Blog: Tips & Resources

As most of you know, our motivation for starting the Email Standards Project two years ago came from the release of Outlook 2007. Specifically, because of Microsoft's decision to avoid using a browser to render HTML emails in place of a word processor. This immediately took standards-based email design off the table, forcing designers to abandon web standards for tables and font tags. You can read our original reaction and the subsequent call to arms that followed.

Since that time, we've had the pleasure of working with teams at Yahoo!, Apple, IBM, Google and even the Microsoft Entourage team. However, the elephant in the room was always Outlook. For a time things were looking good and we had the chance to chat with a number of passionate Microsoft employees who agreed with our position on standards and to try their best to improve future versions of Outlook. I'm sad to say, it looks like these efforts failed.

After testing the latest beta of Outlook 2010 and seeing the same poor standards support as 2007, a senior member of the Outlook team confirmed they plan on continuing to use Word to render HTML emails. Not only that, but early tests indicate that HTML support in the Word engine has not been improved in any way. Same bugs. Same quirks.

To demonstrate just how bad the Word rendering engine is in Outlook 2010, here's exactly the same email rendered in Outlook 2000, and then Outlook 2010. Click the image for a full sized version.

Microsoft explain their position

When Outlook 2007 was released there were lots of theories thrown around about what motivated the switch to the Word rendering engine. Many stipulated that it was a security related decision after the problems they'd been having with previous versions of Outlook. As it turns out, it was much simpler than that.

This was confirmed last week in a discussion with Outlook Product Manager Dev Balasubramanian. When asked why Outlook is using Word to compose HTML emails, this was his response:

"The reason for this lies in the benefit Outlook users gain by having Word as their e-mail authoring tool; rich tools like SmartArt, automatic styles and templates, and other benefits found in Word 2007 and 2010 enable Outlook users to write professional looking and visually stunning messages."

"I am aware of where this decision on our part places Outlook from a standards perspective - at the same time, we ask that you consider the benefits Outlook users get from having Word tools in their e-mail authoring experience."

When asked why Word is also used to render HTML emails, Dev explained:

"Having multiple HTML engines could reduce performance, as well as create an inconsistency in terms of what type of content the user is able to create vs. consume."

Basically, Microsoft are using the Word rendering engine so emails composed in Outlook will look consistent when viewed by other Outlook users (also confirmed in this Microsoft white paper).

Email is not a walled garden

Microsoft's decision to move away from the pre-2007 approach of using Internet Explorer to render emails clearly demonstrates they are not confident that emails composed using Word will render correctly in a web browser. Remember, for a second, that every other email client on the market today uses a web browser to render HTML email.

Surely Microsoft understand that if an Outlook 2010 user sends a Word formatted email to a friend using Apple Mail or Thunderbird and it's unreadable, both sender and receiver suffer a poor experience. By aiming to please Outlook-to-Outlook senders, they are punishing Outlook customers who send to those using other email clients. Given the fact that Outlook 2007 only commands around 7% email client market share, it's easy to see how short-sighted this is.

An obvious solution

To us, the solution couldn't be more clear-cut. By updating the Word engine so it can compose and render standards based HTML, all of these problems are solved. Microsoft can have its pie and eat it too.

Outlook customers can receive email from outside sources without formatting problems. They can also rest assured that any emails they send to friends and colleagues not using Outlook will display as intended.

As the market upgrades from Outlook 2007 to 2010, HTML email design can move out of the pre-standards era of the 90's bringing all the benefits that come with it.

Microsoft want your feedback on this decision

Outlook 2010 is still in beta and a year away from public release. Either we make it clear this is a bad decision now, or the disconnect between Outlook users and the rest of the email world will continue to grow. Email designers will be stuck building emails using the same clunky combination of tables for layout, inline CSS and font tags for many years to come.

Thankfully, Microsoft want to hear your feedback about this. From the Outlook Product Manager Dev Balasubramanian:

"The Office team, and Microsoft in general, is always open to and interested in customer feedback so we can prioritize the various needs of our diverse user base in product planning and development."

"This conversation alone has reignited the topic within the Outlook and Word teams and in and of itself will contribute to future design considerations... We want to hear feedback on this position, and I'm sure you and your readers will provide it."

It's time for us to send the strongest message yet to Microsoft, and we need your help to get started. To make this happen, we've built fixoutlook.org.

All you have to do is tweet your thoughts about this issue, and make sure you include the fixoutlook.org URL somewhere in the tweet. We'll be pulling together every tweet that includes this link on the fixoutlook.org site to send a unified message to Microsoft. The more tweets, the more impact, so please start spreading the word today and encourage your friends and colleagues to do the same.

To get started, head to fixoutlook.org for all the details.

Back in April of this year we decided to have a look at running some banner ads on a number of high profile design-related sites. Over the last couple of years, advertising in our little corner of the web has come a long way. There are loads of highly trafficked design sites with excellent content and affordable ad slots. On top of this, the rise of targeted ad networks such as The Deck and Fusion Ads has made it much easier to get in front of the right crowd.

While we've dabbled in some banner advertising before, I decided to take a more thoughtful approach this time. We put together a number of banners, dedicated landing pages and put conversion tracking in place to measure the results. When looking into this process initially, I didn't come across many write-ups from advertisers on what worked, what didn't and just how effective the ads had been for them. In the interest of helping fill that void, here's the process we went through, and some of the surprising results that eventuated.

Coming up with the ad creative

As part of the merger between Campaign Monitor and MailBuild last year (more on that here), we added a stack of new features to make it easy for designers to earn passive income off their clients through email marketing. In a nutshell, you can create a sub-account for each client, set the price they should pay and earn a profit every time they send.

We figured this was something that lots of designers might find useful and it became the focus of our banner ads and associated landing pages. Here are the 3 ads we ran with initially.

For the final design of these ads we enlisted the help of the clever team at Newism, the same team that coded the current version of the Campaign Monitor site. We couldn't have been happier with the results.

The Landing Pages

As well as testing multiple ad creative, we decided to put together a number of dedicated landing pages for the campaign. We'd randomly display a different landing page for each visitor and measure which one converted best. We bought in the amazing Jesse Bennett-Chamberlain (who designed our web site) and Brad Hayes to help with the design.

Landing Page 1: Earn money in your sleep

This key for this page was to promote the idea of earning money in your sleep. We highlighted the 3 simple steps involved (rebrand, resell and then profit) and included an inline signup form allowing those interested to signup and start using the app on the spot.

Landing Page 2: Are you a designer?

This was definitely the most controversial landing page of the four. We took the fact that Campaign Monitor is built for designers to the extreme by including a modal window that overlays the landing page asking the person if they are a designer or not. If they clicked "You betcha", they'd be shown the page below that highlights how easy it is to resell Campaign Monitor.

If they clicked "Nope", the landing page behind the modal would fade out with a message explaining that "It's not you. It's us." We then linked to a number of other Email Service Providers that they might consider checking out that are built for a less targeted audience.

Unexpectedly, this approach stirred up a lot of conversation on Twitter. Some called us ballsy and classy for linking to our competition, others asked if we were breaking up with them. I personally received a number of emails from people complimenting us on being open and honest with people. The truth is, we've always referred potential customers to our competitors when we know they're not the right match (see this post from 2 years ago). It's how we'd want to be treated, so it's only fair that we do the same to our customers.

Landing page 3: Modal-free just for designers

In the interest of testing what sort of impact the modal window might have on conversions, we also tested it against the very same landing page modal-free. The page was exactly the same otherwise, so should provide a nice comparison.

Landing page 4: Our home page

In the past we've just pointed people to our home page, which in itself is a landing page aimed at converting people to give us a try. Will it out-perform the dedicated landing pages that have a clearer connection to the ad creative?

The Results

Over April and May we booked advertising spots with The Deck and Fusion Ads along with Smashing Magazine, Six Revisions, Webdesigner Depot, Webresources Depot and CSS Elite.

We set up a redirect script on our servers that would choose one of the 4 landing pages above for each visitor and pass through any of the required parameters in the URL so we could track everything with Google Analytics. We have a number of goals set up so we can track important things like a customer signing up, sending a test campaign and becoming a paying customer. If you're interested, our designer Dave Martin has written about our Google Analytics setup in more detail here.

We judged the performance of each banner ad and landing page on the number of visitors that signed up to Campaign Monitor, as opposed to basing it purely on revenue. Because of the nature of our pricing, it can be weeks or even months before a customers starts paying for our software. We'll use the revenue numbers internally over the coming months to get a true idea of ROI.

The best performing banner ad

The blueprint banner ad outperformed the other two with a conversion rate of 3.5% resulting in 370 people signing up for Campaign Monitor. Here are the full results.

Banner Ad	Conversion Rate
Blueprint	3.51%
Post-it Note	2.36%
Chalkboard	2.09%

The best performing landing page

This one surprised everyone. Personally, I was concerned the modal window would result in a lower conversion rate because of the barrier of an additional click. I was pleasantly surprised to see this page gave us 25% more conversions than the next best performing page. Possibly the biggest surprise of all was that the "Earn money in your sleep" page with the inline signup form didn't give us one new customer. Not one! Here are the full results.

Landing Page	Conversion Rate
Landing Page 2: Are you a designer?	4.34%
Landing page 3: Modal-free just for designers	3.48%
Landing page 4: Our home page	1.52%
Landing Page 1: Earn money in your sleep	0%

The best explanation we could provide for this is that people like to check out a product more before signing up (there was no link to the product from the page, the focus was on the signup form). The other landing pages provided links back to the site where an interested customer could take a feature tour, check out the pricing, etc before signing up. On top of this, the form had a total of eight required fields. Reducing this to the bare minimum and asking for the customer data after they signed up might have helped convert more. But still, not one?

The best performing advertiser

From the day we turned these ads on, Fusion Ads has consistently been our best converter. This includes visitors who have signed up right through to total revenue to date. We've also seen good conversion rates from other advertisers, which you can see in the results below.

Advertiser	Conversion Rate
Fusion Ads	3.17%
The Deck	2.62%
Smashing Magazine	2.46%
Six Revisions	2.05%
CSS Elite	2.03%
Webdesigner Depot	2.02%
Webresources Depot	1.9%

It's important to keep in mind that these are conversion rates only, and don't give any indication of the true return on investment. For example, while The Deck has been our second best converter, it's also more expensive than any of the other ad slots. Because of the rates we've managed to negotiate with some providers, I'm afraid I can't share the costs associated with each ad spot, but most are easily found on each respective advertiser's site.

Was it worth it?

Right now it's too early to tell just how long it will take for this campaign to pay for itself and then turn a profit (don't forget the cost of designing the banners and landing pages as well as the ongoing advertising fees). To date we've only recovered around 25% of all expenses in revenue from new customers. Having said that, a large percentage of our customers continue to use our software for an extended period of time. Looking at how revenue has been growing from these customers in the last few weeks, it certainly seems that in the longer-term this exercise will be well worth it. The nature of our business model means that it will be a few more months before we'll really know.

To me, the most important element was actually testing everything as we went. By putting in a little extra work, we could quickly gauge which ad creative, landing page and advertiser was giving us the best results and react accordingly.

Our next steps will be to continue to refine the winning landing page using Google Website Optimizer to improve conversions further. On top of this we'll be trying some new ad creative and throwing a few new advertisers into the mix. I'll try and put together a follow up in a few months time with anything else we might have learned in the mean time.

Adding a subscribe form to your site has always been a simple matter of pasting some supplied code from your account. Recently we've had more and more customers asking how they can go about turning this standard form into an AJAX based form that could submit without refreshing the page.

We've just put the finishing touches on a simple code sample you can use to achieve just that. The best part is, we've built it so you can just drop in the supplied subscribe code and you're done. The code will also check to make sure the email address entered is valid before it processes the form. Once a submission has been made, the form will be hidden and a confirmation message shown in its place.

This example was put together using jQuery and PHP. The concept is fairly simple and the code is well commented, so it could easily be adapted to another programming language.

You can download the code here. You'll find a zip file with two documents, a small PHP file that acts as a proxy, and the HTML page containing the form and JavaScript. Feel free to modify them both to suit your needs.

On a side note, this sample code was put together by David Martin, Campaign Monitor's new designer extraordinaire. You'll be seeing much more of Dave's work over the coming months when we release some exciting new features he's been hard at work on.

Landing a new customer for your rebranded Campaign Monitor can sometimes be tricky, especially if the potential client already has a newsletter system.

One of the best ways to sell them on the idea of Campaign Monitor is by letting them actually use it for themselves, and see how easy it is. Of course, you don't want to end up paying for their 'test campaign' which goes out to their entire 20,000 person list! Fortunately, there is a simple way to set up a demo account that won't let them spend your money.

First, create a demo client (you might want to set it up with their company name to make it feel customized to them). Add a subscriber list of 5 or less people, so emails sent to that list will be free. Now you have a couple of options for how to limit this demo account.

Under 'client settings', you'll want to hit 'Edit Access and Billing'. Check the 'Create and send their own campaigns' box. At this point, you could simply set the client to pay for their own campaigns. So if they do decide to go ahead and send to a larger list, they'll have to add their own card details and pay themselves.

Sometimes, this will be fine. In other cases, you may not want to allow that at all. So your other choice is to pay on their behalf. To make this work, you'll need some email credits in your account. Once you have them, click 'Allocate email credits' under client settings. Now you can allocate a small number of credits to your demo client.

The key is to given them either an amount you are happy to let them spend (like the 1,000 credits above), or an amount that will only let them send free campaigns (i.e less than 500 credits). Then make sure you have selected 'Don't allow them to send until I allocate more credits to them' under 'When their credits run out'.

Now your demo client has a hard limit on how many emails can be sent. Your potential client can login, manage subscribers, send test campaigns and view reports, but not spend any money. If they try to send a larger campaign, they'll see this message:

You can give out the details to your demo account without having to worry. We'd love to hear about how you demo Campaign Monitor to your clients, so if you have a trick you are willing to share, post a comment.

While it isn't completely clear yet how the global financial crisis will impact the design community, one thing is clear: Any way you can add additional revenue to your design business is a good thing. It's no secret that one of the big features of Campaign Monitor is the ability to resell it to your clients for a marked-up rate. Combine this with email marketing being a great compliment to traditional web design services and (I may be a little biased here) you've got a great mechanism for earning passive income.

Over the coming weeks we plan on highlighting more and more customers who are generally kicking ass with Campaign Monitor. Some are using it to save time, some to impress their clients and many to earn additional revenue without lifting a finger. Today I wanted to highlight a customer fast becoming the poster child for reselling Campaign Monitor.

UK based Webselect have been doing an amazing job reselling Campaign Monitor as their own product called Selectmailer. They now have an incredible 80+ clients regularly sending emails through their account which has helped them "dramatically increase sales". I recently chatted with Webselect Managing Director Mark Walker to learn more about the Selectmailer story and any secrets behind his impressive success to date. Check out the full case study to hear Mark's story.

If you're doing cool stuff with Campaign Monitor and would like to be profiled, get in touch, we'd love to hear from you and share your story.