Blog: New Features & Updates

If you or your clients administer company Facebook pages, today’s a happy day. We’re pleased to finally reveal our new Facebook app for Campaign Monitor subscribe forms, in white-label and Campaign Monitor-branded flavors. Both make it possible to add a subscribe form for an existing Campaign Monitor list to a Facebook page. If you administer multiple pages, you can add one subscribe form per page.

The subscribe form apps support custom fields and can be managed using designer and client login credentials alike. While they’re fairly simple, we’ve made it possible to change the introductory text, subscribe confirmation message and tab name on your page’s sidebar.

Setting up either the Campaign Monitor or white-label app for your Facebook page takes less than 2 minutes. All you need is your Campaign Monitor account login details and a subscriber list. You can see it in action on our Campaign Monitor Facebook page.

Yes, there’s a white-label version, too!

As we figured that a lot of our designer friends would be keen to offer this subscribe form app to their clients, we’ve created a fully white-label version. It works just like its’ branded counterpart, but with no mention of Campaign Monitor. High five!

Issues with adding the app in IE8: Due to a weirdo browser issue, some customers haven’t been able to add the app to their Facebook pages when using the Internet Explorer 8 browser. Please try using another browser for now and hopefully we’ll have this sorted soon. Once either app is added, it’s totally fine to use in IE8.

Making changes to the app

As mentioned earlier, it’s possible to change the introductory text and subscribe confirmation message. In addition, you can change the client/list the form is linked to in an account. To do so after you’ve initially setup the app, go to your Facebook page, then click the ‘Edit page’ button. On the next page, click ‘Apps’ in the sidebar, then under ‘Campaign Monitor Subscribe Form’ (or ‘Subscribe Form’), click ‘Go to application’. You can then go through the setup process again.

To change the default ‘Subscribe to Newsletter’ tab name on your page’s sidebar, go through the steps above, but instead of clicking ‘Go to application’, click ‘Edit settings’. In the ‘Custom tab name’ field, add a new name.

To remove the app, go to your Facebook page, then click the ‘Edit page’ button. On the next page, click ‘Apps’ in the sidebar, then click the ‘X’ alongside ‘Campaign Monitor Subscribe Form’ (or ‘Subscribe Form’). Then, go to Account Settings in your Facebook account (pictured), click ‘Apps’ in the sidebar and click the ‘X’ next to the app again. All Campaign Monitor account data stored in the app and forms will be deleted and most certainly won’t be stored by Facebook. If you re-add the app, you will be asked to login and create your forms from scratch.

At present, only the page admin who added the app can make changes to a subscribe form (apart from deleting it). If you would like another admin to take control, then you will have to remove the app and all forms first, as per above. Same goes for using the app with another Campaign Monitor account.

A huge thanks to everyone who requested this app, added their suggestions and egged us on during its development - we’d love to hear your feedback and ideas for future updates! Also, extraordinary thanks to James Dennes for bringing it across the line while skateboarding in Cambodia (no kidding), plus Matt Farag and Buzz Usborne for putting Facebook to shame the sweet design. All of us hope you’ll enjoy using the Facebook app as much as we have on our Facebook page!

If you've been following the blog, you've probably guessed that we've been a pretty busy bunch. Since the launch of our template editor and recently, the template builder, we've had loads of excellent feedback come in with the tide, which we've been responding to with a steady flow of improvements to the app.

In our recent update, we've made a few usability improvements to the template editor. Most of these are so subtle that you probably won't notice them, but in a way, that's the point. For starters, we removed the distraction of having the sidebar slide in and out of view when editing the various parts of a template. Instead, we've made it sticky and constantly present. You didn't notice this, because you were focused on your work instead.

We're also about making the editor more forgiving, so we've ensured that any content that gets entered into the sidebar is auto-saved. Consequently, this has eliminated the disruptive 'save changes' prompt when you move on to editing something else. Another prompt that we've given the flick is the one that appeared upon deleting an editable region. Instead, we've added an 'undo delete' link (pictured), should you change your mind.

These three changes have been directly guided by your feedback, so we'd like to extend a warm 'thank you' for all your tweets, forum posts and emails. Recording and acting on your suggestions remains a priority even at this busy time of year, so if there's something you feel we could improve about the editor (or the app in general), be sure to get in touch with our team, or leave a note in the comments below.

First up, we'll come clean here. While our template builder has sped up the process of creating templates for many designers, the inclusion of English terms like 'Unsubscribe' and 'Web version' has made the resulting templates slightly tricky to use for customers who send their campaigns in Danish, Dutch or one of many commonly-used languages. Naturally, it wasn't long before we received feedback to this effect.

If you send in a language other than English, we want to make things right by providing an easy way to have terms like 'Unsubscribe' and 'Web version' translated into your language. The thing is, we don't want to rely on robots or second-guessing, especially when there are great people like you who know what's best when it comes to email campaigns.

For this reason, we would like to ask for your help in translating some of the default words and phrases that appear in our templates.

Filling in the form below will only take a minute or two, but it will massively benefit designers and clients across the world. Once we've collected a variety of translations, we'll look towards adding a simple language selector to the template builder and taking the hard work out of localizing your campaigns.

Finally, a big thank you for your feedback and for helping us improve. We owe a lot to our international customers and hope to return the favor by building a better app for everyone.

We've recently unleashed a couple of API updates that should make things easier for our developer friends. Included are three new methods, plus a handful of parameters which are likely to be particularly useful if you're syncing subscribers between your app and ours. If integrating with Campaign Monitor is your business, here is what's new in our API.

New methods: Deleting subscribers and unscheduling campaigns

First up, the big one - you can now delete subscribers from a list using our API. Unlike our existing method for unsubscribing subscribers (wow, a mouthful), a delete request results in an email address being marked as 'Deleted', but not added to the account's suppression list. This is particularly useful when a subscriber is to be re-added to a list at a later time, say, when 'pausing' a subscription for a few weeks. Of course, a little discretion should be used when deleting a subscriber via the API, rather than unsubscribing them.

In tandem is a new method for getting deleted subscribers for a particular list. Results can be narrowed down by date range, ordered by date and more.

Finally, we've added a new method for unscheduling a campaign, which moves a scheduled campaign back to the account's drafts. This sure beats deleting the campaign, as was previously done.

Getting social: Forward, Like and Mention stats for a campaign

In the spirit of the social sharing reports in the app, we've now made sharing stats available via the API. Using the new parameters in our existing campaign summary method, you can pull forwards, likes and mentions for any given campaign, alongside the regular metrics. This is a timely addition for all you folks with dashboard apps (or ahem, 'information radiators'), not to mention other app adventures in analytics.

Clearing custom fields on subscriber updates or bulk imports

Last but not least, we've added a parameter for clearing custom fields to our existing methods for updating a subscriber and importing many subscribers. This allows you to clear one or more options on multi-value custom fields and totally clear other custom field types.

Our API wrappers, updated and ready to use

To reflect the new methods described above, we've updated all our official wrappers for v3 of the Campaign Monitor API. We've got wrappers for Ruby, PHP, .NET and more, so chances are, our API speaks your language!

A huge thanks to Paul Duran and our development and testing teams for this sweeping update. Most importantly, thanks to you - all of the above happened because developers stepped forward and provided us with amazing feedback, so if you have any any suggestions for new methods or improvements, get in touch with our team. Alternately, hustle with our lively API developer community and post questions, get the word on updates and most importantly, cut some darn good code!

We regularly talk to customers who are keen on building mobile-optimized email templates, but have hit a roadblock. It's easy to empathise, as while we've put a fair amount of effort into providing resources on designing mobile email, chances are that you'll hit at least one of the following hurdles:

• Skill: 'Everyone says that you should 'code email like it's 1999'. After getting my head around that, I'm now being told to use CSS3 - help!'
• Time: 'Optimizing for mobile adds a whole bunch more coding and testing tasks. My clients can't afford to cover this.'
• Resources: 'I don't have a device to test on.'
• Motivation: 'This is going to be hard.'

One of the aims of our new template builder has been to overcome these hurdles. In essence, make it really easy to create email campaigns that look just as slick on your iPhone or Android handset, as they do in the inbox. Plus, save you loads of testing time, as you can be confident that they will just work.

After yammering on about mobile optimizations in this blog, it's about time that everyone gets to create responsive email campaigns for themselves and their clients.

Switching between desktop to mobile versions

In order to fulfill this, we've added a toggle button to the bottom of the template builder's preview pane. This switches between the desktop and mobile version of an email template, so you can customize things to your heart's delight without having to repeatedly test on a mobile device:

As you can guess, we've already rolled all the necessary @media queries into the template code, so at no point do you have to get elbows-deep into CSS3.

Learning from the code

That said, these templates provide ample opportunity to learn about some of the coding fundamentals behind creating responsive designs. It's worth mentioning that you can export your template builder creations, fire them up in your favorite editing software and see how we've narrowed layouts, resized images and more, simply by using a few lines of CSS.

Finally, we'd love to hear your questions or feedback in regards to creating mobile email templates in the new builder. It has already saved us a lot of time and mental energy when creating our monthly newsletter, so hopefully it will do the same for you, too.