Blog: Interviews & Buzz

It seems like every day of the week we're seeing an interesting new approach to reselling Campaign Monitor. While the majority of rebrands are small to large design firms and marketing agencies selling their own email marketing platform on to clients, a recent standout for me was ScoutMailer. ScoutMailer is a rebranded version of Campaign Monitor targeted specifically at the scout industry.

This approach resonated with me because of our original decision to target Campaign Monitor specifically at web designers. Looking back, this decision was one of the best calls we made. Selling something to a niche market with unique needs makes it much easier to target both the feature set, and your message to that market.

Chris Monnat, the brains behind the rebrand realized this and was very careful to make sure ScoutMailer was pitched to the needs of his audience. Here's what Chris had to say...

Scouts don't do "email marketing" so I needed to present Campaign Monitor as a more generic tool to help them communicate with their members.

It's a smart approach. So smart that I recently caught up with Chris to ask him the full story behind the rebrand. Check out the the full interview.

Hot on the heels of our latest API updates released yesterday, I figured now is a good a time as any to highlight some of the interesting ways customers are using the API for their own benefit.

Performative Web is a powerful tool built for design agencies who want to offer dynamic web sites (such as a CMS, blog or web app) without the need for an in-house development team. The Performative Web team recently integrated Campaign Monitor into their suite allowing their customers to quickly build newsletters using content from their web site and automatically deliver it to their subscribers via Campaign Monitor.

By combining a simple editor with the power of the Django templating system (the framework their system is built on), users can create beautiful emails that combine their own content with dynamic content from the site. For example, recently added products or the last 3 stories from their blog.

In effect, the Performative Web team have built their own version of our editor to make it easy for their clients to build emails based on existing content in a couple of clicks.

They even complete the integration by including basic campaign reporting right in the Performative Web interface such as the number of opens and a list of everyone who bounced. If you're interested in reading more about this integration, Ben Eliott from the Performative Web team has put together a much more detailed post on their blog.

If you're doing anything interesting with the Campaign Monitor API and would like use to share your hard work here, we'd love to hear from you.

Votes have been cast and tallied in our recent t-shirt slogan competition, and we have your winning favourites. Over 1,000 votes were cast, and in the end the results were very tight.

We'll be taking the top 3 ideas, and turning them into t-shirts that are actually worth wearing. If you've seen our existing shirts you know we aren't going to cover them in Campaign Monitor branding.

Thanks so much to everyone who voted, and double thanks to those who made suggestions, funny, quirky, nerdy and downright odd as they were. Our winning authors were:

• Please unsubscribe me from this conversation — This was actually my entry, but I promise there was no vote fixing!
• You are reading the text only version of this t-shirt — by Doug Neiner
• G'day [firstname,fallback=mate] — by Ricky Cox

We'll be sending Doug a Flip Mino HD video camera, copies of each shirt when printed and also setting him up with a nice chunk of Campaign Monitor email credits too. Ricky will be receiving one of each shirt too, as well as his choice of awesome Blik decals and some Campaign Monitor credits.

As for me, I'll be receiving a pat on the back and a temporary increase in social standing. I'll also award myself some bonus ranking points in our internal ping pong tracking application. Watch out on the blog for the shirt designs over the next couple of weeks.

Keep in mind we won't be selling these ones, only giving them away to people we spot sending great campaigns, helping out in the forums or otherwise grabbing our attention.

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.