Blog: New Features & Updates

To keep things as easy to manage as possible, we've always kept unsubscribes at the list level, not the client level. This means that if a customer is subscribed to List A and List B and they unsubscribe from List A, they will still be subscribed to List B. This approach has worked very well for the majority of you guys. Most of you only have one or two lists per client and more often than not there isn't much cross over anyway.

The problem with this approach is that as your list management needs get more complex, the chances of an unsubscriber being accidentally sent to again increase. On top of this, there are plenty of other list management scenarios out there. You might want to ensure anyone who unsubscribed is never contacted again, no matter how many lists they're in. What if you've got a big chunk of unsubscribers from a previous system that you want to ensure are never added to any of your lists in Campaign Monitor? The list really does go on. From tomorrow, all of this will be possible from your Campaign Monitor account.

The Answer: Suppression Lists

Tomorrow we'll be introducing a new feature called "Client-wide supression lists". This is basically a client-wide do not email list. Here's a screenshot of how you can access this list from your subscriber list index page:

Any address in this list will never be added to your subscriber lists and you can add and remove addresses from it whenever you like. By default, any unsubscribes from each list will be added to the suppression list for that client automatically. Here's how the page to manage your suppression list will look:

This keeps you safe by ensuring you can never re-send to a previous unsubscriber accidentally. The best part is, you don't need to lift a finger to start taking advantage of this feature, it will work behind the scenes automatically.

Choose which approach works for you

While the suppression list will be turned on by default for each list, we've give you the ability to turn it off on a list-by-list basis. If you'd like to revert back to the old approach, no problem at all. You'll be able to adjust how this is handled in the Unsubscribe Settings for that list. Here's a quick screenshot of the new options:

I hope you all find the new suppression list feature useful. We think it's a big improvement over the current approach and like any good update, works seamlessly behind the scenes without you actually needing to do anything.

We've always had a very strict permission policy at Campaign Monitor with clear-cut rules about what does and doesn't constitute permission. There was however one piece of functionality which perhaps relaxed our high standards a little - forward to a friend reporting.

To date, we not only store which of your subscribers forward your email to a friend or colleague, we also told you exactly who they forwarded it to. We certainly didn't add these friends to a list or anything nasty like that, but we did expose their details nonetheless. To compound the problem, it wasn't crystal clear on the Forward to a Friend page that your friend's details were even being captured. Another slap on our wrists.

While we never had any negative incidents or complaints around this issue, it's clearly not best practice and we've gone ahead and stopped capturing exactly who forwards to who. Instead, you'll now see which subscribers forwarded your email and how many people they forwarded it to. This change has also been applied to any previous campaigns you've sent.

From personal experience, I know how interesting this data was, but individual's details were being exposed to the campaign sender without their permission. We need to put the privacy of these people first. If you're hoping to capture new subscribers via the Forward to a Friend feature, we recommend adding a prominent link in each email encouraging new subscribers to sign up, then link right to the subscribe form on your site.

One problem we always had with the Campaign Snapshot is that it wasn't immediately clear which subscribers you sent that campaign to. Sure, you can see the total number of recipients, but not which lists those subscribers came from.

Today we did a little reshuffling with the Campaign Snapshot to make it easier to see exactly who you sent that campaign to. Even if you sent it to multiple lists, some segments and even manually added a few recipients, we'll show it all here. Here's a quick screenshot of the updated snapshot for a campaign sent to 3 different subscriber lists:

By Clicking on the 3 subscriber lists link in the Sent to row, we reveal exactly which lists were sent to, including the number of subscribers in each:

Finally, to make it a little clearer, we also moved the date sent under the Campaign Snapshot title.

After some great feedback from a few customers, we've made some further tweaks to the 30 pack of email templates we released last week. These changes improve the results in Outlook 2007 even further, while still maintaining a consistent look in all the other email environments.

Along the way we learnt about a number of key quirks in the Outlook 2007 (um, Word) rendering engine, which we plan on posting about in the next few days. We recommend downloading the latest pack to make sure all your recipients using Outlook 2007 get the benefits of these tweaks.

We've been hard at work on a slew of improvements and bug fixes behind the scene the last few weeks, and I figured it would be worth posting a quick summary of these as there are a number of you guys that have been waiting on them patiently.

Internationalization

We've made some further tweaks to handle encoding for non English character campaigns. We now automatically encode the To name for each recipient when it contains non-standard characters. We've also added some smarts to how we encode your subject lines depending on the types of characters used. Thanks to many of our non English speaking customers for helping us get this spot on.

Segments

As well as launching segments functionality in MailBuild, we've also squashed a few annoying bugs in Campaign Monitor. This update brings some big improvements to the does not equal and greater than and less than rules, especially when working with numbers.

Help and API

As we keep adding new functionality, the variety of shortcut tags available (such as forward to a friend, unsubscribe, web versions, etc) can get harder to remember. We've just added a topic to the site and app help database that brings them all together in one place.

For those clever customers using the API to capture new subscribers, we've also made some tweaks so that all confirmation and verification emails sent to new subscribers support the [unsubscribe] tag allowing subscribers to instantly opt-out if they no longer wish to subscribe.