Worldview is here, and it’s awesome
Moments ago we took the wrapping paper off an amazing new Campaign Monitor feature called Worldview. It’s an entirely new way to see the results of your email campaigns, it’s totally addictive, and I think you’re going to love it. If you’re busy and don’t have time to read the details, here’s a demo so you can see it in action.
What is Worldview?
Do something enough times, no matter how amazing, and you become complacent (watch this if you don’t believe me). I think the same holds true when we send email campaigns.
You click the “Send” button, your reports start filling up with numbers and you move on to something else. But remember, those weren’t ten thousand email addresses you just sent to. They were ten thousand real people. Real people that were nice enough to give you permission to enter their home, their office or their phone and start a conversation.
Worldview reminds you these are real people you’re sending to, not email addresses.
Every time you send a campaign, we’ll show you who is opening it, clicking links, forwarding it to their friends, liking it on Facebook or mentioning it on Twitter. Here’s the cool part—we’ll show you this on a map, in real-time, all wrapped in a gorgeous UI.
Go full-screen
Full-screen is the best way to experience Worldview. With a single-click we remove all distractions so you can watch the pins drop as your subscribers interact with your email. I’ve had the fortune of testing Worldview live for a few days now, and it’s amazing how long you can sit there and stare at this thing.
Built to share
Once we built an early prototype of Worldview and saw it in action, we knew it was something people would want to share. So, we decided to build a public version that you can share with anyone.
While the private version in your account includes your subscribers’ details like name, email address and an avatar, the public version just shows what happened (such as an open, or a tweet) and where, without actually showing who was behind it.
The shared version also supports custom domains, so you can keep it branded if that’s what you’d prefer.
Free for every campaign you send
Worldview is live and available now for every campaign you send. In fact, if you’ve sent a campaign in the last week or so you’ll find a new Worldview link in the sidebar ready to roll. I’m not going to lie, I’m really excited about this feature, and can’t wait to hear what you think about this new way to meet your subscribers.
29th March
Yes, awesome would describe this. Super cool!
29th March
OMG, that’s amazing. Kudos once again to CM.
29th March
Fabulous!!
29th March
Awesome indeed!
29th March
OH WOW ! I just sent a campaign and saw this - hugely impressed :-)
Well done team!
29th March
Cute, but not sure I see commercial value. Did you establish one? Am staring at a 40K send campaign now. Glad you don’t show all activity!
29th March
Fantastic stuff Dave, great way to visualise your campaigns connecting with the world at large.
29th March
Very cool, going to send a 8,000+ campaign soo and see how it works
29th March
This looks awesome!
Got an 80K campaign to send out Friday, very keen to check this out (and waste… er.., spend an hour watching what happens).
29th March
Slightly arousing! Can’t wait to send out the next campaign ...
29th March
Great bit of kit, made me realise that I need more exposure in the middle east and Australia. http://www.aviatoraircraftsales.com
29th March
Amazing amazing thing ;)
I wonder how you got the Google logo out of the map ... would you mind sharing the details of that?
29th March
Very very cool. Can you explain how the thumbnail photos get there in your demo?
29th March
Yeah very cool! Would be good to know a little more about how it works? Like Nark Walker says how do the thumbnails get there?
30th March
Great to hear you’re loving it everyone, thanks for the great feedback so far.
@Snooker, not sure about the logo side of things, but will ask around in the morning and get an answer for you.
@Nark and @Shaun, the thumbnails are actually called gravatars, which is a free avatar service anyone can add their own photo to. Loads of popular sites on the web support it, it’s kind of becoming a standard for avatar hosting. Gravatars are tied to an email address, so we do a look up for each of your subscribers and show them if one is available.
30th March
Sent out a big campaign for a client today - loving this report.
How are people located?
30th March
Hi, Love this feature, but would be good to know how they are located as i opened a clients email from a campaign we just sent out in the UK and so did the client and its saying we are about 200-300 miles from where we actually are…......we do like the feature though.
30th March
Absolutely amazing. I’m looking at my worldview for a campaign I sent this morning right now. just incredible. great great job.
30th March
@Richard and @David, location is based on the IP address of your subscriber when they opened, clicked, etc. We then do a lookup to get the most accurate location possible based on that IP. Sometimes it’s super accurate, other times it can be the other side of the city, or even much bigger distances.
It all really depends on the ISP that subscriber uses and what details are publicly available. The country summary below will be super accurate, and the pin drops will be as accurate as can be based on the data we get back.
30th March
Awesome!
Geolocation via email opening, shweeeet!
Well done to all.
Anthony
30th March
How accurate are the Geo data and how to you gather it?
30th March
How accurate is the Geo data and how are you gathering it?
30th March
Awesome feature, love it!
30th March
Based on my limited experience in LA I’d say the geolocation is accurate down to the county level, and possibly bigger for lower density states.. so for a U.S. map it should be pretty accurate. Might not be as accurate for localized lists such as ours. (80% of our contacts are in LA) But this seems like a ADD-friendly way of getting a sense of subscriber reaction to email campaigns - after watching a couple of sessions you may see a pattern (!!?!??!)
30th March
This is amazing, but I shared a client’s campaign via Twitter and Facebook and I’m not on the map. Does it exclude me?
30th March
coool!
30th March
Awesome feature. Thanks CM.
I looked at a campaign we sent last Thursday that lists about 5k opens in the United States, but there seems to be only around 50 green pins on the map. Seeing the same issue with clicks. I’m curious about the discrepancy.
I think this feature will be very helpful for our clients that have stores in many different locations.
30th March
Sincerely awesome!
30th March
I dropped my jaw on the floor upon seeing this… Awesome, Amazing, Incredible… That’s you guys at CM! :D
Thanks for the thoughts you put on this!
30th March
It’s indeed a very cool graphical representation of the data collected from an email campaign, but how have you made this data actionable? If you want to interact with just those people in New York or those that shared it on Facebook, is that possible within this feature?
30th March
@Mike H, good call. There are loads of cool ideas we have on making the best use of this new geo data for your subscribers. Right now Worldview is the first step, but there will be plenty more to follow.
30th March
This will be great. I’ve been trying to find a map overlay like this for Twitter.
30th March
Just curious, what is the logic behind the pin drops that remain on the map?
30th March
Very cool. BUT - this is a massive give-away feature. White label clients will now instantly know that this is campaign monitor :(
30th March
@Joe, I know what you’re getting at there (although I certainly don’t think it’s something any client would “instantly” learn). What are your thoughts on the option of making this a feature you can easily turn off for a client?
30th March
@Jason, we plan on sharing a little more about the workings behind Worldview soon. We had to make lots of interesting decisions based on providing a good experience for those with 50 subscribers or 5 million subscribers.
31st March
How about working on a killer feature like nested repeaters? Sorry, but I see a lot of comments here saying how cool this feature is but I can’t think of one practical use for this feature which would help my clients. This new feature just feels like fluff which doesn’t add any real value to CM. Yes, it looks cool, but that’s about it.
31st March
But does it blend?
31st March
I gotta say… great, fantastic, amazing, gob-smacking addition but…. so what? Sure, it will make it easier to sell, my clients will go ooo-aaa but I’d rather have SMS options integrated with the current excellent email tools.
31st March
A nice feature… could be useful visually analysing where your subscribers are opening from, especially if their preferences show a different country.
As a white label company, i think one thing CM should consider would be to updated all white label users of the changes 24 hours before the update is rolled out. This would give us all a chance to get to grips with the new feature and fully understand it before a client calls and asks about it?
31st March
@Ara, you’ll be pleased to know we’re working hard on a big template language and editor update right now that I’m pretty sure you’re going to love.
@George, absolutely ;)
@Jim, great to hear your clients will dig it. I’m afraid we don’t have any plans to offer SMS integration though, it just doesn’t fit in with our vision for Campaign Monitor right now.
@Drew, I completely agree we need to get better at this. We’ve thrown around a few ideas on the best way to approach this. Would love to hear what you’d prefer. An email a few days before, a Twitter account for resellers to follow? What works best for you?
31st March
It’s really addicting sitting here and watching it!
31st March
One of the coolest things I have seen. We just sent out a campaign about 30 minutes ago and it’s hard to stop watching it.
Nice new feature.
Bill Hunter
31st March
FYI For people wondering about WHERE the Google logo is:
If you’re building a g-map via flash in real-time (or ajax) and you’re using the Google API, it doesn’t add the logo, unless you query it.
31st March
I’m eager to see this new report in the next campaign :)
1st April
Great looking feature. Any idea though of how it selects which pins to display? We’ve just sent out a small campaign and some of the ‘openers’ it was displaying this morning’ aren’t showing up.
1st April
Brilliant. Been getting all my clients to move to you and now even more the reason.
1st April
Hi David thanks for your response.
Personally, i think the best way to recieve this information is by email. That way it’s only going to the people that need to see it. Twitter could also work but if you do consider this option may i suggest you have this reseller’s account set to private - only allowing people to follow is by ‘requesting’ to do so. This allows you to keep tabs on exactly who is becomming a follower to stop information being ‘leaked’ early etc.
Cheers, Drew
1st April
I just got an email newsletter sent out from you regarding this, and was both disappointed and astonished by the fact that you don’t use your own system in your emails. I thought the email looked great, but I couldn’t figure out how you we’re able to make it look so good with the limitations that <repeater> tags have. After looking at the HTML it’s pretty clear that you’ve hand-coded all of it, and probably haven’t touched the editor or used your own template tags at all.
That sort of shows how hard it is to make an interesting and different looking email when using the editor (which is supposedly one of the two or three biggest things in favor of CM).
Any comment from CM regarding this?
1st April
@Adam, thanks for the comments (and for viewing source). Only last night we were saying how this new design is a perfect candidate for the new template language upgrade we’re working on right now. You’ll be pleased to know that this design, along with pretty much any other, will be possible very soon. We’ll announce more details here in the coming months when it’s ready to roll.
@Drew, thanks for the follow up. Good call, I was leaning towards email as the best option too.
@Jonny, we need to be fairly selective on how many pins we show and when to make sure your browsers doesn’t get overloaded. There’s a post on that coming soon too, to share some of the technical details of how this works.
1st April
@David Perfect, I’m happy to hear that. The design restrictions is the only (!) flaw in my opinion.
1st April
I agree that this feature could be considered fluff, but actually it is very useful for small businesses to see where their subscribers are in the world, and it does provide white-label resellers with a cool feature that clients will get a kick out of watching!
2nd April
great work. You guys always deliver! I see companies paying out £10,000+ for email systems that dont come close to CM.
2nd April
Super cool, super neat and all that. Awesome. Well done.
Now… when can we have the ability to add multiple images, titles within a repeater region? Soon?
2nd April
Very cool addition - like some other commenters I can’t see how we could use it in a meaningful way currently, but looking forward to what you guys have in store.
Targeting specific users based on their interactions would be cool as someone else said.
Also a way to ‘replay’ the world view would be great - I don’t know that many of our clients would have the time to sit and watch as opens came in. You could imagine some kind of playback controls so you could skim through opens from when the email was sent to the current time, then it would be useful during analysis.
7th April
I was looking at geolocation by IP for a project, and found them to have varying (but never accurate) results, particularly the UK. Does Worldview’s geo data come from Google as the locations of IPs seem to match those shown in Analytics? I think it’s important for designers to let their UK customers know Worldview location markers are not accurate otherwise people will believe it and (groan) rely on it. If anyone knows a source of accurate UK data for geolocation by IP, please share it here.
7th April
@GP, thanks. Plus, you’ll be happy to know we’re working hard on this right now. A more flexible template language and sweet new editor is on the way.
@Neil, good call on the replay idea, that’s something we’ve talked about at our end too. We haven’t gone much farther than that at this stage, but I’ve noted your request.
@Asil, we use data from both Google and Maxmind’s GeoIP City database to get the best location we can. You’re right though, sometimes this can be extremely accurate, other times quite a distance from the exact location. From what we’ve seen this is about as accurate as you can get using IP data as opposed to more accurate things like cell tower triangulation, GPS, etc.
7th April
HEY! I’m happy to see you selected Missoula, MT as an example in your Worldview graphic. Thanks for putting us “on the map” ... literally.
8th April
Unfortunately, with Flowtown now gone, it appears that displaying social profile information in our databases is now out the window :(
Cool feature though
14th April
Good job! We are really impress. However, I have to agree with @Joe B that it will be a tell tale sign for us as a white label reseller. Why don’t you guys use a more generic word(s) like geolocation, subscriber location, etc.
29th April
Just loving the constant innovation guys, this is such a great feature for clients as is the share feature. Also looking forward to the new template upgrade.
7th May
Is there any way to segment a list by Worldview opens i.e. by the country they are opened in?! Yes, I know, the lazy way, BUT for clients with lists of 1,000’s and they aren’t bothered to do it themselves, it could be a good shortcut for us…
9th May
@Darragh - Many thanks for your suggestion, we’ll certainly add your vote for this. Segmenting your lists by location certainly could get interesting!
1st June
I had thought it was cool when I first saw it, yet quickly realised in its current form it has limited actionable value (but a ‘wow’ is a good start to get me and others thinking). What I’d love to see is to append subscriber information with the location data when they open it. I haven’t been collecting this up until now and would love to pre-populate the country and location which people could then confirm/correct.
I’m sure there are other uses too, but this was the first thought of what would make this useful.
1st June
PS - and auto adding their Gravatar photo URL to their profile would be nice too.
1st June
@Duane - Thank you for the feedback, I’ll take note of these suggestions internally. Much appreciated! :)