Forum round up: API, design & your favourite tools

Published September 20, 2007 by Mathew Patterson

Since we launched the Campaign Monitor email design forums we've had over 350 people signup, and over 400 posts on the design and technical sides of HTML emails.

We like to highlight some of the interesting things going on over in the forums - here's some you might want to check out:

What tools do you use to create your html emails?
Gmail feature request - CSS in the head!
Looking for designers - we send a lot of your potential customers to this page!

Are you a Flash developer (or do you know one?)

We don't have Flash developer skills here at Freshview, but we'd love to hear from any generous developers who have used the API to subscribe people with custom fields to a Campaign Monitor list. Check out Jason's post if you might be able to help.

Getting yourself registered for the forums is the work of a moment, so why not jump in and join us!

6 Comments

Posted in: Observations & Answers

6 Comments

Rafa
September 21, 2007 8:51pm

Hi, I didn’t really know where to comment this but…
I like your site and your service. I love the fact that you offer a cool API to remotely do things. I have had to do some hacks around in my actual mailing provider…

Anyway, I think your service is great, but boy is it expensive!! We have more than 11,000 subscribers, we have a weekly newsletter and some other occasional emails, which makes for around 7 emails sent per month. That is 77,000 mail “credits” per month; that is 924,000 per year, which costs 5,570 USD (already after a discount of 3,670 USD). That’s *20 times* more expensive that our actual provider!

Sure, we don’t get everything you offer, which would be nice to have, but I am not sure it is worth 20 times the price…

Rafa
September 21, 2007 9:13pm

Wow! I guess you don’t like people complaining about your high rates, huh? I just wrote a comment here a few minutes ago and you have already deleted it! Well done guys… Now I don’t only think you are far too expensive, I also think you don’t get critics very well, nor want to discuss them…

Rafa
September 21, 2007 9:15pm

OK… I talked too fast. sorry.

I now see my previous message appearing again. Check your blog system, there were no comments listed a few seconds ago. Maybe you are using some cache thingy and it hadn’t refreshed…

Rafa
September 21, 2007 9:16pm

Just so you know: again, there were no comments listed. When I clicked “Refresh” in the browser (Safari), then I got the comments. Sorry for posting 4 comments in a row ;-)

Dave Greiner
September 21, 2007 10:40pm

Hi Rafa, thanks for the feedback and no need to apologize. We don’t moderate comments and are happy to publish anything, positive or negative.

Our pricing probably isn’t the best match for the sort of campaigns you’re sending (2 large campaigns a week). Our product is built specifically for designers who more often than not are sending monthly campaigns for their clients, and then generally passing those costs back to their clients at a marked up rate.

Having said that, we’ve also had feedback from loads of customers who can’t believe how cheap we are. You can’t please everyone I guess. Of course, price is only part of the decision on which service to use, and we’re pour everything we’ve got into making sure we’ve got the best feature set for our target customers.

Thanks again for the feedback.
Rafa
September 25, 2007 5:07am

I guess I am not your target customer, and that sucks, because your whole service really is great and all the features seem useful. And the fact that you yourself seem to be into good design, everything looks neat and well-thought. But it is just too expensive for us. I am keeping you on “my list” so that I can use Campaign Monitor whenever I can ;-)

Keep the good work (and keep trying to lower the price!) ;-)

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