CampaignMonitor

Live from Cafe Lucca, Kold­ing: My rec­om­men­da­tions for Cam­paign­Mon­i­tor.

One of my clients wanted to start send­ing out newslet­ters, 4–6 every year, show­cas­ing their work and prod­ucts. I’ve been in trou­ble with newslet­ters before; home­made sys­tems have crashed, actual list­servers seemed a bit tricky if the client didn’t want to man­age stuff via email etc. etc. Every­thing below 500 recip­i­ents should be pos­si­ble to do using Out­look or some­thing along those lines, but then you have the whole unsub­scrib­ing issue, lack of stats and dif­fi­cul­ties cre­at­ing the con­tent properly.

Cam­paign­Mon­i­tor to the res­cue. They claim to focus on web devel­op­ers want­ing a good fea­ture set for their clients and they’ve got an inter­est­ing deal going on: You pay $5 as a startup fee for each cam­paign you send out and one cent per recip­i­ent. First of all, it’s a good prod­uct and easy to man­age even if you’re not a web devel­oper (the thing here is sim­ply that it’s easy to offer this ser­vice using their web appli­ca­tion), but the pric­ing struc­ture is kind of inter­est­ing as well. Obvi­ously, if you have thou­sands of recip­i­ents and send out stuff fre­quently it’ll quickly get rather expen­sive. But for the small com­pany want­ing to focus on con­tent and not pay­ing for some­thing they might not use, it’s a sweet deal. Espe­cially because of the features.

The inter­face is sim­ple and ele­gant (Base­camp style), you can give your clients (if you run them through your account) access to the detailed graphic reports via your own sub­do­main (Base­camp style), put signup forms on your own page (Base­camp style) and you always have detailed infor­ma­tion on click-rates, unsub­scribed adresses, bounces and sta­tis­tics over time at your hand. Pow­er­ful shit. A day after we sent out the cam­paign, we can track down impor­tant recip­i­ents and see how they reacted to the cam­paign, see how many mails are opened at this time etc., giv­ing my client a solid knowl­edge base to build future cam­pagns on.

All in all a great prod­uct with good pos­si­bil­i­ties for pre­view­ing your con­tent, test send the actual cam­paign and export the reports. I’ve men­tioned Base­camp a cou­ple of times which isn’t a coin­ci­dence; I only know of Cam­paign­Mon­i­tor because of a prod­uct plug over at Sig­nal vs. Noise. Oh, the power of sharing.…

And now back to real life in Kold­ing where the weather’s hor­ri­ble, the wifi-access expen­sive and the girls far from pretty — but where you can charge your lap­top while sip­ping coffee.