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Campaign Monitor adds mobile support in their Template Builder

campaignmonitor.com

Slick and simple to build.

Bulletproof HTML Emails

mailrox.com

Sign up for the public beta of this amazing tool which helps you create rock solid HTML markup for emailers. Headache over!

Campaign Monitor Competition?

sendy.co

An Amazon project.

Email Templates

Developing e-mail campaigns is probably the closest any of us will get to experiencing time travel.

There is nothing more tedious than coding up e-mails using techniques that are over 10 years old so to save yourself from smashing up your keyboard here are a few really good resources for e-mail development.

Downloadable MailChimp Templates
Link

12 Killer Tips & Tricks for Building HTML Emails
Link

HTML Email Boilerplate
Link

Sync user information right from your MySQL and PostgreSQL database with Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor lists


You are preparing the latest email campaign full of exciting news and features. You’ve selected good subject, nice copyright and a professional design. But right before sending it you need to update the email marketing list with the new users. So now, you need to login to your database and search for the new users since the last time. Export them in a suitable format - CSV or Excel and again import in the email marketing provider. Match the file content and then you are probably ready to send your campaign.

And this is where Mailsync comes in handy!

Hello. We are Mailsync :) We are tackling the boring part of updating the lists with the latest users. We are syncing emails, first and last names for Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor. And we are well integrated with two of the most popular databases - MySQL and PostgreSQL.

OK, sounds good, show me: here is the DEMO or if you prefer quick tour here.

Why use Mailsync?

  • Works with your own users from your own database. You may use it on just a landing page or a working product.
  • Removes the need for generating, transfering, exporting and importing database dumps, csv and excel files.
  • Syncs the users data between your database and marketing lists with just ONE click.
  • Self-hosted application, therefore you have the data and the product in your environment.
  • Works with two of the most popular databases: MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Last but not least we’ve been approved by both Mailchimp: Mailsync and Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor: Mailsync and Campaign Monitor. They even tweeted about that, big thanks guys!

Well, back to work, meanwhile we would love to hear from you: team@mailsync.li or @mailsync. And if you have ideas, don’t be shy - share them here.

Good luck!

Awesome Campaign Monitor Feature

For those of you who are like me and absolutely love Campaign Monitor, you’ll likely be pleased to learn about something I discovered while using it recently (if you don’t already know about it).

Campaign Monitor employs some template tags which enable you to auto-generate tags for unsubscribe, sharing, browser view, etc. The problem I’ve faced with these tags is not being able to apply inline styles to them. And for those familiar with the email-client landscape, inline styles are absolutely necessary for visual integrity within clients such as Gmail and Outlook 2007. Otherwise you get results like this:

When you put together a template you can use embedded CSS and then ask Campaign Monitor to move your styles inline when generating your template. This works great and applies your embedded styles into their auto-generated tags. But if you’re building in your own inline styles from scratch there isn’t a way to add the CSS to the custom tags. At least that’s what I thought.

I went ahead and blindly tried to force inline styles into one of the tags like this:

<forwardtoafriend style=”color: #b6b6b6 !important;”>Share This Email</forwardtoafriend>

I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Campaign Monitor system was smart enough to respect that inline style and carry it over into the auto-generated tag, resulting in this:

<a href=”{url}” style=”color: #b6b6b6 !important;”>Share This Email</a>

The result is readable share/unsubscribe links because of the preservation of my inline styling:

I am super impressed at just how smart their system is. They’re a bright group of individuals over there.

Campaign Monitor launch editor and template update

Campaign Monitor launched a much needed new editor and template language today. Good news for front-end dev’s like me who occassionally get stuck doing relatively simple HTML and image updates - which IMHO really should be manageable within the editor!

Probably the most standout feature from my perspective is the ‘repeater’ and ‘layaout’ template tags. The reapeater tag allows you to create a repeatable block of code which can be replicated within the WYSIWYG, such as a news/articles entry. And the layout tag allows you to specificy varying designs, so you may 2 article designs, one with an image and one without:

   	
<repeater>
<layout label="Article - No Image">
   		<h2>
		<singleline label="Title" repeatertitle='true' >Title of article/tip/resource</singleline>
		</h2>
		<multiline label="Article Body" >Enter the full text</ multiline>
</layout>
   		    <repeater>
<layout label="Article - With Image">
   		<h2>
		<singleline label="Title" repeatertitle='true' >Title of article/tip/resource</singleline>
		</h2>
<img align="right" editable="true" src="image.jpg" label='Image' />
		<multiline label="Article Body" >Enter the full text</ multiline>
</layout>


</repeater>

For more information checkout the presentation over at Campaign Monitor here

Great people in a great space!

I am surprised very rarely. But when people want great results, you have to create great creative work spaces. Checkout the office of Campaign Monitor - I love it.

Play

Campaign Monitor Image-Blocking Email

I really loved this email from Campaign Monitor because it was immediately relevant to its own medium and because the design supported that contextually. It’s clever and appropriate, and I love it. Except for not being able to hide the replicated tool tip, which very much agitates my OCD.

Campaign Monitor: How to use the API Wrapper

I had a checkbox ‘Please add me to your mailing list’ on a contact form that i needed to hook up to Campaign Monitor.

The form was a c# webform. I downloaded CampaignMonitorAPIWrapper.dll from Campaign Monitors website but it wouldn’t let me add it as a reference for some reason. So I found an older .dll from an Umbraco package and referenced that which worked straight away.

To add a subscriber to a newsletter list I used the following method:

CampaignMonitorAPIWrapper.Subscriber.Add( apiKey, listID, email address, name)

and did a simple if statement to see if the checkbox was ticked.

Campaign Monitor Details

To find out the API Key:

Login to campaign monitor, go to client settings (top right tab), and its under client details.

To find out the listID:

go to Lists & Subscribers, Create a new list and give it a name, then in tiny tiny letters you’ll see Single opt-in list (change name/type) just below the name you gave the list. Click on change name/type and you’ll find the listID.

Simples! 

Finding the right E-mail service provider

We have a new project and we needs a good email service provider. After a bit of googling and reading up on a bunch of reviews like on ReadWriteWeb and awwwards our short list was as follows:

  1. YMLP
  2. MailChimp
  3. Campaign Monitor (CM)

Since all three offered free trials up to a certain number of subscribers and sends, it made testing much more friendly. 

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First Impression

YMLP feels a bit old school but serious, kind of no frill approach. For a company that deals with modern technology looking old is very slightly concerning. Mail Chimp is all the way at the exact opposite end of the spectrum, very cute an carefully crafted, welcoming for beginners like me. Campaign Monitor on the otherhand is somewhere between the two, nothing special, but at least it feels up to date. I’m a designer at heart, so hard for me not to judge a book by it’s cover. 

Creating Newsletters using template

Although i may not be able to use templates in the end for our clients, I thought this would be a good way of testing workflow for sending actual emails. 

YMLP straight away first ask what i want the reporting to look like and how would i like to get started. This seem logical to me, it gets me thinking about my end goal before i get started, a tick there. But, then it start to look bad again. had some very old 1999 looking email templates, i actually struggled to find ones which i find good enough to make a start on. I couldn’t, so i just randomly picked one to get the ball rolling. The interface again feels old, to edit an element you click and make the edit on the left side of the screen which i didn’t notice for a few seconds. I tried to add an image, it was too big for the space but instead of cropping or resizing the image it destroys the email by bushing outside the template. This doesn’t feel like it’s working for me. 

As I just mentioned MailChimp makes it very user beginner friendly with little hints here and there educating you on how things work, so it did pretty well when it comes to making mailers. First thing it ask for is campaign info, and tracking. Bonus here is it allow social network integration. and GA tracking. Templates comes in all shapes and colours. much more attractives.  

Interface also much more upto date, with drag to upload function, it also immediately ask if you want to resize or link the image. You can even apply effects to images! like on instagram! that’s cool.

Fast text editing. with pop up editor for photos and text. Can edit source code and easily integrate dynamic data.  But, doesn’t allow drag and drop to rearrange text or image blocks like YMLP

Campaign Monitor did pretty well, it didn’t shine in anyway, but was highly usable. It had the same approach as YMLP with the editing panel on the left, but it makes it much more up to date and noticeable. Doesn’t have as many templates as MailChimp, but they offer a handsome collection to customise for your self, it also have a nice template builder which I liked. 

Actual Sending

I test sending with various email accounts, including Hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and Gmail business account. YMLP was the fastest, only took several minutes, Campaign Monitor took a little while, perhaps 5-10 minutes between different accounts. A mail chimp took  a tiny bit longer. Google Business email accounts doesn’t seem to like any of the service providers I picked, since it autmatically chuck them in a Bulk folder

Reporting

To keep this post short, for my purpose, all 3 includes all the reporting I needed so no real winner or loser here. 

Price

Assuming we have 3000 subscribers and 4 emails are sent a month, the cost from each of the providers are as follows:

  • YMLP, 12,500 emails/month Pro Plus package with advanced reporting
    $35USD per month
  • MailChimp,  2501-5000 Subscribers with unlimited sends per month
    $50USD
  • Campaign Monitor, 2501-5000 Subscribers with unlimited sends per month
    $55USD
My Verdict

First of all, lets make it clear YMLP doesn’t feel right to me, so bye bye. If I were to run my own product I would definitely choose MailChimp, it’s very user friendly and well crafted. Apart from slightly slow on the send (Waiting for 5 mins to get an email at 2am feels like a very long time). But since this is for a client, Campaign Monitor offered the best solution, it looked very business like and more importantly it can be used as  platform where we set certain templates up for the clients to manage themselves. So despite being the most expensive it is our winner today.

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