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Four years ago this week was the official launch of Campaign Monitor, the email marketing web application aimed specifically at web designers. Today we wanted to look back at the beginnings of Campaign Monitor and some of the highlights of the last 4 years.

We also want to give huge thanks to everyone who has used Campaign Monitor, given us suggestions, built extensions and plugins and mentioned us to their friends, clients and colleagues.

Campaign Monitor: Origins

The need for Campaign Monitor to be built came out of frustration with existing email marketing tools that were restrictive on design, or added 'branding' into the footer, or was just painful to use. Originally built as an internal tool for a web design agency, it was soon clear that plenty of other web designers had the same problems.

In October of 2004, Campaign Monitor was released to the public. Focusing on the web design market was clearly shown to be the right choice, since we understood the needs of designers and could target features towards them. Soon there were some high profile fans helping to spread the word.

Since that time, the Freshview team has grown from 3 people up to 14, and the number of Campaign Monitor customers has skyrocketed into the tens of thousands all over the world.

Faster, stronger, better

The Campaign Monitor of 2004 was intentionally clean, simple and minimalistic in approach. The simplicity of use has been the most commonly mentioned part of the Campaign Monitor experience for all the customers we've talked to, and the team has worked hard to maintain that while adding a host of new features.

Some Campaign Monitor statistics

The email marketing business is all about numbers: Open rates, clicks, unsubscribes, bounces, replies...here's a few numbers relating to the usage of Campaign Monitor itself.

• 1 paid email campaign sent October 1st, 2004
• 1213 paid email campaigns sent yesterday
• 3780 campaigns sent by just one long time Campaign Monitor user
• 513 comments on the infamous 'Outlook 2007' post (and counting)
• 1 month to reach our first 100 customers
• 1 day (typically) to add 100 new customers
• 98% highest open rate of any campaign to 100 or more people

Behind all those fantastically designed email newsletters has been a lot of hard work from our team. We've gone back through our archives and calculated some 'behind the scenes' numbers to give you an idea what we've been up to.

• 689 bugs squashed
• 756 updates and improvements pushed live
• 624 blog posts
• 1213 staff posts in the forum

The future

So what's going to happen over the next four years? We don't release roadmaps at Freshview, we prefer to maintain our flexibility so we can do what needs doing as it turns up. However, over the next few months we've got some big improvements coming (if you were at Web Directions you might have had a sneak peek), so keep reading the blog for the latest news.

Happy Birthday Campaign Monitor!