December 2007

Not-So-Monthly Tips and Updates

The Email Standards Project launches

Last week saw the hugely successful launch of The Email Standards Project. Started by the Freshview team, the ESP works with the design community and email client developers to improve web standards support in email.

We've had a phenomenal week so far with loads of coverage around the web and more importantly, some early contact from some of the largest email client developers. Keep your eye on the site for the latest news, and read about how you can help the effort.

Email testing just got easy

This is definitely one of the coolest new features we've added to Campaign Monitor in a while. Our new testing tool lets you generate screenshots of exactly how your email will look in 18 of the most popular email clients before you send it.

Not only that, but we'll also run your email though a number of popular spam filters to make sure you won't have any filtering problems. All this for only $10 each test.

7 new email designs in the gallery

It's like this. You guys keep designing awesome emails, we'll keep featuring them. In the last few weeks we've added another 7 gorgeous new email designs to our gallery, which is fast approaching the 200 mark.

Actually, will that even work??

In our never-ending quest to find out what you can (and can't) get away with when designing emails, we put two different technologies to the test:

Do forms work in email?
The short answer... sometimes. While you can get forms to display in most email clients, it won't work in many of them.

Can I use image maps in email?
Surprisingly, yes. But don't get ahead of yourself. Image blocking, lack of accessibility and Gmail combine to make them a bad idea.

Recent Articles and Tips

Optimizing your subscription process in 7 steps

To coincide with our launch of HTML confirmation email support, we put together 7 tips to ensure a good experience for your new subscribers and make sure they're primed to receive your first campaign.

The best approach to tables and inline CSS

While our current energies are focused on improving the future of email design, if you're looking for something close to consistency today you'll need to embrace tables for layout and some basic inline CSS. Dave put together some recommendations on the best approach to take for the popular web design site Vitamin.

Automatically generate inline styles

Clever Campaign Monitor customer Alex Dunae recently put together a very handy tool called Premailer that will automatically convert any web page into an email-ready page with inline CSS. This is a huge time saver for anyone looking to improve their design consistency until email clients move towards better standards support.

Recent Campaign Monitor Updates

HTML confirmation emails - say thanks with style

It's now easy to send a nicely formatted HTML confirmation email to anyone who joins your list from your subscribe forms or via the API.

Staying above the fold line

This update to our design and spam testing tool makes it easy to ensure they key content of your email will be viewable by your recipients without the need to scroll. Getting your key content visible early may mean the difference between an engaged subscriber and the trash.

2,000 forum members and counting

Our email designer forums have been a hive of activity lately. We've now got more than 2,000 members who have contributed more than 1,000 posts on everything from email design and formatting tips to API hacks. Register and start chatting to other email designers today.

Finally, a big thanks to everyone who continues to send in their feedback and feature requests. We're always listening, so keep it coming.