If you were ever looking for an example of organized chaos in design, then you couldn't go past UK design agency, UC48's email newsletter for the East London Design Show. We say this with positivity – color and objects are bursting from the header, the body is solid with copy about everything from opening hours to designer biographies and the newsletter as a whole just resonates with kinetic energy. You can't help but be excited. Despite the rich array of images, this design still retains order by virtue of a structured layout and limited color palette. Even when shifting from a one- to three- column layout, it still maintains a sense of composition and avoids visual surprises. However, in some ways, not enough thought has been put into the placement of elements – for example, you would think that something as generous as a 2-for-1 voucher to the show would be given a little more credit than to be relegated to the bottom of the email. Paired with the italicized copy in the upper third of the email, it seems like a design afterthought. Overall, a solid effort from UC48 for bringing us a highly eclectic email design that maintains order through layout.

Here at Campaign Monitor, we've put the robots out of business. So when you contact support, we guarantee that your message will be read and responded to by a real person in your timezone. Our support is a 24-hour operation, manned by awesome folks like yourself, so we've updated the 'Contact the support team' page in your account to reflect this: Now, when you get a response to your support question, you will be able to put a name to a very handsome face. We've also got the brains to match the looks – as every member of our support team is an experienced web designer, we're happy to look at your HTML code and help you with formatting issues, dispense design advice and assist you with those curly code questions you may have. Resellers, please note that your clients will not be able to access this support page. Take a look at the new support page in your account and let us know what you think of the fun new design. Just be careful not to wake up our 'sleeping' team members! Got a question? If you want to know how to get something done in the app or have a suggestion as to how we can do things better, let us know via your account's support page. You can also visit us on the Forums. For your shorter questions and comments, send us a tweet (@campaignmonitor) and keep our resident Twitterholics happy. We're always keen to hear from you!

As the days get cooler in the Northern Hemisphere, we were certain that we would start seeing some delectably Autumnal email designs. So it was with much appreciation that we received Activeark UK’s design for Cauldron, a purveyor of fine (and very convenient) food. The use of warm, subdued colors first appealed to us, as they convey a restful personality well suited to an email newsletter about comfort meals. The images and iconography have been selected with care to compliment the newsletter. However, what had us sold was the passionate copy, promising the reader an Autumn both ‘exceptionally exciting and beautiful’ as prelude to their enthusiasm for seasonal produce. The Cauldron email newsletter is a pleasure to view and its elegance is only accentuated in the browser window. What’s more, the footer sets the reader’s expectation as to what is to be seen in the delicious monthly newsletters to come.

Imagine a world in which you didn't have to code and re-code your site to ensure consistency in both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Now, imagine something even more outrageous, another dimension in which HTML emails render as they should – reliably and accessibly, across all email clients. It's not too late to make this a reality, so today we're wearing our blue with pride and celebrating International Blue Beanie Day, in support of web standards! Despite Sydney's sultry Springtime making beanie use totally inappropriate, such is our love for web standards that we've defied the elements and donned our blue bonnets. We've also changed our avatars on Twitter and Facebook and kept the conversation alive on the importance of web standards support. So, now there's only one thing left to do – get you to help us spread the word. Here are some things you can do today: Read up on why we need standards support in HTML email Get involved with Blue Beanie Day events on Facebook Find out how you can assist the Email Standards Project Wear a blue beanie and upload a pic to the BBD 09 Flickr pool Talk to your clients and colleagues about how important web standards are – and how you would spend a lot less time coding and testing if they were supported across all web browsers and email clients! Regardless of what you do on the Web, standards do matter. Don your cap this Blue Beanie Day and spend some time learning about web standards support, talking to other designers and getting active. Together, we can make crappy CSS hacks and table-based layouts a far and distant memory. Follow International Blue Beanie Day on Twitter - #BBD09

In our previous post, we covered the basics of preparing an email template for use in a Campaign Monitor campaign. But how about if you want to do more than simply changing the look and feel? In this post we’ll discuss using content tags to embed some of Campaign Monitor’s automated features, such as unsubscribe links, links to a web-based version of your email, personalization of copy and more. Lets get started... Adding content tags to your email templates is a little bit trickier than visually tweaking an email template (as we did previously), but thankfully, not that tricky. That said, you won’t be able to see the results until your completed email has added to a campaign. In this example, we will be editing code and adding a variety of Campaign Monitor-specific content tags which should not look that unfamiliar if you have some experience with HTML. We’re going to start where we left off, by re-visiting our earlier template for ABC Widgets: In this example, we’re going to make the following changes to the template: Personalize the email with the subscriber’s name Add a web-version link to the top of the email Add an unsubscribe link to the email Add a ‘forward-to-a-friend’ link to your email Add a link to a preference center Personalizing an email with a subscriber’s name Say we’d like to add a personal touch to our email campaigns – greeting our subscribers in the email copy by first name. If your existing subscriber list already contains subscriber names, then we can add a greeting like, “Hi Jerry”. If a name doesn’t exist for your subscriber, then you can set a fallback greeting - “Hi customer”, “Hi widget fan” - or the like. The good news is, that we can achieve this with one simple tag: [firstname,fallback=widget fan] Once this is inserted into our template’s HTML code, it will look something like this: Hi [firstname,fallback=widget fan]! Welcome to this month’s ABC Widgets newsletter... When you send your campaign, it will look something like this: Pretty nifty, eh? Find out more about personalizing your emails. Once you get the hang of this, then adding other content tags is pretty self-explanatory, however we’ll run through their applications, too. Add a web-version link to the top of the email How your email campaigns render in your subscribers’ email clients can be highly variable, especially if you consider the countless email clients and platforms that exist out there (eg. Hotmail, Outlook, Blackberry...). For this reason, it’s best-practice to provide a link to a web-hosted version of your email campaign, just in case it doesn’t display quite right. Campaign Monitor automatically creates a web-version of your email campaign. You can link to it by simply adding the <webversion> content tag to your template. Here is an example: Having trouble viewing this email? <webversion>View it in your browser.</webversion>. Add an unsubscribe link to your email Providing an instant one-click unsubscribe link is mandatory in all campaigns. It’s pretty easy to include as well. Using the <unsubscribe> tag, you can add an unsubscribe link in this manner: <unsubscribe>Unsubscribe instantly from our newsletter</unsubscribe>. Add a ‘forward-to-a-friend’ link to your email Adding a forward-to-a-friend link is a great way to allow your subscribers to share your email, without hitting the ‘Forward’ button and potentially having it render in unpredictable (and often, broken) ways. The best part is, you can track who is forwarding your campaign and how many people they are forwarding to from your campaign reports. As you can now guess, this content tag is very much like the others - <forwardtoafriend>. You can even customize your ‘forward-to-a-friend’ page, too! Here’s the code: <forwardtoafriend>Forward this email to a friend</forwardtoafriend>. Add a link to your preference center Earlier in our blog, we touched on the importance of having a preference center to better manage and target subscribers, as well as reduce unsubscribes. If you have already included custom fields in a subscriber list, providing a link in your email to your preference center is a great way to start collecting information on your subscribers’ interests, desired email frequency or even location. All you need to include is the <preferences> tag. Here’s an example: Want to change your <preferences>subscription preferences</preferences>? Putting it all together Now we’ve added all these content tags, here’s what our email looks like after we’ve added it to a campaign: Take a look at the web-version for this sample campaign. You will be able to see the forward-to-a-friend, preferences and unsubscribe pages in action. No comment on the geeky copy… This is our second post in a series on getting started with Campaign Monitor’s templates. Next we’ll look at creating templates for use in our WYSIWYG editor. Hang in there! Looking to get your hands into more serious coding? This post covers the basics of using content tags in your email campaigns. For more detailed information, check out our glossary of content tags, or ask a question in the forums.

If you've ever played around with a service, plugin or app that requires an API key in order to authenticate your account, you may have noticed that it's not the most convenient string of random characters to wield around. Great for developers, yes, but not so great if you're on a mobile device without the liberty to copy text, or even switch between browser windows. We realized that in order to make applications using the Campaign Monitor API more user friendly and to extend use of the API to mobile devices, it was imperative to add the new method, User.GetApiKey. This method will return the API key for a Campaign Monitor user or client, given: The base URL they use to login to their account (eg. http://abcdesign.createsend.com) Their account username Their account password As a user's username and password are being passed for authentication purposes, we strongly recommend that you use the HTTP Secure API endpoint for all calls to this method. Read more on the usage of User.GetApiKey. Amazingly, there have been over 84k calls to this method since its release! We're very pleased to announce this method as it will inevitably overcome the usability issues that come with requesting API keys. You may even use it in your next widget! Share your questions regarding the Campaign Monitor API here and in the forums.

Really, you just can't go wrong with a super cute drawing of a monster to illustrate your email, right? It's eye-catching and can immediately pique the readers' interest. Not only that, but the email keeps it short and simple and provides clear call to action for the readers, inviting them to participate. The only suggestion we have is to convert that title at the top to text rather than an image.

Have you, or your clients been importing email addresses into your subscriber lists in Campaign Monitor? You may have noticed that when you import lists larger than your approved list size, a warning appears, noting that you will have to complete our campaign approval process prior to sending your campaign. The benefit is that you and your clients will no longer be caught out by the need to get your campaign approved, just as you're about to send that time-critical email newsletter. Our approval process is in place to ensure that everyone enjoys reliable deliverability and service. By having our approval team check that lists abide by our anti-spam policy, we can maintain permission best practice and great deliverability for all campaigns. If you're a designer sending on behalf of one of your clients and you import a list larger than your approved list size, you will see a message like this (“Before you can send a campaign to this list, you'll need approval“): If one of your clients imports a list above their current approved list size, then they will see a warning like this (“Your account has not been approved for a list of this size"): Once your client has imported the list, an email will be sent to you, explaining that your client will need to go through our approval process before they can send a campaign. This will prepare you for any questions your client may have: In both instances, you will have to have to go through our approval process. This involves answering two short questions regarding your list, which we will then review prior to approving your first campaign to a list of this size: You will only have to do this once in order to send to your new subscriber list. Read more about how the approval process works. Let us know your thoughts on the new campaign approval process – it will certainly mean far less campaign approval surprises for you and your clients.

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