Blog: New Features & Updates

When selecting the recipients for a campaign, you used to have the option either selecting your subscriber lists, or manually adding the recipients.

Our main motivation behind this option was to make it really easy to sample Campaign Monitor without the need for creating a subscriber list. The downside of this is that there are so many benefits of sending from a subscriber list as opposed to just copying and pasting your recipients. Unsubscribes and bounces are remembered, you can customize the subscribe and unsubscribe process, you can track subscriber activity, the list goes on.

As of today, you can no longer manually add more than 10 recipients for a campaign. If you want to send to more recipients, you'll need to create a subscriber list first. This still makes it easy to try Campaign Monitor without creating a list, but encourages customers to create a list for larger campaigns once they get going.

Of course, providing you've got permission you can still copy and paste as many recipients as you like into the subscriber list, you'll just have to do that before sending the campaign.

Firstly, I want to thank everyone for their fantastic suggestions and feedback over the last week since we launched segmentation. You guys have had some great ideas, a few of which we'll be looking at adding soon. Keep them coming! A few customers also let us know they wanted to use custom field values that contained commas. For example, for State, they wanted "New York, NY". That one was pushed out the door this morning.

To compliment our list segmentation update, we also overhauled the process of creating custom fields. If you didn't already know, custom fields allow you to capture extra info on each of your subscribers. This can be anything you like. Zip code, interests, sock color - whatever you need to capture so you can better target or personalize your campaigns.

It's now super easy to create custom fields with pre-defined options. For example, you can create a custom field for Interests, with pre-defined options like Surfing, Skiing and Reading. You can also control whether a subscriber can choose multiple options, or just one. This makes it very easy to match up your user preferences when you create segments and ensures better data integrity for each subscriber.

We've also made the conscious decision to limit the number of custom fields to five (plus name and email address). There are a few reasons behind this one:

1. Campaign Monitor is an email marketing tool, not a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool. We provide many ways to synchronize your subscriber lists with another database.
2. After reviewing tons of sent campaigns, we confirmed that people aren't personalizing their campaigns with any more than 2 or 3 custom fields, max.
3. The less we store the faster, simpler and more scalable we can keep things.

We didn't quite make your Christmas stockings, but list segmentation is finally here. This has consistently been the most requested feature over the last 12 months, so we're really pleased to get this update out. Now it's a piece of cake to target your emails at specific groups of subscribers based on their custom fields or past campaign behavior.

Below is a screenshot from a sample list where we've created a segment containing the male drummers in our list who have opened a campaign in the past.

We hope you like the approach we took for creating segments, but we'd love your feedback on what we can improve to make it even easier to use.

We've also made some subtle changes around creating custom fields and subscribe forms that make it easy to store and capture extra information on each of your subscribers. We'll go into a little more details about these changes in the next few days. Enjoy.

Well... maybe not, but you're getting it anyway!

After loads of customer requests (and I mean loads), we've just got the ball rolling on a big upgrade that will allow you guys to very easily target specific groups within your subscriber list. This opens up endless opportunities to break down your lists into smaller, juicier segments. For example:

• All your female customers who spent more than $1,000 last year.
• Every subscriber who lives in Chicago and is aged between 35 and 50.
• All subscribers who showed interest in Product x from your last newsletter.

To support segmentation, we'll also be overhauling custom fields and the way you create subscribe forms - making it much easier to find out more about each subscriber. Most importantly, none of this new functionality will get in your way. If segmentation isn't for you (and it's not for everyone), then you won't have to change a thing about how you already use Campaign Monitor.

Stay tuned, we'll be announcing more about these updates in the coming weeks.