Blog: New Features & Updates

Champagne for ExpressionEngine may have been in the wild for a few weeks already, but discussing it now doesn't discount the fact that it's one of the most fully-featured CMS plugins for Campaign Monitor that we've seen. Built by the fine folks at Natural Logic, Champagne allows you to generate both the HTML and text versions of an email campaign, schedule delivery and even select lists and segments for sending to, all from the ExpressionEngine interface.

The first thing that struck us is how simple campaign creation is. Once you setup Champagne, a new tab is added to EE's 'Edit' view. Using this tab, you can define campaign recipients and when your campaign should send. Just like other content, EE templates are used to render HTML and Text versions of your campaign. Generating a text version of a campaign is made easy with a handy plugin that is included. Champagne then does the heavy lifting by automatically creating the campaign via Campaign Monitor's API and getting the final product out the door. This same tab displays a summary of results once the campaign has been delivered.

Champagne also provides tags for adding Campaign Monitor subscriber forms to your EE sites. Custom fields are supported. Take a look at their documentation for further details.

Campaign Monitor integration with EE has seriously streamlined the content publishing experience - with a few clicks, you can push your content to the web and email, all from within the EE interface. Using your Campaign Monitor account, you can view detailed reports, edit and resend sent campaigns and take control of your subscriber lists and segments.

Champagne for ExpressionEngine costs USD $35 for a single site license, or USD $84 for a 3 site license pack. Find out more about Natural Logic's Champagne for Expression Engine.

Recently we made some subtle design tweaks to the default confirmation pages many of you (and your subscribers) have seen when using Campaign Monitor. This includes pages like the one we display when someone subscribes to your list, needs to confirm their email address or enters an invalid address. Here's a quick sample.

Generic subscription confirmation page

Generic error screen for an invalid email address

The new page designs are now consistent with the emails we send you (and the white label versions we send your clients) such as payment invoices and campaign sent confirmations.

We've tried to keep the designs as simple and generic as possible so we can minimize the disconnect between your site and these screens. Of course, you can customize the subscribe and unsubscribe confirmation pages and we'll redirect to your own version instead.

These pages are often an afterthought that get little design attention, but we do our best to keep every corner of the experience polished for you and your subscribers. We hope you like the new look.

Last week, we launched the mobile-optimized version of Campaign Monitor. The response has been astoundingly positive, however it became evident that a few things could be improved. So instead of resting on our laurels, we've taken your constructive feedback on board and rapidly rolled out a neat update to our mobile application.

A lot of the comments we received suggested improvements to the login screen. So, we've stepped out with a slightly sexier design, yet kept it congruent to the rest of the web application. We've moved the login button, resulting in a more intuitive interface. Plus, you can now remain logged in to the app, which is great news if you're regularly spying on campaign stats.

These may be all incremental improvements, but it does go to show that our team have been taking your comments and feedback to heart. Many thanks to all of you for giving it a whirl and sending in your thoughts on the app - it's a work in progress, so please let us know what else you would love to see in future updates.

Today we're super excited to announce a new mobile optimized version of Campaign Monitor that gives you and your clients quick access to great looking reports on any campaigns you've sent. It's fast, looks great and is available now. Just head to your account on any popular mobile device like an iPhone or Android and the mobile version will be shown by default. You don't need to install anything, because it is a web application, not a native phone application.

Here's a quick preview of how it looks on an iPhone.

A focus on reporting

When deciding what functionality to include in the mobile version, we've been keeping a close eye on our customers. It turns out that the most popular section of your account accessed by a mobile device is campaign reporting, so that's where we focused our efforts. More than 95% of all mobile visitors also come in on an iPod or iPhone variant, so we put a lot of work into making sure the experience was perfect on these devices in particular. It's a really nice way to get the latest stats on a campaign you've sent in a couple of thumb presses.

Great for resellers

One of the biggest issues that stopped us from building a dedicated iPhone application (as opposed to a mobile optimized web version) was that it wouldn't be any use to our customers who were reselling Campaign Monitor to their clients. We'd have to mention the name Campaign Monitor for starters.

By taking the web application approach, we can keep everything private label. When you or your clients log into their account, there is no mention of Campaign Monitor. We even honor the color scheme you've chosen in your account and use that same theme in the mobile version. It's a great new feature you can pitch to your clients, especially if they're iPhone addicts like most of our office.

Launch it like a real application

One great thing about the iPhone is that you can launch web applications just like a traditional app you've bought from the App Store. By heading into your account with Safari and adding it to your Home screen, you have a dedicated button that will load your latest reports with a single click. We even provide a nice icon and loading screen for you and your clients while the latest stats are downloading.

There is lots of cool technology under the hood of our mobile version, and I'll be sure to share some of the more interesting details in a future post.

Easy switching

While the mobile version is all about your campaign reports right now, you can still switch to the full version of Campaign Monitor and access all our functionality with a single click. At the footer of every page is a link to switch to the corresponding page in the full version of the app. We'll automatically switch you back to the mobile version the next time you log in.

Tell us what's next

We've got lots of our own ideas on other features that would be handy in the mobile version. With the first release out the door, we'd love to hear what else (if anything) you would like to see in future updates.

At Campaign Monitor we do our best to really sweat the details. While we're all big fans of shiny new features, it's always important to balance that with continual improvements to the existing software. This is especially important for those common parts of Campaign Monitor you all use day in, day out.

One such area is importing your email content. In many cases, you might import a draft you've been working on, send a preview to a colleague and notice one or two tweaks you'd like to make. While we did our best to make this process painless, there were always more clicks in this workflow than we were happy with. Not any more.

Fewer page reloads

We still think the wizard process of building your campaigns is the smartest approach, but this led to some steps being split over multiple pages. We've ditched these unnecessary page reloads and combined multiple steps into a single page. Here's the new import page which loads without a page refresh and takes a tabbed approach to your import options.

Send a preview on import

Instead of requiring you to import your content and select your recipients before you could send yourself a test email, we've build that right into the import process. You can now fire off a test email the moment you import your creative. If you spot some changes you'd like to make, you can reimport and re-test in a couple of quick clicks.

You can still do more advanced testing of personalization or run a full design and spam test later in the process, but this is really handy for a quick review or debugging a design issue in a specific email client.

Remembering your preferences

During this redesign process, we had a closer look at which of the two importing options was more popular. Turns out there was a fairly even split between importing via a URL or file upload. Importing from the web was slightly in front, so we made that the default tab. However, the moment you switch to the file upload approach we'll remember that preference and load that tab by default the next time you import. Of course, you can still switch to the other approach with a single click.

These tweaks are part of a series of optimizations we're performing across Campaign Monitor, but we've also got some exciting new features to announce over the coming days. Stay tuned.