Blog: New Features & Updates

It's been just over a month since we announced RSS to Email support in Campaign Monitor. The response since then has been crazy positive, with more than 125,000 RSS campaigns already delivered and some stunning custom RSS template designs starting to surface (we'll feature some of these here soon).

The one catch when we launched last month was that RSS to Email was only available for customers on monthly plans. It was pretty clear from the day we launched that our PAYG customers were keen to get in on some RSS action too, and so we immediately started working on making the feature available to everyone. Today I'm happy to announce that RSS to Email is now available for our PAYG customers too.

Making sure your subscribers don't miss out

Like any complex feature, there are always lots of small gotchas we need to be aware of when it comes to billing. For example, what happens if we try and send today's recurring RSS campaign for you, but you got a little carried away with your Apple obsession and the funds aren't available on your credit card? There are lots of reasons a charge might not be approved, but we wanted to give you a quick way to resolve these issues without forcing your subscribers to miss out on your daily goodness.

So, if a payment fails for some reason when sending a recurring RSS campaign for PAYG customers, we'll let you know immediately and give you a grace period to get to the bottom of it. We'll send you an email explaining exactly what happened, and if you manage to get that issue resolved within a time period (2 hours for daily, 4 for weekly and 12 for monthly), we'll automatically send the email for you.

If for some reason you can't get it sorted in the grace period, the next campaign we send will include any new content, plus the older content your subscribers would have missed because of the failed charge. There are lots of other contingencies our engineering and QA team feverishly tracked down (they really are awesome) - rest assured we'll do our best to handle things in an elegant manner.

A quick refresher

If you happened to miss the full announcement last month, here's a quick demo video to give you an overview of what all the fuss is about...

This update is the perfect example of just how much we rely on your feedback to drive where we take Campaign Monitor. Feedback via blog comments, tweets and personal emails started rolling in as soon as we launched RSS support, which made it very easy to prioritise and get it out the door as quickly as possible. We're always listening, so please, keep it coming.

We're lucky enough to get a constant stream of feedback and feature requests from customers. We record every little piece of it, and this forms a crucial part of how we decide what features to add next to Campaign Monitor.

When we made the call to offer some kind of RSS to Email support, we sat down to review the hundreds of requests, some going back years. Personally, I was expecting everyone to ask for the traditional RSS to Email functionality—you update your site or blog, we send that new content to your subscribers on a recurring basis. To my surprise, this only accounted for around half of the votes. Of course, we still built this feature, which we announced a few days back. It turns out the other half were looking for something else.

Instead of automatically sending your content, many of you wanted an easy way to get that content into your existing newsletters. Nobody likes writing something twice. Maybe you want to include specific blog posts, or it's secondary content like a sidebar of upcoming events you'll be hosting. The important thing is, that content exists somewhere else and you want to use it in a campaign.

If that's you, you're going to love One-Click Content. Here's a quick video of it in action...

How it works

If you caught our recurring RSS announcement last week, you would have seen that we've added a new kind of repeater to our template language. Known as a datarepeater, it lets you reference an external RSS feed and then display the content any way you see fit.

The cool part is, you can actually add datarepeater's to any regular email templates too. Just point the datarepeater to your blog or RSS feed, design how you want the content to appear in the email, and with a single click your content is imported into your campaign and ready to send. You can even have multiple datarepeater and regular repeater tags in a single template.

Let's say, for example, that you publish a blog called Signal vs. Noise. You occasionally send a newsletter, and would like to include some of your blog content in each issue. Just add the following code to your template...

<datarepeater type="rss" src="http://www.37signals.com/svn/">
    <rsstitle/>
    By <rssauthor/>
    <rssbody paragraphs="1"></rssbody>
    <rssitemlink>Read more...</rssitemlink>
</datarepeater>

In this code we're referencing our blog with the src attribute, and then displaying the title of each post, plus the author and the first paragraph of the post itself, followed by a "Read more" link that points to the full post on our site. There are lots of other content options, such as images, enclosures, dates, comments and more, which are all covered in our lovely new documentation. You can even use alternating designs for each item in the feed via our layout tag.

What you'll see in the editor

Whenever you create a regular campaign and select this template, you'll see this nice blank slate in the editor. You can click the image for a larger version.

Click, Choose, Send

Clicking the the "Load posts" button will show the most recent posts from this RSS feed in the sidebar of the editor. You can also see an instant preview of how this content looks in my campaign.

You can then choose exactly which posts I'd like included, click "Done" and my campaign is good to go. Because of the ubiquity of RSS, there are so many ways you can use this feature. Here are a just a few quick examples of the sort of content you might want to automatically import:

• The last 4 posts from your blog
• Your upcoming events on Eventbrite
• Your 5 most recent tweets

Getting started is easy, and we've put together a sample template to help you get started even faster.

View the RSS template language and download a sample template

Leave your options open

If you're using One-Click Content for a client, we recommend making it crazy simple by specifying the address of their site or RSS feed in the datarepeater tag. As I mentioned earlier, you do this via the src attribute, for example:

<datarepeater type="rss" src="http://www.client.com/rss">

If you'd prefer to leave options open for yourself, or a more savvy client, you can leave out the optional src attribute. If you leave it blank, we'll let you choose an RSS feed right there in the editor. Here's the code:

<datarepeater type="rss">

Because an src hasn't been provided, clicking on the "Load posts" button will let you enter the web site or RSS feed you'd like the content to come from:

As soon as you enter the web site, we'll grab the feed contents and let you select what you'd like included. Again, click the image for a larger version.

We're also working hard on supporting other data formats on top of RSS to open even more possibilities for importing your content into your campaigns. We've got big plans, and more details on this will be coming soon.

In a little under two weeks, we'll be making a subtle change to the way we handle email authentication in Campaign Monitor. For those of you new to the concept, email authentication tells your subscribers it's OK for our servers to send email on your behalf. It can help you avoid spam filters, and also proves your email isn't a forgery. All good things.

Right now, email authentication is an opt-in kind of thing. It's not on by default, but we've tried to make it as painless as possible to set up. The problem is, it's still pretty painful. For starters, you need to have access to the DNS records for your domain. In many cases that can rule this process out, or at the very least start your eyes glazing over.

The trouble is, this stuff is important. So, we're taking a different approach. Starting Monday, March 26 we'll be turning on email authentication for everyone.

A small change in Outlook

If you've already set up your own authentication, we're not changing a thing. For those of you that haven't, there's one small change that we want you to be aware of. Because we'll be authenticating on your behalf, we add a couple of new details to the header of any emails you send. To the vast majority of your subscribers, this won't change a thing. But, there is a subte change your Outlook subscribers may notice. Here's what they'll see:

It's the extra from address and on behalf of that I highlighted in yellow that's new here. Because we're authenticating for you, we need to include our own domain in your mal headers/ Outlook lets their users know this at the top of the email. It's also worth pointing out we'll only ever use our white label domains when sending on your behalf - there's never any mention of Campaign Monitor. It's also worth adding that this small snippet is something any Outlook user would already have seen at the top of countless emails in the past. We think it's a small price to pay to help avoid spam filters and ensure your email never appears to be a forgery.

Alternate options

If you're not crazy about the "on behalf of" snippet, we've made it nice and easy to opt-out of us authenticating for you. Remember, we won't start this until March 19, so you have some grace time. To change this setting, just head into "Client Settings" and click on the new "Authentication Settings" in the sidebar. Here's what you'll see (click for full-size):

By default, "Authenticate all emails for me" will be checked. If you'd like to opt-out, you have two options...

Set up your own authentication

Authentication is a great thing. If you don't want us to do it for you, we recommend you do it yourself. This is the same approach we've always supported, and it will mean your domains are authenticated and no "on behalf of" text will appear in Outlook or "via" snippet will be shown in Gmail. The only drawback is that you'll need to have access to the domain's DNS settings to complete the process.

Don't authenticate my emails (not recommended)

If you don't have access to your DNS settings and you really don't like the "on behalf of" text in Outlook, you can disable authentication entirely. It's not something we recommend, but it's the easiest way to avoid any Outlook subscribers noticing a change. This is the default for how we've been sending email for you to date, so you won't see any negative impacts, you just won't experience the positive impacts of letting us sign for you.

Update

After further testing, we've confirmed that the "via" text in Gmail isn't impacted by letting us authenticate your email for you. Even if you turn authentication off, the "via" text will still appear for all your Gmail subscribers. This is exactly what they would have see before this update, so nothing is actually changing here for your Gmail subscribers.

The only way to avoid this "via" snippet altogether is to set up your own authentication by following our step-by-step guide to updating your DNS.

Today, I'm very happy to announce the release of RSS to email support in Campaign Monitor. Sure, RSS to email has been done before, but I can promise you it's never been done like this. We went back to the drawing board and put together what we think is the nicest, easiest to use RSS to email tool on the market. Over the last few years this has consistently been one of the most requested features we've ever had, and we're really happy with how it came together. Here's how it works...

A new type of campaign

Recurring RSS is an entirely new type of email campaign. In a nutshell, it allows you to automatically send an email to your subscribers whenever you update your site or blog. We then show you elegant reports that make it easy to see what your readers are actually interested in. Here's a quick video tour showing some of the highlights:

There are lots of nice touches throughout this feature, but here are a few of the standouts.

Reporting you can learn from

Just like regular one-off campaigns, we provide you with a detailed report that shows the performance of your recurring campaigns over time. You can easily spot trends over time, dig into what posts were popular for a specific email, and even see what the most popular posts of all time are.

We also show you which countries your readers are from, and with complete Worldview integration you can even watch your subscribers open your campaigns in real-time.

Roll your own design

Instead of limiting your emails to a range of templates, you can create your own recurring RSS design by adding a few simple tags to any HTML page. Those of you already familiar with our template language will be right at home with the new <datarepeater> tag.

View the RSS template language and download a sample template

Our new template language for RSS campaigns allow you to include specifics from each post in your RSS feed like the date it was published, a link to comments, the author who wrote it and more. You can even use the <layout> to create a series of alternating designs for each item in your RSS feed.

Or, customize a template in seconds

For those of you that don't want to start from the ground up, you can use the template builder to quickly create a great looking mobile-optimized design for your RSS campaigns. We'll automatically show you your feed content and let you customize how it should be displayed to your subscribers.

Facebook and Twitter integration

We've made it easy to add social sharing features to your recurring RSS campaigns. By adding our social sharing tags, your subscribers can easily Like any post on Facebook or tweet about it to their own followers.

Flexible scheduling

You can choose to send these campaigns on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. You can get even more granular and send each campaign on the second Monday of every month at 9.25am. We'll leave it up to you.

As well as flexible scheduling, you can also select a range of recipients. It might be a single list, multiple lists or even different segments. This means you can create multiple recurring RSS campaigns and then let your subscribers choose the frequency they'd like to get updates from you. Passionate readers can get daily updates, while others can get a slimmer summary each month.

That's not all folks

While automatically sending is great for some, what if you'd like to populate some of your email content from an RSS feed, but not necessarily send it on autopilot. Maybe you only want to include certain posts, or it's secondary content like a sidebar of upcoming events you'll be hosting.

In the next few days we'll have another exciting new feature to share that lets you do just that. And here it is... introducing One-Click Content.

Update: PAYG support is here

While we initially launched RSS to Email for only monthly customers, we just released an update that means PAYG customers can now set up recurring RSS campaigns too. Check out the details.

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!