Case Studies

Holler, on a candid approach to marketing & pricing, plus using ExpressionEngine with our API

Launching onto the scene with a yell, Holler immediately caught our attention with their memorable website, no-nonsense pricing model and a very simple account signup process. Founder John Henry took the time to help other resellers by answering some commonly-asked questions.

Hi John, thanks for taking a moment to discuss Holler with us. Can you tell us the story behind why you developed such a polished service around Campaign Monitor?

Campaign Monitor ticked all the boxes for a perfect feature set.

The honest answer is that I have tried similar email products out there and Campaign Monitor ticked all the boxes for a perfect feature set. There was never too many features for a client to be overwhelmed with and in my experience, anything that they would potentially ask about had already been addressed by Campaign Monitor.

A lot of folks would consider your fixed pricing model for both email design and delivery services to be quite unique. What have the benefits been?

I have designed a lot of campaign templates, period. I know exactly the amount of work that goes into designing and creating templates and therefore feel confident in my fixed pricing route. I also felt  leaving only a link to contact me for a quote would cause people to think twice about first contact. I was very much the mindset of putting a shopping list on the website that gave people a variety of choices.

Keeping in mind that you've just launched, is there a particular industry or company size that you see Holler appealing to? How do you communicate the benefits of email marketing (and your service) to them?

While working for another employer I had managed  a varying list of clients from all different sectors. The campaigns also varied in terms of size and type. My pitch really is selling Holler as a marketing tool as opposed to a service for just sending emails. Very quickly you realize that a majority of your clients never realized there was so much more to sending a marketing email than just pushing out something from their own email. It's integrating their current work-flow that has really sold Holler and previous Campaign Monitor accounts I used to work with. The potential of competitions, sign-up forms, unique content and being able to measure the results has been a big selling point.

You've had considerable experience as an ExpressionEngine designer & developer and even created an addon for automatically creating customer accounts via your site. Does the Campaign Monitor API play nice with ExpressionEngine?

Yes it played very well with ExpressionEngine. An ExpressionEngine add-on can consist of a plugin, a module or an extension or all 3 for an add-on package. In this instance I only used an extension as it was for personal use but I intend to make a small add-on package available for download shortly once I have some free time away from initial launch of Holler. For the demo accounts feature I integrated, the API only let me push the default Campaign Monitor account information into Holler so to compensate for this I wrote the extension to tie in with the creation of a member account in ExpressionEngine. Using this approach I was able to collect a few more details via ExpressionEngine custom profile fields which lets me do a more personal follow-up with potential customers after their initial Trial and allows them access to any exclusive content on Holler website when it becomes available.

Finally, what's your advice to other designers who are planning to offer email marketing to their clients?

My advice is to concentrate all your promotional efforts on what you can do with Campaign Monitor and integrate it with the services you already offer. Campaign Monitor's features alone will already get you 90% of the way there.