Blog: Interviews & Buzz

Wildly successful (and Australian based) software company Atlassian make some awesome collaboration and development tools, including JIRA which we use at Freshview.

If you are involved in the web or software industries, you have probably noticed during the last week their Stimulus package, in which they offered $5 small team licenses for JIRA and Confluence. All the proceeds from this sale were to go to the children's educational charity, Room to Read.

This kind of campaign can only work if it attracts a lot of interest, and the team at Atlassian decided to give it a kick start by emailing their existing customers and newsletter subscribers with the details of the offer. Below is an example of an email to a customer:

There were variations for customers who had one or the other products already, with a slightly different message so that the content was quite targeted. You will notice that the readers were explicitly asked to twitter the offer out to others, and pass it on. In total, Atlassian were able to reach around 70,000 people directly through permission based email.

It is easy to see how successful those emails were in getting the word out! As Atlassian team member Morgan Friberg told us:

In the end, we surpassed our goal 4Xs over! Looking back at the success of this campaign, we credit a lot of it to the emails we sent with your product... Amazing.

Atlassian raised more than $100,000 for their chosen charity, which really is fantastic, while reaching out to a ton of people who now have the chance to use Atlassian products for the first time. There is a lesson here that you may be able to apply to your own campaigns, or your client's campaigns:

Don't forget about the role of email in the web 2.0 world. Even though a lot of the actual spreading of the offer happened on Twitter, and on various blogs, the initial push started with email.

Asking someone directly for their help, right there in their inbox, is different to just posting it online and letting people find it themselves. Email can be powerful, and when used for the right reasons it can be a fantastic tool for your business (or charity).

Does this example give you some ideas about your own subscriber lists? Let us know in the comments.

While it isn't completely clear yet how the global financial crisis will impact the design community, one thing is clear: Any way you can add additional revenue to your design business is a good thing. It's no secret that one of the big features of Campaign Monitor is the ability to resell it to your clients for a marked-up rate. Combine this with email marketing being a great compliment to traditional web design services and (I may be a little biased here) you've got a great mechanism for earning passive income.

Over the coming weeks we plan on highlighting more and more customers who are generally kicking ass with Campaign Monitor. Some are using it to save time, some to impress their clients and many to earn additional revenue without lifting a finger. Today I wanted to highlight a customer fast becoming the poster child for reselling Campaign Monitor.

UK based Webselect have been doing an amazing job reselling Campaign Monitor as their own product called Selectmailer. They now have an incredible 80+ clients regularly sending emails through their account which has helped them "dramatically increase sales". I recently chatted with Webselect Managing Director Mark Walker to learn more about the Selectmailer story and any secrets behind his impressive success to date. Check out the full case study to hear Mark's story.

If you're doing cool stuff with Campaign Monitor and would like to be profiled, get in touch, we'd love to hear from you and share your story.

As you guys know, Campaign Monitor is built just for designers. Sure, lots of designers like to handle everything for their clients like email design, subscriber management and analyzing the results. But there's a whole stack of you who prefer to leave that to your clients. That's why we've worked so hard at making it easy to get your clients started, then you can "set them free" to manage everything themselves.

We take the idea of setting your clients free very seriously, because it's an awesome way for a design firm to earn passive income. Lots of designers mark-up their client's hosting fees, and email marketing is another great area to make money while you sleep. For many of you, this means rebranding Campaign Monitor as your very own email marketing tool. You customize the interface, maybe host it at your own domain and set your own prices. In 5 minutes you've got an in-house email marketing app.

One of our favorite parts of this process is seeing the ways our customers go about the rebranding process. One such customer that recently caught our attention was the team from AshWebMedia who have rebranded Campaign Monitor as the aptly named AshWebMail.

We were so impressed with the AshWebMail rebrand that we caught up with Derek Ashauer from AshWebMedia to find out more about it. Derek explains why he went with Campaign Monitor, how he pitches email marketing to his clients and why it's important not to re-invent the wheel. Check out the full case study for some great ideas on selling your own email marketing product to your clients.

Since we released a stack of new methods for our API back in February, we've been genuinely blown away by all the cool integrations our customers have been doing. There was the new Joomla modules, an ExpressionEngine extension and an updated Magento extension. Not to mention the other plugins currently under development that we'll be announcing soon.

On top of integrating Campaign Monitor into third-party applications, we've also heard from customers building their own solutions and integrating them directly in our software. A great example of this is Post Poster, an automated email building tool from web development shop Infoding. I recently chatted with Adriaan Stellingwerff from the Infoding team about why they built Post Poster, how it works and what the results have been.

What inspired you to build Post Poster?

The real-world need of a client was the inspiration behind Post Poster. Design agency Hoverkraft had a client that needed to promote their cultural events through a weekly HTML email. The client publishes their events on two different websites, the newsletter had to be simple to send out without time-consuming cutting and pasting.

Hoverkraft suggested using Campaign Monitor and its API, from this we developed an application on top of the API that automatically pulls posts from both of the client's websites and compiles them into a nice looking HTML newsletter.

How does the application work?

Post Poster interfaces with both the client's websites and Campaign Monitor. Through Post Poster's admin interface the user can select which posts he/she wants to include in a newsletter. The selection can currently be based on a date range or by selecting individual posts. Here's an example of it in action.

The posts that fit the selection criteria are pulled in from the websites, and rendered in both an HTML newsletter template and a plain text version. A preview is presented to the user. If the user is happy with the preview they submit the newsletter to Campaign Monitor for sending in a single click. The screenshot below shows the live preview of the dynamically generated email.

This automatically creates a draft and then sends that draft to their subscribers using the Campaign Monitor API. The monitoring of statistics is handled through Campaign Monitor's brilliant reporting tools.

That's the essence of it. Of course different clients will have slightly different needs, so we can always customise the app to suit their exact needs.

What has the feedback been like from your clients?

They've been very happy! The original client that inspired the app has been using it for a while now, and it's been a great step forward for them. Both in terms of how professional the emails look and the time they save every issue. They used to send out plain text emails which they cut and paste together. Now it's just a matter of a few clicks for a nicely laid out HTML newsletter with loads of great reports on the results.

If you've built your own email solution for your clients with our API, make sure you get in touch so we can share your story.

Late last year I was lucky enough to host Philip Fierlinger in our Sydney office. As well as having great taste in clothing, Phil (pictured on the left) is an incredibly talented designer I've personally been following for many years. Today, Phil is Head of Design at the popular web-based accounting software Xero, who are doing some amazing things in what would traditionally be considered a boring space.

We spent a few hours discussing our approach to software design and sharing some tips and tricks on what worked for us. Phil had some amazing insights to share, so I was excited when I learned he'd be using Campaign Monitor for their email marketing.

Fast forward to today, and we haven't been disappointed. Not only are the Xero team sending gorgeous emails, they have also integrated Campaign Monitor into their internal CRM/sales system using our API. This allows them to automatically target specific groups for newsletters, campaigns, offers, events and invitations.

I was so impressed that I decided to sit down with Charlotte Hinton from the Xero team and find out more. Read the case study for all the juicy details and some screenshots of the great email designs they've been sending lately.

We plan on doing more case studies in the coming weeks on customers doing cool things with Campaign Monitor. If there is a certain type of customer you'd like these to cover (for example, those rebranding Campaign Monitor as their own product) then please let us know in the comments.