Blog: Interviews & Buzz

Another Web Week means another appearance at our favorite web industry conference, Web Directions South in Sydney, Australia. This year, our team will be manning the Campaign Monitor expo booth and naturally, attending the parties. So, if you're on your feet for the event this Thursday and Friday, swing by and say 'hi!'

And yes, we've got prizes!

Not wanting to waltz in empty-handed, we'll be giving away an iPad 3G or a Parrot AR Drone to two lucky winners in this year's Web Directions South competition. If you haven't seen the wonder that is an iPhone-controlled quadricopter, check out this video of us giving it a spin around the office:

So, how can you get your mitts on one of these? Simply visit our expo stand to enter and be present for the closing Web Directions session on Friday afternoon for the chance to become the envy (or terror) of your office!

Competitions aside, we love meeting our customers in real life, so come give us a holler, tell us what you would like to see added or improved to the app, or simply swing by for a chin wag. You never know, come Friday you might find yourself inciting mass panic at the helm of a very own drone!

With the holiday season coming up, it's time to get your email marketing efforts into top gear. To help you get ready, we've teamed up with our friends at Shopify to take your online store to the next level. Together, we're offering an amazing e-commerce prize pack that includes:

• 6 months use of a Shopify Business account (value $600)
• 20,000 Campaign Monitor email credits
• A 16Gb iPod Nano

It's super-easy to enter this competition - simply tell us your hot email marketing tip for promoting an online store in the lead up to the holiday season (in 50 words or less). You don't have to be a Shopify or Campaign Monitor customer to enter.

Some (obvious) tips include:

• Using A/B testing to pump up your email campaign response
• Getting creative with autoresponders by sending timed messages in the days before the major shopping holidays
• Mixing it up with holiday-themed email templates

Now it's over to you. Apart from offering the chance to win the amazing prize pack above, the best tips and online stores collected during this competition will be featured on the Campaign Monitor & Shopify blogs!

So what are you waiting for? Entries close at midnight on Wed, 20 October (CDT).

More tips and tales for online store-builders

In collaboration with the Shopify crew, we'll also be featuring case studies from a range of successful online stores to inspire you over the coming week. Get started with our Minui Handysitt case study on how a small business uses Campaign Monitor + Shopify to promote their store, or quickly build your own store with Shopify.

We recommend using the Campaign Monitor Shopify App by Lucid Design for adding new customers to a Campaign Monitor subscriber list.

Have you considered becoming a Campaign Monitor reseller, but have had trouble putting the pieces together between starting an account and launching your own unique email service? In our latest case study with John Henry at Holler, we answer some common questions that new designers and resellers face, such as whether to go with fixed vs personalized pricing and how to pitch email marketing to clients. We also touch on his experience coding with the Campaign Monitor API, as Holler has cleverly integrated ExpressionEngine with our app to create on-the-fly demo accounts for new customers.

"My pitch really is selling Holler as a marketing tool as opposed to a service for just sending emails."

As a designer and developer with considerable experience working on email marketing campaigns, John Henry was in an excellent position to offer email to his clients via Holler. In fact, what attracted us to Holler initially was its visual flair and attention to detail - not only is it an immensely attractive and memorable site, but it comes with a compelling range of resources that demonstrate an understanding of what many businesses look for in an email design and delivery service. Another advantage is Holler's understanding that email works best alongside other marketing channels and strategies, not in silo. As John Henry notes, "It's integrating their (customers') current work-flow that has really sold Holler and previous Campaign Monitor accounts I used to work with. The potential of competitions, sign-up forms, unique content and being able to measure the results has been a big selling point."

Finally, with John Henry's background developing for ExpressionEngine in mind, we asked about his clever use of our API to automatically create demo accounts for new customers. After quickly starting an account ourselves, we have our fingers crossed that Holler will release their demo account addon for EE sometime in the near future.

So if you're planning to launch your own rebrand, or are looking for sound tips when offering email marketing to your clients, read the full Holler transcript, or browse through our other case studies, including Q&A's with 37signals, Xero and more.

Thanks to John Henry from Holler for assisting with this case study. To see this service in action and start your own demo account, visit Holler.

We love hearing from Campaign Monitor resellers, especially when they focus on, or take an interesting approach towards selling email to a specific niche market or industry sector. So it was a pleasure to chat to Anna Penrose about her new business, MailAway. With a focus on Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in the UK, MailAway has worked tirelessly to make email attractive to folks who may not have large marketing budgets, or loads of staff.

Educating clients with user guides

"The video demos serve to show prospective clients how easy Campaign Monitor is to use."

In our case study, Anna explains that one of the first challenges in engaging clients from the SME sector is the lack of knowledge about basic email marketing concepts. To address this, the MailAway site has been designed to be not only very presentable, but detailed. Alongside sample reports, an email design gallery and clear-cut pricing information is a series of freely-available video user guides.

So, why video user guides? Not only do they give new clients a simple, visual idea of what this email marketing thing is all about, but it cuts back on the hands-on time that clients need to get started with their own campaigns. A great example of this is MailAway's 'A whole campaign in five minutes' video, which reassuringly explains the process of getting a campaign out in the time it takes to brew up a coffee:

Accompanying this guide are excellent resources regarding subscriber management, reporting and even the use of custom fields.

That's not to say that MailAway is entirely hands-off. Anna stresses the importance of offering solid email marketing advice to your clients, as it will pay off handsomely in the long run. If anything, the great results that their campaigns have experienced are a testament to the success of this approach.

Many thanks to Anna for her insight into marketing to SMEs. To read more on MailAway's approach to email marketing, check out our case study, or browse through our other customer stories from Xero, 37signals and more.

If you've been keeping an eye on our growing collection of customer case studies, you may have noticed our latest with Matt Weinberg from Vector Media Group. Based on his experience with a client base that spans from small online stores to large publishers, we asked Matt to explain how email marketing has complimented his design agency's service offering. He also touched on some of the challenges that his design agency has experienced in selling email, then shared a neat success story, after one of his clients turned around their email marketing efforts with a combination of testing and a review of their newsletter content. Finally, we asked Matt for a 'pro tip' - his response may give you a little food for thought! Don't miss the full case study.

Even though most of our customers are on the other side of the world, we still actively make a point of getting in touch with individuals to find out what they love, or think could be improved about Campaign Monitor. Firstly, it's because we're a pretty social bunch here... And anyone can tell you that I personally love a good chat. Secondly, it's simply awesome to hear it from folks like you that use Campaign Monitor as part of a day's work.

"The design needs to work in the email clients their customers use, not just on the web browser preview we show them!"

So it was with great pleasure that I got to meet up with Matt during a flying visit to New York City. Over coffee, Matt shared with me how his design agency uses Campaign Monitor and what could be done to make it a more competitive service to use. I didn't want his thoughts to go to waste, so afterwards, we stayed in touch and got rolling on this case study.

Many thanks to Matt and Vector Media Group for providing a design agency perspective to our questions. Check out the new Vector Media Group case study, or browse through our other case studies, including Q&A's with 37signals, Xero and more.