Blog: New Features & Updates

All you Ruby developers out there will be pleased to know that a new SOAP-based Ruby gem has just been released for the Campaign Monitor API. The gem is the work of clever Campaign Monitor customer Marcelo Menezes, who was kind enough to open source his code and make it available to all at GitHub.

You might remember that we already have an existing Ruby gem available for the API. This gem uses the HTTP protocol to interface with our API and covers most, but not all of our API methods. Marcelo's gem instead uses the SOAP protocol and also covers every method currently available in the API. A big thanks to Marcelo for his hard work and generosity in sharing it with the Campaign Monitor community.

Thanks to suggestions from you guys, and the hard work of the development team, the Campaign Monitor API continues to get more powerful. Today's update adds the ability to delete campaigns from your account via the API.

You can delete both drafts and already sent campaigns, which comes in handy when you've sent a few test emails, or created a draft campaign that didn't work out. Find out exactly how it works by reading the Campaign.Delete method documentation. Thanks to our new developer James who made it all happen.

Add that to the bunch of API methods added earlier this year, and we are starting to see some very cool API integrations happening. Not everyone can write API integration code themselves, but there might be a plugin you can use to hook your Campaign Monitor account up to your other tools.

Keep an eye on the blog for more plugins and integrations over the coming months.

While some of the team have been putting the finishing touches on our new A/B split testing feature, we've also been hard at work on a range of speed improvements we plan on making across Campaign Monitor.

We've been consistently growing at more than 1,000 new customers each week for the last year now. While this is nothing short of awesome, it also means we need to be conscious of our own infrastructure. Today we completed a significant database upgrade that brings with it a host of speed improvements across the application as well as much improved scalability.

Serving your images from 15 key locations

On top of this upgrade, we also pushed a big improvement to how we render images in your recipients email clients. Traditionally, all images in HTML emails were served from our main data center in North Carolina. As of today, all campaign images are now served from a global Content Delivery Network (CDN) across North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. Here's a quick map to show you the locations your campaigns are now being served from.

Whenever you import a HTML email campaign or template, we'll automatically cache copies of that content across 15 key locations around the world. Whenever a recipient opens your campaign, we'll choose the optimal data centre and serve your image content directly from there. This results in a dramatic reduction in email load times for many of your recipients. The best part is, it's completely automated, free of charge and available now.

For those customers using custom domains, your images will also be served from the CDN by default (which uses the createsend domain). All tracking links will still use your custom domain, and you can have the CDN switched off in your account at any stage by getting in touch with our support team and requesting it.

A better experience for your subscribers

This update ensures image-based campaign content will now render significantly faster for all subscribers. A reduction in load times reducing the chances of a recipient getting impatient and moving on to the next email in their inbox.

Added redundancy

As well as a big speed increase in rendering times, this update also provides additional redundancy for your campaigns. If one data center is unavailable, the content will be served from the next closest location. Think of it like 15 backups of your campaign in highly secure, reliable locations around the world, not to mention the addition backup procedures we have place in our main data center.

Lots more to come

Now that your email campaigns are rendered faster, we're moving on to more speed increases to the software itself. The first step will be serving all Campaign Monitor assets (images, CSS files, scripts, etc) from the CDN too. We're also switching to a much slimmer JavaScript library and optimizing the majority of files to keep the footprint of the software to a minimum.

While this is happening, we're also warming up a second data center location that we'll be load balancing between. This will give us another nice speed boost, add an extra level of redundancy to every layer of our platform and give us an additional range of IP's to deliver campaigns from. We'll be sharing more details about the benefits of this soon, but I wanted to keep you all in the loop about some of the exciting behind the scenes improvements coming to Campaign Monitor over the coming months.

We just pushed a nice little update live to give you more flexibility when removing subscribers from your list.

Previously, when you wanted to remove a subscriber, the only option was to unsubscribe them from that list. Whenever someone is unsubscribed from your list, we also add them to your client-wide suppression list by default. This is a nice safety measure to ensure that subscriber is never accidentally imported into another list again and sent to.

In most cases, this is just how you want the remove subscriber feature to work. We've since discovered many of you using our subscriber lists in unique ways where you need a little more flexibility.

For example, let's say you divide your subscribers between a list of members and a list of non-members. When a non-member decides to join your organization, you need to move them across to your members list. On the flip-side, some people let their membership lapse and should be move in the opposite direction. Previously you'd need to unsubscribe them from one list, remove them from the suppression list and re-add them to the members list.

This new update makes this problem a thing of the past. Whenever you're removing one or one thousand subscribers from a list, you now have the option of just deleting them from that list, instead of unsubscribing them (highlighted in yellow below). Now you can add them straight into the other list without the suppression list messing with you.

In the example I gave above, you could also use our custom fields and segments feature to work around this problem. Just set up a custom field to indicate if they are a member or non-member and then update that custom fields by re-importing any subscribers with the new membership value.

In our experience, it can often make more sense for some customers to keep separate lists, so now you have the option of easily moving members around no matter how you approach your list management.

This one has been hard to keep under wraps, but after loads of customer requests and a few months of hard work, I'm happy to announce that we'll shortly be adding support for A/B testing to Campaign Monitor. This is one of those features that we always wanted to add, but were never completely satisfied with the best way to implement it.

Testing is one of the great strengths of email marketing. Almost everything is measurable, making it easy to compare multiple approaches and quickly figure out what works best for your subscribers. It's a guesswork killer.

That's the theory anyway. In reality, most of the A/B testing systems we've seen are bloated and hard to use beasts that require a manual just to get started. That never sat well with us, so we went back to the drawing board. We knew that if running an A/B test wasn't as quick and easy as sending a regular campaign, it was never going to get used.

We plan on releasing this in the next month or so, but wanted to give you all the heads up on what's coming. The testing feature will be available for everyone, including your clients if you've given them access to send their own campaigns.

Choose the test, we'll do the rest

Instead of forcing you to create segments of lists, send multiple campaigns and scour over pages of statistics, our testing tool does all the heavy lifting for you.

All you need to do is choose what to test (subject line, from name or different email content) and how to decide the winner (open rate, link clicks, etc) and we'll take it from there.

Campaign Monitor will then send both versions to a small subset of your recipients, see which version wins and automatically send that winning version to the remainder of your recipients. In a couple of clicks you've guaranteed that the best version of your email is being sent to your subscribers, and you've learned something doing it.

While we'll be sharing more details when A/B testing goes live in the next month or so, here's a sneak peek at how the process will look in your account.

A new type of campaign to send

When you create a new campaign, you'll notice a new tab for running an A/B split campaign. Clicking that will let you choose what test you want to run and get started.

Setting the test parameters

A simple slider makes it easy to choose the size of your list you'd like to test on. Next choose how to pick the winner and how long the test should run for.

Watching a test in progress

For all you stats junkies out there, this sweet report gives you a bird's eye view of a test as it's running. When the winner is decided, we'll send it to the rest of your list automatically. If you like, you can pre-empt this and send any time during the test.

Post-test report with benefit estimates

After the test is run and the winning version sent to the remainder of your recipients, you can access the full results of the test. We'll also extrapolate the performance improvement of the winning version to give you an idea of the total benefit of sending that version to the remainder of your list. It's a great way to justify testing to your client or boss.

When will this be available?

We're putting the finishing touches on this feature now before running it through our usual phase of heavy testing (thanks to our new QA engineer Trish). While we can't give an exact date just yet, we're hoping to have this available in all accounts within a months time. We plan on sharing more as we get closer to launch.

If you have any feedback (positive or negative) or questions about this new feature, we'd love to hear them below.