Blog: Observations & Answers

Our congratulations to Joseph Szala from Vigor Graphic Design for being the first to forward our most recent newsletter on to his friends. Our apologies to the hundreds of others that kindly passed our newsletter on, but Joseph had it forwarded in all but a few seconds. His quick hands have earnt him 10,000 free email credits to play with.

Every now and then we'll get a question about how we ensure good delivery rates or how we make sure spammers don't abuse our software. We've just added the info to our site, but it seems to be a topic of interest so I thought I'd echo it here. From personal experience, we know how frustrating it can be when you work hard on a campaign only to see it never get close to your recipient's inbox. We take deliverability very seriously, so here's a quick summary of some of the measures we have in place to ensure you never have to deal with this problem:

• Our delivery servers have been whitelisted by major ISP's.
• Our team monitors blacklists daily. If a server is ever listed (and it does happen ever so rarely), we remove it from the cluster immediately and resolve the issue on behalf of our customers.
• Until a customer has been approved, every large campaign is reviewed by our team before it can be delivered. Any spammy campaigns are removed and the account closed immediately.
• Our team verifies all large lists that are imported and ensures they comply with our strict permission policy.
• Every email sent using our software contains a single click unsubscribe link.
• Our abuse email account is monitored closely and every complaint is followed up promptly. Our software is directly integrated into abuse complaint systems for some large ISP's. If a sender receives an unacceptable number of complaints their account is terminated.

We certainly don't pretend to offer 100% deliverability, no-one can. What I can promise is that we take every step necessary to keep the bad guys from abusing our software and the good guys sticking to best practice. We apologize to any new customers who might experience a delay when their campaign is being approved, but trust me, it's definitely worth it.

Yep, you read that right. Not only have you got to worry about comment spam on your blogs, but your subscribe form could be the next target. We've had a number of customers let us know about this problem and have just made a small change to the subscribe form code to combat this. If you're seeing any strange subscribers in your list (especially those that mention the .com domain in the email address), grab the latest version of the subscribe code from your account. We also updated the supplied signup code to include one with basic formatting, one with CSS formatting and a table based version. A big thanks to Ken Schafer from One Degree for helping us test this solution. Great guy and a great resource for Canadian marketers.

A number of customers with larger lists might have been experiencing speed issues with some of reports, especially the Recipient Activity Report. We're constantly making small tweaks to our database to improve performance, but this update was a biggie. Thanks to a complete rethink of some parts of the database, you guys should notice significant speed improvements in the reporting section of Campaign Monitor. We're rolling out a number of other improvements in the coming days, so stay tuned.

Firstly, we remove duplicates for every campaign you send, so if a recipient is subscribed to multiple lists and you send a campaign to all of those lists, they will only ever receive one copy of your email. What about unsubscribes? If you send a campaign to multiple lists, and an individual is subscribed to more than one of those lists, they will be removed from each list if they unsubscribe from the campaign. If you send a campaign to a single list, and an individual is subscribed to multiple lists, they will only be removed from the list you sent to. They will remain in the other subscriber lists until they unsubscribe from a campaign sent to that list. This ensures your subscribers can join different types of lists, unsubscribe from one but still receive from the other. Also, when you upload subscribers into an existing list, all bounced and unsubscribed recipients WILL NOT be added to the list. We remember everyone that ever unsubscribed. The only way an unsubscribed individual can get back into your list is to subscribe again from your web site or if you manually change their status.