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Making your subscriber list personal with Flowtown

April 29, 2010

Face it - we've all either received an email from someone we didn't know that well, or taken a business card, then later struggled to put a face to a name. In the olden days, this could be all kinds of awkward, but now with the power of social media, it's not that hard to find a Twitter account or user profile to jog your memory.

In a nutshell, Flowtown is a nifty web app for creating targeted, personal marketing campaigns by applying this process to your customers overall. By pairing email addresses with public social media profiles, it not only allows you to learn more about individual contacts, but more importantly, provides insight into your customers' location, social media usage and more. All with nifty analytics and campaign management tools tucked in for good measure.

Using Flowtown integration with Campaign Monitor, we can now turn our humble subscriber lists into rich social media profiles, based on information spread across services like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. What's better, Flowtown automatically populates your Campaign Monitor subscriber list with custom fields including geographic location, gender and even age range, so you can segment your campaigns in unprecedented ways. Here's a short screencast that wraps it up nicely:

But hold on a moment...

You're probably thinking, this is taking it a step too far in terms of collecting personal details. So, first things first, Flowtown does not provide:

Personal stuff, like house address, or even status updates
Phone numbers
Pics of you at that party on Friday night...

In short, it aggregates general information, like city and gender. Stuff that a lot of folks have requested that we include in our reports, anyway. Here's my personal profile:

Yep, put your pens down, boys, there's nothing to see here. So now we've got that out of the way, lets get on with the show.

Subscriber list in, good times out

Importing your Campaign Monitor contacts into Flowtown is really too easy. Once you fire up a free trial account, all you need is your Campaign Monitor site address, username and password handy, then Flowtown pretty much walks you through the rest. Here's the import process:

You then select the subscriber list you wish to import and voila! Flowtown gets to work matching your email addresses with social media profiles. It takes roughly 2 seconds to process each email address, so go find something fun to do in the meantime... Flowtown will send you an email when it's done, anyway.

Once your subscribers have been imported, you will see a list like this:

Apologies for the blurring to protect the innocent, but Flowtown has matched email address with full name, location and a list of social media services used by each subscriber. You can then browse through profiles, send text-only email campaigns to subscribers from within Flowtown, or check out some fancy reports:

Once you've got a feel for what you can do from within Flowtown, it's time to take the magic back to Campaign Monitor.

Every player gets a prize!

I love discovering that a task requiring a bit of effort has already been done for me. Like, when I come home to find the dinner has been done, or some neat content for the blog lands in my lap. I got that same feeling when I logged into my Campaign Monitor account, to find six additional custom fields added to my subscriber list. Thank you, Flowtown!

Courtesy of the new custom fields, you can segment your list by social network, city, state, country, gender or age group (based on this information being available):

Where Flowtown makes the information available, segmentation by location is very useful. Same applies to targeting your subscribers by gender. I've met enough Kellys and Jordans to know that the joke in guessing gender by email address isn't funny anymore.

In summary, we're fans of Flowtown. It looks great, makes it really easy to segment your campaigns and adds a lot of useful information to your Campaign Monitor subscriber lists. Perhaps best of all, it makes it all personal. Your subscriber list is no longer a dull list of email addresses, but a collection of living, tweeting people, with faces, occupations and relationships. Like it should be.

Posted in: New Features & Updates

14 Comments

Nickolas Simard
April 29, 2010 10:29pm

I’ve been following Flowtown for a little while and I’m thrilled to now see it’s integrated with CM. I’ll do some test right away!
darron
April 30, 2010 1:22am

Wow - this is incredible. Any reason why I’m only able to access 1 subscriber list? I have a number of clients in my Campaign Monitor account and am only to access 1 of the lists.
Ethan Bloch
April 30, 2010 3:17am

Hi Ros,

Appreciate the detailed blog post ;-)

We’re really pumped about this integration as well!

Ethan Bloch (@ebloch)
Co-Founder
Rick
April 30, 2010 6:14am

Looks great will trial this for sure!
Only downside I see currently is the restricted number of custom fields available in CM. Eg one of my clients is already actively using all 11 allocated fields so wouldn’t be able to utilise this service without compromising on other data. Is there any plan to increase the number of custom fields in the near future?
BTW I just love seeing all the integrations coming through from 3rd parties at the moment!
Jon D
April 30, 2010 9:15am

Agreed, fantastic feature, but the cap on custom fields will limit it, the client i have in mind that this would absolutely rock for is already importing as many fields as possible from Wufoo…is there any chance of configuring CM so that custom fields populated from the API don’t count toward the 11 field limit?
Ros Hodgekiss
April 30, 2010 12:04pm

darron - At this stage, you have to restart the import process to pull in more subscriber lists. I’ll let the Flowtown guys know that this is something you’re looking for.

Rick & Jon D - We’re pleased to say that expanding the number of custom fields you can have is right up there in our list of improvements for the coming months. Most certainly we’ll keep the API in step with this, too. We’ll keep you posted as more comes to light.
doomgloom
April 30, 2010 8:03pm

yes this is totally awesome but what about the impact on preference centres?

all of this extra information is sure to scare the cr@p out of some subscribers.

is there anyway to reverse this whilst i evaluate the risk?
Stig Morten Myre
April 30, 2010 9:41pm

@doomgloom You can actually hide custom fields from the preference center quite easily - have a look at this blog post for help with that.
Bart
May 1, 2010 5:25am

How is CampaignMonitor related to Flowtown?

Why does CampaignMonitor promote a service that requests (and probably saves) my CM login credentials?
Chris
May 1, 2010 8:16am

Great stuff. Just one big flaw, from a CM-reseller point of view: it totally blows your carefully labeled reseller-cover. And even worse: what’s that monkey doing there? Yikes!

Bottom line, I’ll certainly check this out for our own use, but there’s no way I can introduce this to my customers.
I have the same mixed feelings about a lot of other integrations announced by CM. All these third parties are spreading the word about the CM brand a bit to enthusiastically—considering CM is supposed to be a designers/resellers “little secret”.

Like I said: mixed feelings. I think CM is a great product by a great company and great people. And it has added a substantial revenue stream to our business. Third parties providing solutions that integrate with CM are part of the success story… and I don’t want to come across as if I envy CM that success.
But I do think it is something CM should strategically think about. Ultimately, your success is defined by your resellers—you did choose that road as your business model. It “itches” to read about third party solutions in your blog at least once or twice a month, while on the other side real important or even basic (and very, very frequently asked for—check out the forum) features like auto-responders, more flexible template tagging and more custom fields are being postponed to the point it’s costing CM clients. I mean: CM on the iPhone… nice, but hardly essential—development hours that imo could or even should have been invested in features your resellers are asking and even begging for.
CM has been great for us and I have no doubt will continue to be so. But even as a loving reseller, this is something I had to get of my chest.
Mathew Patterson
May 1, 2010 4:35pm

Thanks for the feedback Chris,

We do always appreciate it, and can understand your point. There are two sets of users for Campaign Monitor - people using it for themselves, or transparently for their clients, and people rebranding it.

For the first group, these kinds of features are a huge bonus, and believe me we get tons of requests for these plugins and integrations. We also don’t spend our own development time on them, they are typically produced by our customers or the provider on the other end of the plugin.

Please don’t think we’ve forgotten resellers - our development team is working super hard on a bunch of great improvements on the front end, and in the background. Those are much more involved projects and take longer to be released, so you don’t see them on the blog as often.

While those projects are underway, we keep things improving with small and less developer intensive improvements like the mobile view. Those things are not slowing down any other major functionality, they are separate people working concurrently.

Of course, there are features which people ask for that Campaign Monitor just won’t have - making those decisions is what makes Campaign Monitor nicer to use than a lot of other options.

That said, we definitely do think strategically about how everything will impact people rebranding our application, and it never hurts to be reminded of that, so thanks again.

I think you’ll be happy with some of the improvements coming up, just be aware that things are always happening that we don’t pre-announce, and in the meantime we’ll continue with releasing the smaller updates, plugins and enhancements.
Chris
May 1, 2010 8:59pm

Thanks Matthew, appreciate the explanation. As a positive person I do look at the bright side of things… waiting for some highly desired CM-features is a bit like waiting for boxing day (except with CM you’re never quite sure if Christmas will come around this year).

Ah well, all the more joy when we get to unrap the presents. “Oh wow mom, look what Santa got me: it’s a brand new autoresponder!”
PS: Not suggesting that you should wait untill Christmas of course :-P
Wendy
May 3, 2010 6:03am

We did a test using 20 addresses owned by members of our team, and were disappointed with the results. It did not pick up much information, particularly for the people who are quite active in social media.
Ros Hodgekiss
May 12, 2010 9:41am

Jon D and others: You can now include 20 custom fields in your subscriber list (in addition to Name and Email Address). Check out our blog for details on this update.

Should make it much easier to dedicate 6 fields to Flowtown info!

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