Blog: New Features & Updates

A while back we quietly pushed an update live that meant the entire Campaign Monitor experience was now served securely over SSL. Originally only our signup, login and all payment pages were served this way. In the interest of keeping your data as secure as possible at all times, we recently made the call to switch the entire application over.

This means that there is always a secure, encrypted link between you (or your clients) and Campaign Monitor. It also ensures account data such as your subscriber lists and campaign reports remain private at all times.

It's also worth noting that we've gone with a white label approach with our SSL certificate that doesn't relate directly back to Campaign Monitor. As always, we want to provide the best experience possible for everyone while staying true to our private label offering.

There is one important exception to our SSL support right now, it's not available for accounts with custom domains. A custom domain allows you to host your Campaign Monitor account at any domain of your choosing. Because we need to own the domain we set up the SSL certificate for, we can't just roll this out for everyone automatically. In reality, this just means business as usual for custom domain accounts. Like always, your login and payment pages will still be served via SSL.

This certainly isn't a huge update, but it's one of the many small tweaks we're continually making to the application and our infrastructure to make sure we can offer you guys a secure Campaign Monitor experience. Plus, it helps our sysadmins sleep better at night. Even if they already know how much we all appreciate them.

After making it easy to specify which page you want your subscribers to Like on Facebook, we've just added two optional properties to our new tweet tag to encourage more people to follow you on Twitter when using our social sharing feature.

Recommend who to follow

The new recommend property allows you to suggest a Twitter user that anyone who tweets about your email campaign should follow. This could be your own Twitter account, another account you're trying to promote or a completely different Twitter user you think your subscribers will get some value from. Here's the code:

With the recommend property added, anyone who shares your campaign on Twitter will now see the following suggestions after they post the tweet.

A nice little bonus is that if a subscriber is already following you, or whoever you recommend, this message won't be shown. It's only visible to people who aren't already following you, which they can start doing with a single click.

Add yourself as the tweet source

These days most of us are familiar with the use of via to credit the source of the original message. With the addition of our new via property, you can add your own Twitter account as the source any time somebody shares your campaign. Here's how the code looks:

Once that property is added, we'll credit your account as the source of the tweet by adding via yournamehere at the end of any tweet sharing your campaign. Just like the recommend property above, it's a great way to expose your own Twitter account and potentially attract more interested followers. Here's how it looks:

Mix and match

Using our recent newsletter as an example, here's the code to include both properties at once, as well as provide your own image instead of the default Twitter share button.

As you can see, you can use the same account for both the via and recommend properties so that those who share your email as well as their followers both have an opportunity to follow you too.

Moments ago we took the wrapping paper off an amazing new Campaign Monitor feature called Worldview. It's an entirely new way to see the results of your email campaigns, it's totally addictive, and I think you're going to love it. If you're busy and don't have time to read the details, here's a demo so you can see it in action.

What is Worldview?

Do something enough times, no matter how amazing, and you become complacent (watch this if you don't believe me). I think the same holds true when we send email campaigns.

You click the "Send" button, your reports start filling up with numbers and you move on to something else. But remember, those weren't ten thousand email addresses you just sent to. They were ten thousand real people. Real people that were nice enough to give you permission to enter their home, their office or their phone and start a conversation.

Worldview reminds you these are real people you're sending to, not email addresses.

Every time you send a campaign, we'll show you who is opening it, clicking links, forwarding it to their friends, liking it on Facebook or mentioning it on Twitter. Here's the cool part—we'll show you this on a map, in real-time, all wrapped in a gorgeous UI.

Go full-screen

Full-screen is the best way to experience Worldview. With a single-click we remove all distractions so you can watch the pins drop as your subscribers interact with your email. I've had the fortune of testing Worldview live for a few days now, and it's amazing how long you can sit there and stare at this thing.

Built to share

Once we built an early prototype of Worldview and saw it in action, we knew it was something people would want to share. So, we decided to build a public version that you can share with anyone.

While the private version in your account includes your subscribers' details like name, email address and an avatar, the public version just shows what happened (such as an open, or a tweet) and where, without actually showing who was behind it.

The shared version also supports custom domains, so you can keep it branded if that's what you'd prefer.

Free for every campaign you send

Worldview is live and available now for every campaign you send. In fact, if you've sent a campaign in the last week or so you'll find a new Worldview link in the sidebar ready to roll. I'm not going to lie, I'm really excited about this feature, and can't wait to hear what you think about this new way to meet your subscribers.

Hot on the heels of our custom domain announcement last week, we rolled out more social sharing goodness today. This time we focused on making our Facebook integration much more flexible.

Set what you want your subscribers to "Like"

When we launched social sharing, we made it easy for any of your subscribers to Like your email on Facebook. That worked well for a lot of you, but was a little inflexible for some. You might have your own Facebook page that you'd rather them Like instead. Your email might be pointing people to a landing page, and you want your subscribers to Like that page instead of the email itself. Now that's all possible, all without your subscriber ever needing to leave your email.

Introducing the likeurl property

To keep things as flexible as possible, we've added a new property to the fblike tag called likeurl. Throw any URL in there, and that's what your subscribers will be Liking when they click the button in your email.

An example of this in action

Here's where the good stuff happens. Let's say I'm sending a weekly newsletter for Threadless, who have done an amazing job of getting more than 250,000 people to Like them on Facebook. When I send my weekly email, I'd much rather my subscribers Like my main Facebook page for Threadless rather than an individual email I'm sending. So, I throw the following in my email:

Now, when any of my subscribers hit this Like button, they'll see something like this (depending on whether or not any of their friends on Facebook like Threadless already).

As well as putting this like on the subscriber's Facebook wall, they will also continue to see any updates Threadless post to Facebook. Essentially, that recipient is subscribing to your Facebook page when they Like it. It's a brilliant way to encourage your email subscribers to keep up with you through another medium.

One small design change you might notice is that we now list the URL that person is liking below the modal title, just to make it clear what it is they are endorsing.

Take control of Likes with Open Graph

It's possible to customize how Likes display on profiles, using Facebook's Open Graph protocol. For instance, if you want a custom picture and description to display when someone Likes your site, then you can set this by adding Facebook-specific meta tags to the site itself (not the email campaign). Find out more at Facebook's developer site.

Keeping your reports simple

Now that you can set the URL you want subscribers to Like for an individual Like button, and you can have multiple Like buttons in a single email, we wanted to make sure that data was available in your social report.

Now when a subscribe Likes a URL that you've set that isn't the email itself, we'll include the specifics in the sharing timeline. This means that even if you include multiple Like buttons in an email, each with a different destination page, you can still see a split of which ones were more popular in your reports. Here's an example:

We'll still pool all of your Likes together at the top of your reports so you can easily compare them against those that share your email on Twitter or forward it to their friends.

With this out the door, we've got some other surprises for sharing on Twitter coming your way soon. A big thanks to everyone who gave us so many great suggestions after the initial launch of social sharing. It's been brilliant seeing so many of you embracing it already, and hopefully this update will encourage more of you to follow suit.

Despite the slow crawl the email client industry is making towards better standards support, building an email that looks good across the board is still no mean feat. I guess that's why our design and spam testing tool is still so popular. With a single click we'll show you exactly how your design will look in 20+ of the most popular desktop, web and mobile email clients. We'll also run it through all the popular spam filters, for just $5 a test.

While this feature is great for your own piece of mind, it's also very useful if you're designing for someone else. I've spoken to lots of customers who like to show these test results to their clients before sending. It's a great way to set expectations and remove any surprises. Nothing worse than a client demanding their email looks great in Lotus Notes after you've sent it.

With this in mind, we've launched a new sharing feature for all design and spam tests. Now you can provide anyone with a link where they can check out the full results for any tests you've run. Here's what it looks like.

Click that button, and we'll give you a simple URL you can pass on to anyone you like.

When anyone visits that URL, they'll be taken to a slimmed down version of your account. That means it will be 100% private label using your color scheme, logo and even your own custom domain. This is the only page they'll have access to, meaning they can't see results for other tests or gain access to any other parts of your account.

This should make it loads easier to share your test results with anyone you like. We've got some more cool updates to announce in the coming days, but in the mean time, happy testing.