Editor update: Feedback and Fixes
Posted by David Greiner on July 22, 2008 5:45 PM
It's been 24 hours since we launched the new editor and I just wanted to say a quick thanks to everyone who has been sending in so many kind words about the upgrade. It's awesome you're finding it a big improvement, and especially cool that your clients are digging it too.
A number of you guys have also notice some irregular behavior with some templates, and we've been hard at work fixing these issues. We just pushed another update to the editor live that included fixes for the following issues:
- Floating titles that include links can now be updated once added.
- Drag and drop sorting is now working across the board. Some templates has some pretty serious nested table action but we've worked through it so drag and drop away.
- When editing an existing floating image, you can now delete it altogether, as well as replace it.
On an unrelated note, a number of customers have been asking if they can nest a repeater within a repeater. I'm afraid that's not supported right now, and unless there is serious demand it's not going to happen in the short-term.
Thanks again for all the great feedback. Of course, If you spot any other issues moving forward, please get in touch. We want this transition to be as smooth as possible for both you and your clients.
Posted in New Features & Updates1 comments so far
The new MailBuild editor is alive and kicking
Posted by David Greiner on July 21, 2008 2:51 PM
I'm very pleased to announce that the new MailBuild editor has just been pushed live and is now available to all of your clients. We covered the list of new features here last week, but here's a quick summary if you missed it:
- Multiple repeater support - Include as many repeaters in your templates as you'd like.
- Inline CSS - We automatically move all your CSS inline when sending the campaign for the best results in all email clients.
- Drag and drop - Move repeater items quickly and easily.
- Live preview - See precisely how your content looks as you type.
- Bigger, resizable WYSIWYG editor - Great for clients adding big chunks of content to their campaigns.
- Huge performance increase - Rebuilt from the ground up, feels like you're editing a local document.
The only change to the template tagging structure is the addition of a new toc='true' attribute in the repeater tag, which I'll discuss in more detail below. We've also put together a sample template that includes multiple repeaters and uses this new attribute.
Download the sample template (including Photoshop files - 2.5mb .zip)
Now that the new editor is out in the wild, we'll also be releasing a whole bunch of new sample templates that take advantage of the more flexible editing environment. Look out for an announcement here soon.
Answers to common questions
Will my old templates break?
Not a chance, the editor will continue to work for all your older templates. In fact, there have been no changes to the current templates tags, you can just include as many repeaters as you like, instead of the previous limit of one.
What happens to the table of contents when there are multiple repeaters?
As you know, we automatically populate your table of contents tag as your client adds items to their template. Now that we support multiple repeaters, you can tell us which repeater should populate the table of contents with the toc='true' attribute in your <repeater> tag. Here's how it looks for a repeater that includes a title, description and image...
<repeater toc='true'>
<$title$>
<$description$>
<img src="<$imagesrc link='true'$>" width="200">
</repeater>
If you have the table of contents tags along with multiple repeaters and no toc='true' attribute is present, we'll use the first repeater found in your code.
Can I have a repeater that is just images and no text?
You sure can. Previously a repeater needed to include a title, but you can now have image-only repeaters. This means, for example, you could include a photo gallery in your template, among other things.
We do have more plans for the editor moving forward, such as making it easier for your clients to add personalization tags and giving more sophisticated clients a more advanced editor. In the mean time, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the new editor and any suggestions on how we could make it even better.
Posted in New Features & Updates4 comments so far
Coming next week: All new MailBuild editor
Posted by David Greiner on July 14, 2008 4:55 PM
The past few weeks we've been hard at work putting the final touches on an all new version of the MailBuild editor. It's launching this time next Monday (July 21st), but we wanted to give you a heads up on the new features we'll be including.
Here's a quick screencast showing some of the new features in action. You can also check out a higher quality version here.
Multiple repeater support
Of all the feature requests we've received for the editor, this has been the most popular by far. For many of you, a single repeater just didn't cut it. We've completely re-built the editor, allowing you to include as many repeating items in your template as you need.
Inline CSS
This is a big one. We now automatically move all of your template CSS inline for your clients when sending the email. This means a much more consistent rendering across all email clients, especially those with poor CSS support like Gmail and Outlook 2007.
You won't need to make any updates to your templates either, this will work automatically for all of your clients current template designs.
Drag and drop
Re-ordering the items in your newsletter is now as easy as picking it up and dropping it where you'd like. Even if you've coded your template using nested tables, you can still drag and drop any repeating items to change their order. No more moving items up and down click by click.
Live preview
Now your clients can see exactly how their content will look in the email as they type it. No more switching back and forth between editing and previewing just to see how your content will look. After using the new editor myself, I can personally vouch for how much of a time saver this is.
Bigger, resizable WYSIWYG editor
If your clients are adding lots of content to their emails, the limited size of the current editor made it hard to see a lot of what they were writing at once. The new editor maximizes use of the available screen real estate and can be resized to any height your client prefers.
Huge performance increase
The entire editor has been rebuilt from scratch and is now much faster than the original. This speed increase combined with the live preview feature make it feel just like working on a local document.
We'll be rolling out the new editor next Monday, so you might want to let your clients know in advance that these improvements are coming. The editor will still work in more or less the same manner, so your clients shouldn't have a problem picking up where the old editor left off.
We hope you like the changes, this is the first in a series of big updates we'll be making to MailBuild over the next few months. Look out for an update to the blog the moment the new editor goes live next week.
Posted in New Features & Updates21 comments so far
Do your readers understand your terminology?
Posted by Mathew Patterson on June 24, 2008 2:18 PM
We web designers and developers can easily forget how much of our day to day language is incomprehensible to outsiders who don't know their AJAX from their Jif. Over time, we tend to develop ways of talking to our clients that they can actually understand, which is great.
However, there are other areas where industry specific jargon can creep in without being noticed. One such spot is in our MailBuild templates. Not so much in the technical construction of the templates, which are intended for clients, but more in the labelling used, which is aimed at your client's subscribers.
For example: You know what a web version is, and your client might know, but their readers? Probably not. Instead of using the actual phase web version in your template, why not describe what it actually is. "If you can't read this email, view it on the web".
There are other spots you might want to work on. Do email readers understand what "unsubscribing" actually means? Could you be clearer perhaps: "If you are no longer interested in these emails, unsubscribe now and you will not get any more."
Once you've sorted out your templates, you can work on your language when explaining things to your client. Do they know what an open rate actually is? Have you helped them understand what bounces are? These are useful terms that can be easily glossed over.
You may already do this of course, which is great! Now all you need to worry about is your clients using their own jargon that the readers don't understand!
Posted in Articles/Tips1 comments so far
What's the latest CSS support in email clients?
Posted by Mathew Patterson on June 12, 2008 11:55 AM
Over at Campaign Monitor we've posted our 2008 update to our testing of CSS support in email clients. There's been no Outlook 2007 style shocks this year, but we have seen some changes worth noticing.
There's now 21 different sets of test results covering both desktop and web based email clients. This information will definitely come in handy when deciding how to construct your templates.
Visit http://www.campaignmonitor.com/css for the full report, including downloadable PDF and web versions. Thanks to Freshview community and support guy Travis for putting together this big update.
Posted in Articles/Tips0 comments so far
MailBuild and sending to membership lists
Posted by Mathew Patterson on June 3, 2008 11:44 AM
In many cases, deciding whether your client's subscriber lists meet our permission guidelines is pretty straightforward - perhaps it is a list of customers or people who filled in a subscribe form.
There are some other cases which are less clear cut, and that we get asked about a lot. The most common area of misconception is with membership lists. Typically, this includes things like Chamber of Commerce members, Real Estate Association members and conference attendee lists.
Often such lists are openly shared with the members and sponsors of such organisations, even with the explicit understanding that they will be used by members to contact each other.
However, we don't allow you or your clients to send to such lists with MailBuild (or Campaign Monitor). Even though often this usage is allowed by the Association or organisation, the key difference is the other members have not given their explicit permission to you directly.
They have given their permission to the group they joined, or the conference they attended, but not directly to you or your client. So while in some cases people will be happy to hear from you, others will not, and we've seen many complaints from such lists in the past.
That's why we can't allow sending to membership lists, unless your client is the actual organisation itself. Of course, if you have contacted individual members and obtained their permission, that's totally fine.
Maintaining a higher level of permission even than the organisation that owns the list helps us to protect our whitelisted status, and ensure we can keep delivering email for all of our customers.
We always appreciate your help in explaining these policies to your clients. Don't forget about our permission guideline handouts that you can download to give to your clients, to help them understand.
Posted in Observations & Answers0 comments so far
How do you use MailBuild?
Posted by Mathew Patterson on May 28, 2008 3:03 PM
Since the launch of MailBuild we've heard from all kinds of different people who use MailBuild in different ways, sometimes in ways we never expected. Whereas both Campaign Monitor and MailBuild came out of our own needs as a web design agency, the products have been adopted by designers in many other situations.
Government departments, for example often have inhouse designers or design teams who need to manage a lot of web and email content, and those designers use MailBuild to help them do that.
Some designers provide email newsletter capabilities for entire franchises, by setting up each store location with their own client account. Sales organisations setup each sales person as a 'client' and let them contact their prospects.
Each of these uses, and the many other ways out there, have slightly different goals and hence can have different requirements. We'd love to hear how you use MailBuild - it helps us understand how you think about it, and what your priorities might be.
Please drop in a comment letting us know if you are a traditional web design agency, a freelancer, or however else you describe yourself and your use of MailBuild.
Posted in Observations & Answers19 comments so far
Getting subscribers to 'whitelist' your emails
Posted by Mathew Patterson on May 12, 2008 2:32 PM
One relatively simple way to reduce the number of your emails (or your client's emails) ending up in spam folders is to ask them to whitelist your 'from' address or newsletter name.
Many email clients will not mark as spam emails from people who are in the users address book, or on their whitelist, or are otherwise 'known senders' of valid email. However, with so many different email clients out there, it can be tricky to know what instructions to provide for readers to put you onto their safe lists.
We recently discovered, via a comment on the Campaign Monitor gallery a simple online tool that will generate for you a single HTML page of instructions specific to your own sending address and newsletter details. You just fill in a short form, and you get back a full page that lists instructions for major email client, spam filters and ISPs.
From Chris Lang, the tool is called the Whitelist Email Instructions Generator. To get an idea of what it is about, see Chris's example generated whitelist page.
You can create your own, and then just grab the resulting HTML and paste it into your own site somewhere. Then link to it from the head or foot of your emails, or include it in your clients templates for them.
It's a smart tool that will save you a lot of time compared to working all this out yourself. Well done Chris!
Visit the Whitelist Email Instructions Generator.
Posted in Articles/Tips1 comments so far
How do you find new clients?
Posted by Mathew Patterson on May 7, 2008 2:56 PM
In our last blog post we mentioned some ways to get existing clients using MailBuild more often. This time, we're looking at some ways of bringing in new clients.
We're always interested in hearing how you guys and girls are making use of MailBuild, and we are often surprised by the smart, different and interesting approaches different designers have.
For example, some designers have managed to sign up franchises, so that each store in a regional chain becomes a new 'client' in their account. In other cases, the chain is just one client with different lists for different stores.
Other customers have told us that they concentrate on signing up customers in particular industry niches, like accountants or photographers, and market their rebranded MailBuild just to those people.
Probably the most common approach is to sell MailBuild as an additional service to your current web design customers, who already know your skills and are often interested in how email marketing can build their business.
You can also read some of our rebranding case studies to see how other designers have approached it. We'd love to hear about how you find new customers too (if you aren't scared of people stealing your approach!).
Posted in Observations & Answers0 comments so far
Help your clients use MailBuild more often
Posted by Mathew Patterson on April 22, 2008 10:01 AM
Often MailBuild users create one or two major templates for each client - perhaps the standard monthly newsletter template, and maybe an announcement format. That will meet most of their needs for email marketing.
However, if you would like to provide more value to your clients, and give yourself the opportunity to get some additional income from either template production charges or an increased number of campaigns, think about offering some more specialized templates.
What do we mean by 'specialized'? The idea is to think about ways that your clients can use email marketing outside of their normal practices. That might mean a special '10% off sale' campaign, or a special offer to their top customers.
If you can come up with these ideas for them, and then provide custom templates to suit those campaigns, you can help your client increase their business, and increase your own billing income too.
Here's a couple of examples to get you started:
- A "10% off" sale
You could create a template that is very much focused on a single idea - it would be designed differently than a normal newsletter template, perhaps with a 'sale!' badge or banner and an image header that focuses on the savings.
Design it so that there is a repeater for some of the top discounted items, and make sure the email has big 'call to action' buttons at the end. - A 'Forward to a Friend' focused template
You could combine this with a discount voucher offer, and create a template that your clients can send that really focuses on encouraging people to forward it to their friends. Also, make sure the email links prominently to a subscribe form, so that your client can build their list. - Favourite customers
Encourage your clients to send a special email to their top customers or most frequent readers. Help them use custom fields and segments to create a list of those top customers they can send to, and give them a special template that is designed to make those customers feel special.
Think about how you would design for people who know your client's brand well, as opposed to people who might be just new. How would the wording change? Perhaps the logo is not as important for those people?
If you can come up with some smart ideas to help your clients get more value from their email lists, they will love you for it, and you may end up benefiting directly from their increased sending.
I'm sure you can come up with something even smarter for your clients, and we'd love to hear about it in the comments!
Posted in Articles/Tips2 comments so far
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