Blog: New Features & Updates

If you're using double opt-in for your subscriber list (which we recommend), you've now got the option of seeing which subscribers have completed your subscribe form, but haven't actually clicked the verification link.

Unlike single opt in, double opt in requires your subscribers to validate their email address before being added to your subscriber list. When a new subscriber completes the subscribe form on a web site, an email is immediately sent to the supplied address containing a verification link. To complete their subscription, that person must click the verification link.

From today, you can quickly see if any potential subscribers have failed to take that final step and click their verification link. This is handy for spotting potential form entry errors like a mis-typed email address.

This feature also helps to identify any potential delivery issues with your confirmation email. We allow you guys to specify your own from name, from address and email content for the verification email. Make sure you always use valid from details and avoid potentially spammy words in your email content.

We've been hard at work behind the scenes at Campaign Monitor the last few weeks. Our focus hasn't been on new features you'll see in the interface, but they're important nonetheless and we wanted to keep you all in the loop.

It's been an exciting few months for the Freshview team. We've rolled out our second product to complete our email newsletter toolkit for designers, plus we've continually improved Campaign Monitor based on loads of customer requests.

Back in May 2005 we announced the big move to a new data centre and a solid hardware upgrade to ensure everything kept purring along smoothly. Now, almost 18 months on, we're again making a number of key upgrades behind the scenes to keep the application super fast and ensure all your campaigns are delivered in a timely manner.

Here's a few of the updates we've been working on and will be moving to in the coming weeks.

• The move to one of the world's premier tier-1 data centers. This means brand new hardware, improved scalability and some of the best support and server monitoring available.
• Complete redundancy in every layer of the application to dramatically reduce the risk of any outages moving forward.
• A big upgrade to our mail servers that will seriously improve delivery speeds.

As part of this upgrade, we'll be updating the IP's of our delivery servers, which will obviously have implications for those customers that have whitelisted these IP's or set up SPF or Sender ID records. We'll be giving you all plenty of notice on these changes and are always available to help out if you ever have any questions. We'll also ensure these IP's are added to our existing ISP whitelisting agreements, feedback loops, etc.

These upgrades will give us the breathing space we need for plenty of future growth and also give us the opportunity to work on some of the new features we've got planned for the months ahead that would have been inhibitive with our current setup. These are exciting times and we couldn't have got here without your support.

If you're looking at creating a Campaign Monitor subscribe form for a client in Flash, we've just added a sample file to our API documentation that provides a simple walkthrough on the best approach to take.

The sample includes a simple subscribe form that passes through name, email address and requires a checkbox to be checked to indicate permission.

A huge thanks goes to Nick Lloyd from Stephen Thomas and Greg McMullen for putting this together for us.

We've just made a few small updates that should keep you schedulers out there happy.

From today, as well showing the date, time and time-zone your scheduled campaigns will be sent we'll also be including how far away that actually is from right now. So instead of seeing something like 1.55pm on Friday, 25th August (Central Time), you'll also see about 4 days and 3 hours. This comes in especially handy for those scheduling multiple campaigns in multiple time zones.

On top of this, we'll also warn you when you try and schedule a campaign in the past. Previously we just assumed this was deliberate and sent the campaign immediately, now you'll get a confirmation message just to make sure.

When you import your content into Campaign Monitor, we automatically download all your images and convert all your links so they can be tracked through the reports. Works well. Everyones happy.

But, what if on the odd chance you didn't want us to do that? What if you've got a dynamically created image that you want to be different for each recipient (perhaps using data you pass in through a custom field).

Well we've just added a couple of simple attributes you can add to your code that let us know to leave certain bits alone. What do they look like? All you need to do is add either the cm_dontimportimage or cm_dontconvertlink attribute to your image or link tags. As a quick example, here's the image tag in action:

Turning off image importing

Turning off link tracking

Although we don't do any conversion when we detect these values, we do remove the cm_dontimportimage and cm_dontconvertlink values when we actually send your campaign.