Blog: New Features & Updates

After launching our new social sharing feature a little while back, one of the biggest requests we had was support for custom domains. Our custom domain feature lets you host your account at any domain you like. It comes in handy for anyone reselling Campaign Monitor, especially those who want their account to match their brand as closely as possible.

The problem was, when you or your subscribers wanted to share a campaign, the link being shared didn't use your own domain. As of today we now use your custom domain for all social sharing. This means you, your clients and all subscribers will be sharing things using your own brand, not ours.

Here's an example of how a campaign might look when you share it on Facebook:

This also means that if whenever a subscriber "Likes" a campaign of yours, the update on their wall will promote your own custom domain. Here's an example:

Along with custom domain support, we've also rolled out loads of other awesome improvements to our social sharing feature which we'll be walking you all through over the next few days.

Thanks again to everyone for all their feedback on this, as well as your patience while we put it together. Stay tuned for more cool stuff coming soon.

Today we launched a very handy new feature making it easy to keep your Campaign Monitor lists synced with, well, anything. Using the awesome power of Webhooks, Campaign Monitor can now let any third party know the moment a change happens to your subscribers.

For a quick primer on the concept of Webhooks, this wiki is a great place to start. The idea is actually pretty simple. You tell us what you'd like to be notified about and where we should send that update when it happens. For example, let's say you have a CRM system that relies on having accurate email addresses for your customers. You can set up a webhook that automatically updates your CRM system whenever a subscriber hard bounces or changes their email address via your preference center.

The beautiful thing about this is that it's always real-time. The moment something happens on our end, we'll let you know so you can always be confident your data is up to date.

Available Webhooks

Right now you can create three types of webhooks for each list in your account. These are all administered via the API, and we'll likely add the ability to manage them via your account for those less comfortable working with the API in the future. Today, these 3 types of webhooks are available:

List Subscribe

Whenever someone is added to your list, we can keep you in the loop. This includes joining via a subscribe form, via the API, you manually adding them or importing them from a file, and more. Basically, no matter how they get added, we'll let you know about it.

Subscriber Update

While it's great to keep track of subscribers when they are added or removed from your list, it's also important to keep up with any updates to a subscriber's details over time. They might update their interests, their postal address or change an email address. We'll keep you covered for updates you make to a subscriber via the API, any changes they make via your preference center as well as when existing subscribers are re-imported with updated details via a list import.

Subscriber Deactivate

There are lots of ways an active subscriber of yours can enter an "inactive" state that you'd want to know about. They might unsubscirbe from your latest newsletter, their address might hard bounce because it's no longer in use, they might mark your email as spam at their ISP. This webhook ensures you're informed if any of your subscribers drop off the radar so you can take the appropriate action.

Using batching to lighten your load

Because of the nature of some events, such as importing a large list, we've introduced batching so we don't overload the address you set for these notifications. We'll batch up larger calls into a maximum of 1,000 events each and space them 10 seconds apart so you have time to process everything at your end.

For example, lets say you import 5,652 new subscribers into a list. Instead of making 5,652 individual HTTP POST's to the URL you set up for that webhook, we'll make 6 over 60 seconds. The first 5 would include 1,000 of the new subscribers, and the 6th would include the final 652.

Getting started

Right now all webhooks are maintained via the API. We've put together plenty of documentation on how to get started. You can easily add, delete, activate, deactivate and test webhooks with a single call. If you're already familiar with our new API you should be able to dive right in.

We're really happy to get this one out and are looking forward to seeing what sort of syncing solutions you all come up with. This really is the first step of many we plan to make in this area. We'd love to hear any feedback you guys have about webhooks and the easiest ways to keep your Campaign Monitor lists in sync with your favorite tools.

Back in March last year I excitedly posted that we'd passed $3 million in profit automatically earned by our resellers. Yesterday, I had the chance to take a peek at the numbers from December and realized we'd reached another big milestone.

Here's a chart that breaks it all down by showing the total profit earned by resellers since we launched the ability to set your own prices in 2007.

While breaking the $5 million barrier is exciting enough, it's the rate of growth that blew me away. It took us two full years to reach the $1 million mark. The next million took eight months, then five, then four and now a little over three months to break $5 million. In 2010 alone our resellers earned close to $3 million without lifting a finger. 2011 is going to be a big year for you guys.

The best part is, this is just the tip of the income iceberg. It only includes cash automatically earned by marking-up our pricing. Loads of you do your own invoicing, charge for template design and also offer advice and consulting on an ongoing basis, none of which is included in this total.

Another thing I've noticed is our monthly pricing is getting extremely popular with resellers. That makes sense. Placing clients on a marked-up monthly plan means much more predictable passive income for you and encourages your clients to stay regular with their newsletters. We're seeing more and more resellers make the switch each month.

Most importantly for me, this continuing trend shows that offering email marketing to your clients is a powerful side business for lots of you, and a profitable full-time business for many more. In a game where the majority of you get paid for your time, it's refreshing to see people generate income without lifting a finger, and keep their clients happy in the process. After all, that's why we built Campaign Monitor in the first place.

Our new Social Sharing feature went live yesterday, making it super easy for you to share your campaigns on Twitter and Facebook and then see a report of the results. Before I dive into the details, here's a preview of the new Social Sharing report. You can click it for a full-size version.

We've been thinking long and hard about the best way to add this kind of social integration into Campaign Monitor. As always, our goal was to keep the sharing process as simple as possible for you and your subscribers. Here's how it works.

In-email sharing made easy

The easiest way for your subscribers to share your email is by adding a "Tweet" or "Like" button to your campaign. Then with a couple of clicks any subscriber can share your email with their friends or followers. To do this, we've introduced two new tags that you can easily add to your existing designs.

Add a "Like" button to your campaign

Just add the following tag anywhere in your email design and we'll instantly turn that into a working Facebook "Like" button.

When your subscriber clicks on this button in their email, we'll load the following lightbox where they can "Like" your campaign and see which of their friends have also liked it. Here's an example of this in action:

If you don't want to use the standard "Like" button, just add your own text or image between the tag and we'll turn that word or image into a link that, when clicked, loads the lightbox like the one above.

Add a tweet button to your campaign

Let your subscribers tweet about your campaigns using the new tag below.

If your subscriber is a Twitter user, clicking that button takes them straight to a compose window with the tweet pre-populated with your campaign subject and a shortened URL linking to the web version. Here's how that one looks:

Just like the Facebook Like tag, you can add your own text or images between the <tweet></tweet> tags and that will be used instead of the default tweet button, giving you complete design flexibility.

Sharing made simple for your clients

If you've built templates for clients, you can easily add permanent "Like" and "Tweet" buttons to them that work for every email they send. We've also made it simple for clients to add their own share links to any campaigns they send using the editor.

Get the word out from within Campaign Monitor

Our new social tags aren't the only way to get the word out about your latest campaign. You can also share them yourselves right from Campaign Monitor. The report for every email you've ever sent now includes a new "Share" button in the top right corner. Here's how it looks:

Clicking the "Share button" will open the modal popup below, where you can share on Twitter or Facebook with a single click:

Whenever that URL is mentioned on Twitter or "Liked" on Facebook, we'll track the results for you. You and your subscribers can share your campaign any way you like and we'll handle the rest.

Real-time reporting to bring it all together

While there are lots of different ways to share your campaign, we bring it all together with the new Social Sharing report. This includes who tweeted about your campaign, who liked it on Facebook and who forwarded your email on to friends. Basically, whenever anyone shares your campaign, we'll show you who it was and how they did it.

The report is broken up into two parts. Up top we've got a summary of the activity so far across Twitter, Facebook and email forwards.

Below that is a real-time list that pulls all of this together into a single activity stream. See what people are saying about your campaign on Twitter, who's sharing on Facebook and which subscribers have forwarded it to their friends.

For each subscriber that tweets, we'll show you their Twitter avatar and a link to the tweet in question. We also link to the subscriber snapshot and display a gravatar if available for anyone who "Likes" your campaign or forwards it on to friends.

There are loads of other subtle features in this report, but I'll leave some of them for you to discover once you start sharing. We hope you guys have fun with this new feature. It's a brilliant way to learn more about who is sharing your campaigns with the world, and what they're saying about you in the process.

Update: Custom domain support now available

A big thanks to everyone for all the passionate and overwhelmingly positive comments about this new feature. You'll be pleased to know we now support custom domains for all social sharing, and have more exciting updates to social sharing rolling out shortly.

When importing a HTML email campaign (and by default for all client templates), we give you the option of automatically moving all your CSS inline. Given just how crappy some email clients are at rendering HTML email without inline CSS (grrrr, Gmail), this is something we recommend doing for all of your campaigns.

Until recently, we didn't do the best job inline @media queries or shorthand CSS.

Better @media support

If you recall a few months back, we showed you how handy @media queries can be when optimizing your emails for mobile devices. At the time, we recommended moving your CSS inline manually if you went down the @media path. That was pretty lame advice, as moving your CSS inline manually is a fairly painful experience.

We recently updated how Campaign Monitor handle inline CSS so that we only move certain types of @media queries inline. Specifically, we only move the following types inline:

All other media types, such as handheld, tv or those that specify a max-device-width will no longer be moved inline and work as intended.

Smarter default values for shorthand CSS

Shorthand CSS is a handy way to simplify your CSS by combining multiple properties, such as padding: 0 8px 3px 7px sets the top padding as 0 pixels, the right padding at 8 pixels,bottom at 3 and left at 7. If you're not familiar with them, here's a more complete rundown.

The problem is, shorthand CSS also implies a set of default values for that property if they are not explicitly set in your code. Because some email clients do a bad job of handling CSS shorthand, we expand these into longhand format when we move them inline.

Let's say you're using a condensed single font: declaration for a h3 like so:

If a value is not specified in single declaration shorthand, a default value is used (again, this is nicely covered here). For example, we're not specifying a font-weight above, so it should just default to normal.

The problem is, if this code is moved inline and a font-weight value isn't set, the font will be bolded (because it's inside a h3). In our latest update, we now include the default values for all of the properties for any given element if they are not specifically set in your shorthand. So, using the example above, the inline CSS would look something like:

Sure, a bug like this is not the end of the world. But for those of you who sweat the details, it's small tweaks like this that can make an already challenging process a little more pain-free. A big thanks must go to Cabel Sasser from Panic Software for helping spot these issues and give lots of constructive advice on the solution. The man knows his stuff.