great designs, and giving away some prizes.

We'll be doing the same thing again this year, so this is your fair warning to get cracking on some unique, effective Christmas email design. Businesses tend to ramp up their email sending at this end of the year, so if you can offer your clients a tweaked holiday design it could pay off for them, and for you.

If you need some inspiration, check out our previous winners for 2006 and for Christmas 2005. For Christmas and holiday related imagery iStockPhoto is always a good option, as is stock.xchng.

We'll announce further details as the holiday season gets closer, so watch the blog for prizes, and get started on the winning design!

Right now we're working on the new website for the email standards push that kicked off recently. That site will include a section on how you as a web designer can get involved and help improve the situation.

One simple step you can take right now, if you are a Facebook user, is to join our Email Standards Project Facebook Group. It's a really fast and easy way for you to show some support for what we are all trying to do, and it will also help us connect with people who might be helpful.

The recently crowned King of Web Standards, Jeffrey Zeldman, has joined already, saying "I hope all standardistas on Facebook will join in this effort". We'd love to see you there.

Join the Email Standards Project group on Facebook.

If you haven't already heard of it, FoxyCart is an awesome ecommerce platform built by web designers for web designers (kind of like Campaign Monitor). It makes adding a shopping cart and complete payment system to your site a breeze.

It turns out the FoxyCart crew are fans of Campaign Monitor, and recently announced a really easy way to automatically add your FoxyCart customers to any subscriber list in your account. If you're a FoxyCart customer, check out the simple instructions.