[UPDATED] Campaign Monitor downtime Saturday Sept 13th
Posted by Mathew Patterson on September 5, 2008
Campaign Monitor will be unavailable from 9pm on Saturday September 6th 13th to 3am Sunday September 7th 14th, US Central Time. See this in your own timezone.
Due to some maintenance requirements, we have scheduled an extended downtime period for Campaign Monitor Saturday evening of the 13th, US Central time. We are specifying a total downtime of 6 hours overnight, but if all goes well expect a shorter period offline.
Downtime rescheduled: We've had to move this downtime to the following weekend to make sure we can get everything lined up and make the most use of the time. We apologise for this late change.
What does 'downtime' mean?
This maintenance period will have the following effects:
However, subscribes and unsubscribes will be captured during the downtime, and processed into your reports afterwards. Images will continue to load in emails, and clicks and opens will also be recorded.
We will update this post if our plans change before Saturday, and also once the application is back up and running. Thanks in advance for your patience while we go through these maintenance periods.
Posted in Observations & Answers0 comments so far
Web Directions South 2008
Posted by Mathew Patterson on September 4, 2008
In just 3 weeks it will be time once again for the always excellent Web Directions conference in Sydney. Like last year, we'll have a stand in the expo hall, where you can come up and lobby for your favourite feature request, ask questions or just say 'hi'.
If you are going to be there, then make sure you drop by, because we love to see people face to face. In 2007 we gave away an iMac — this year we also have a prize, to be revealed later. I can tell you right now that wearing a Campaign Monitor shirt will get you an extra entry into the competiton, so buy, borrow or steal one before you go!
Speaking of shirts, the fun new Web Directions shirt is now available too, as is the artwork for remixing. Here's a Campaign Monitor version:
Don't come to Web Directions just for the shirt, or just to see us! Come for the awesome (that was for you Dean;) line-up of speakers including Jeffrey Veen, Jina Bolton and Mark Pesce.
See you there!
Posted in Observations & Answers0 comments so far
Connecting Campaign Monitor and Magento
Posted by Mathew Patterson on September 2, 2008
The number of plugins and extensions for using Campaign Monitor with external web tools continues to grow. Today we have the Fontis Campaign Monitor extension for Magento, the open source ecommerce platform.
Using this extension, you can connect your newsletter setup inside your Magento install to any of your Campaign Monitor lists. From the extension description:
If you are at all interested in an ecommerce system for you or your clients, then Magento is definitely worth a look. It's packed full with functionality, but is also very flexible, giving you lots of opportunities to build something really cool.
Magento also sends some awesome newsletters, as featured in our gallery, so you can't go wrong!
We're always excited to see new plugins and extensions appear, so if you are working on one yourself, definitely let us know, we'd love to publicise it.
Download the Fontis Campaign Monitor extension for Magento.
Posted in Articles/Tips4 comments so far
Subscribe your Shopify purchasers to your Campaign Monitor list
Posted by Mathew Patterson on August 29, 2008
If you've checked out our Campaign Monitor shirts then you've experienced Shopify, a slick hosted ecommerce product.
It's super fast to setup and a great choice for selling anything from t-shirts to toasters online.
This morning on the Campaign Monitor forums, Alex Dunae has just announced his Campaign Monitor “Subscribe†Web Hook for Shopify
You may remember Alex from such hits as Premailer and Gladys the Groovy Mule.
Alex's code allows you to easily process a Web Hook from Shopify and subscribe the purchaser to a specific Campaign Monitor list via the API.
Read more and download the code to get started. Another great job Alex!
Finally, speaking of our shirts, if you've got one, and you are coming to Web Directions in Sydney, make sure to wear it. You'll an extra entry in our competition...more on that later.
Posted in Articles/Tips0 comments so far
Embedding images revisited
Posted by Mathew Patterson on August 28, 2008
In a recent post we discussed our (poor) results from testing embedded images in email. A couple of people pointed out a different method we could use that may produce better results.
So we've run through our tests again, this time with the image as a Base64 encoded attachment to the message. Here's how it went.
Embedding as an attachment
Rather than having the image src be the encoded data, this time we define the email as a multipart/related file, and place the encoded image in a separate section of the email.
Then in the body of the message, we refer to the image via its identifier which is specified for each attachment.
Results for embedded attachment cid method
This time around, we did see some better results. The image was rendered by default in the desktop clients at least, but still not in webmail clients.
Image displays inline and as attachment Image displays inline and as attachment
Image will not display Image will not display Image displays inline and as attachment Image displays inline and as attachment Image displays inline and as attachment Image will not displayAlthough the images did show up ok in desktop clients, in webmail clients they did not at all, even after clicking 'display images' or equivalent. Additionally, in the desktop clients the images are shown inline, but also as attachments on the bottom of the email.
If you have just one image, it might be ok, but with most newsletters you will have an email that ends with a messy jumble of individual image attachments. Imagine the Threadless newsletter for example.
The increased initial download size, and hence slower speed, the failure to show for increasingly popular webmail clients and the hassle of attachments still seem to indicate that embedded images are not the way to go in most cases.
Our recommendation is still to have the understanding that your images may not display, and design your emails accordingly.
Thanks to everyone who commented and suggested this additional test, we appreciate the feedback.
Posted in Articles/Tips4 comments so far
CSS support for MobileMe
Posted by Travis Bell on August 27, 2008
Last month Apple replaced .Mac with a new service called MobileMe and while it is certainly slicker visually and nicer to use, in terms of CSS support the results were mixed.
We ran MobileMe through our baseline CSS test, and found that there were improvements in some areas (see our Email Standards Project test result) but in other places some CSS support was actually degraded compared to .Mac rendering.
It is still a very solid client, but of course it is never nice to see the level of support going in reverse. MobileMe lost point in CSS selectors, and we saw odd results with link colours and heading styles.
CSS defined in the head is partially ignored (for example in lower level headings) but if you drop the styles inline, everything seems to render much more reliably, much like Gmail. Nonetheless, MobileMe dropped a few points in our test.
We're already planning the next version of the CSS test, which will broaden its scope to better cover both inline styles and styles in the head, giving you as much information as possible to build emails which will render more consistently.
If you haven't already checked them out, take a look at our free email templates which are built using all the information gathered during the CSS test.
Posted in Articles/Tips2 comments so far
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