Observations & Answers Archives

MailBuild downtime this Saturday September 14th

Posted by Mathew Patterson on September 5, 2008 9:32 AM

[UPDATE] Thanks for your patience, we are back up and running after successfully completing our maintenance.

Due to some maintenance requirements, we have scheduled an extended downtime period for MailBuild Saturday evening of the 13th, US Central time. We are specifying a total downtime of 6 hours overnight, but if all goes well expect MailBuild to be back sooner.

What does 'downtime' mean?

This maintenance period will have the following effects:

• You and your clients will not be able to login to MailBuild (or c/send.com)
• Campaigns scheduled to be sent during this period will not go out, but will be sent automatically as soon as the application comes back up.

However, subscribes and unsubscribes will be captured during the downtime, and processed into your reports afterwards. Campaigns sent previously will continue to display correctly, links will work and clicks and opens will be recorded correctly.

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.

2 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.

0 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.

19 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!).

0 comments so far

We're Hiring: Web Interface Designer

Posted by David Greiner on February 27, 2008 5:30 PM

One of the biggest benefits of selling software for designers is, well, we get to know lots of designers. Today I'm hoping that pays off as we open up our first ever pure design role at Freshview. We're looking for an interface designing guru to join our Sydney team and help make our products look great and a pleasure to use.

We've put together a page on the Freshview site about the position itself, with a basic overview of our design approach. You can also check out what it's like working here and read more about our recent office upgrade.

This position is only available in our Sydney office, but we're more than happy to relocate the right candidate. We recently moved 2 new members of our team from North America, so if you're interested in moving to sunny Sydney, please consider applying.

Other recent hires

While we still have a number of positions open, I'm excited to announce four new members have been added of the Freshview team in the last month or so. This includes Toby and Phil to our development team, along with Travis and Diana on the support and community side. Travis is heading over from Canada, while Diana will be our first team member operating out of the US. Our shiny new offices are filling with great people fast!

0 comments so far

Are you a MailBuild user looking for design work?

Posted by Mathew Patterson on January 29, 2008 3:02 PM

If you can design a MailBuild template with one hand behind your back, then checkout this iFreelance project and you may be able to pickup a new client.

We get quite a few people contacting us at MailBuild and at Campaign Monitor looking for designers familiar with our software who can help them out.

If that is you, then in the short term, why not drop by the looking for designers thread in the Campaign Monitor forums and leave your details.

We're looking at more ways of connecting designers with the people who need help in the future too.

0 comments so far

Want to work for Freshview?

Posted by David Greiner on December 5, 2007 7:39 PM

After just completing a mammoth office fitout and a big move into more space, we're looking for a number of new people to join the Freshview team. This is a pretty cool opportunity for anyone interested in shaping the future of 2 award winning (and much-loved) web applications used by tens of thousands of fellow designers.

I like to think we offer a pretty awesome work environment - free catered lunches, near the beach, private offices, and lots of other fun stuff. We've been holding out on making this announcement until the move into our shiny new premises was complete, but now we're all settled and really need some more hands on deck. Here are the new positions we've opened up:

• Designer and customer support legend
• System Administrator
• Senior Developer
• Mid-level tester
• Office Manager/Bookkeeper

If you're interested, we've written a little about what it's like working at Freshview. If you're not a good match but know someone who is, please help us out by passing the position on to them.

All of these positions are for our Sydney office, but if you're the right match and interested in moving to sunny Sydney, we'd be happy to sponsor you. It's actually a pretty easy process these days - just ask Bob, our new QA Engineer who we moved here from Canada.

0 comments so far

The Email Standards Project launches

Posted by David Greiner on November 28, 2007 9:26 PM

After a couple of months of hard work and some amazing help from others, I'm excited to announce that the Email Standards Project site has just officially launched.

First off, I wanted to say a huge thanks to a few people:

• Luke Stevens for his awesome hard work on the design and build of the site. Luke's worked incredibly hard, especially in the last few days to make the site a reality.
• Mark Wyner, our fearless tester and standards guru for being patient enough to test and document every major email client out there.
• The entire Freshview team, especially Mat for managing the Facebook group and having a hand in just about everything else.

What's on email-standards.org?

If you're after a quick background on how the whole idea started, check out my rant from a few months back. Here's a quick overview of what the site currently includes:

• An overview of the project, it's aims and background.
• A short article about why web standards are important for email.
• A series of reports on the current state of standards support in each major email client, including suggestions for improvement.
• The Email Standards Project blog, focusing on news about the project and about email standards. We'd love to see your contributions here!
• Information about how people like you can be involved and help the Email Standards Project make a difference.

How can you help right now?

The most immediate way that everybody can help is to make your voice heard. Use your blog, newsletter or website to mention the launch of the Email Standards Project, and to discuss why you think it is important and worth checking out.

It would be fantastic if we could get as many people as possible posting about this. If you don't have a blog, then you could contribute your thoughts as a comment on our blog or someone else's post, and help to build interest in that way. We've put together some other ideas you might consider.

HTML emails have been languishing for too long, and now it is time to get involved and make something happen. If you have any questions, or suggestions for how we can further the cause, please get in touch or leave a comment on the ESP site.

0 comments so far

Web based email continues to grow

Posted by Mathew Patterson on October 30, 2007 3:49 PM

While we spend a lot of time as designers worrying about rendering in the desktop email clients, and quite rightly, it's sometimes easy to forget about the growing use of web based email clients.

Particularly as offerings like Yahoo Mail (and recently Gmail) offer IMAP capabilities, more and more people will be accessing their email in part of completely through a web browser.

Over at Email Marketing Reports, Mark Brownlow has recently updated his Email and webmail statistics article with recent numbers. Yahoo cites a staggering 543 million webmail accounts, of which Yahoo provides almost half.

What does this mean for web designers? It means that testing in webmail clients is even more important than ever. Even though your subscribers are probably using one of the major browsers to view their email, different webmail providers render your newsletters in different ways.

You might want to set yourself up with free accounts for Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail at least, and test with them. Also, check out the new design and spam testing tool over at Campaign Monitor that can save you a lot of time.

0 comments so far

MailBuild loading slowly or timing out

Posted by David Greiner on October 17, 2007 5:29 PM

Last night, Sydney time, MailBuild and Campaign Monitor were both handling very high loads, and you or your clients may have experience slow response times, missing images and dropped connections to the server.

We were notified right away by our monitoring, and the server support team started working right away on sorting it out. Thanks to everybody who let us know too. We can only apologise for the frustration and inconvenience this has caused for you.

New load balancing hardware is on its way, but it is a tricky process to get right, and we do not want to risk rushing the project.

Although we have made several changes today to reduce the peak load, we are anticipating that during busy periods tonight (the US Wednesday business day) there could again be slowness when accessing both the applications and campaigns.

Please be aware that this is a possibility, and keep it in mind when scheduling and sending campaigns. We're doing everything we can to keep up with the demands of higher usage during that time.

All of us at Freshview appreciate your business, and we want to make sure you have a great experience every time you use MailBuild. If you have any questions or concerns, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us.

2 comments so far

MailBuild resellers earning thousands of dollars

Posted by David Greiner on October 8, 2007 10:44 AM

Back in February of this year, we launched a new billing system which let you guys set your own prices for each client, and then earn a profit every time they sent a campaign from your account. We followed this up in June by supporting an additional 4 currencies, making it easier for you to bill your client in their local currency.

So, what have the results been?

Before we launched this "set your own prices" system, we always encouraged you to pass our prices back on to your clients at a marked-up rate. We got the ocassional bit of feedback saying how well that was going, but we never really knew what sort of money our customers were earning reselling MailBuild.

Well, we do now! Our mark-up system has well and truly been embraced, and I'm wrapped to say that many of our customers are making thousands of dollars each from their MailBuild account. Here's a quick chart (with dollar values removed) showing the growth in profits you guys have been earning since we launched in February.

Earnings growth for MailBuild resellers

As you can see, growth in profits earnt has been skyrocketing each month and show no sign of slowing down. It's one thing knowing your customers might be doing well reselling your product, but knowing it for a fact is another thing altogether!

While this growth is fantastic, we're certainly not sitting on our hands. We plan on adding more currencies to the mix soon and will also be revisiting our pricing for some currencies to bring them more in line with today's exchange rates and make sure you can stay competitive in your own currency. If you're not already reselling MailBuild as your own product to your clients, then the chart above should be all the motivation you need.

For everyone who is already marking their clients up, we transferred your September profit into your PayPal account today - go buy yourself something nice.

2 comments so far

Show your support for standards in HTML emails

Posted by Mathew Patterson on October 5, 2007 3:17 PM

You may have seen on the Campaign Monitor blog we recently kicked off a big push for HTML email standards, and we're planning a lot of activity to improve the situation for web designers.

Right now we are working on a separate website to bring it all together, and we're getting in touch with people in the right places to start the discussion. If you would like to show your support for consistency of rendering in HTML emails, consider joining our Email Standards Project group on Facebook.

It's a quick and simple way to get involved and will also be a good gathering point until the website is up. If you know other designers who feel the same way (or even who don't) , please let them know about it too.

Join the Email Standards Project group on Facebook.

0 comments so far

The MailBuild introductory movie

Posted by Mathew Patterson on September 25, 2007 2:34 PM

Back in July we put together a Campaign Monitor introductory movie, with a lot of help from our friends at freshweb.

Now it's MailBuild's turn, with this MailBuild overview movie that covers the key features of MailBuild in just a few minutes. The point of the video is to help give web designers an idea about what MailBuild is and how it can help them, and their clients.

Special thanks to MailBuild customer Hamish Stevenson from Catch Design who let us use some of Catch's excellent templates in the movie. You can see one of their templates in our customer gallery too.

Please do check out the movie and leave us a comment below - does it cover the questions you had before you started using MailBuild? If you are not using MailBuild, are there questions you still have now?

7 comments so far

Troubleshooting your HTML and CSS

Posted by Mathew Patterson on September 20, 2007 3:27 PM

We get a lot of questions from frustrated designers trying to deal with their beautiful designs being mangled by various email clients. Often we don't have a single straight answer, because it is an issue with support for a particular element of HTML or CSS.

We're going to start pushing for standards in HTML emails, but even so we all need some skills in how to track down problems with our HTML and CSS.

Here are a few techniques I use for web pages and for emails - leave us a comment below with your own techniques, processes and ideas.

• Borders on everything: Adding a 1px coloured border to different elements helps you to see where the elements are interracting with each other, whether sizes are applied and where you might have munged tags. Tools like Firebug can let you do this live.
• Chop it in half: If you can't figure out where a problem is coming from, try cutting out big chunks of the CSS until it goes away. It helps you narrow down to the section that is causing the problem, which can save a lot of time.
• Validate your code: Even if you aren't going to be able to make it 100% valid, it will pick up broken tags and incorrect nesting, things that you can easily miss when you've been looking at your own markup for hours.

One new, and free, tool I love is the Xray inspector, that works on Internet Explorer 6+, and Webkit and all the Mozilla/Webkit based browsers including Safari and Camino. It's a really fast way to work out what is going on in your layout.

How do you troubleshoot problems when building a MailBuild template?

5 comments so far

Scheduled maintenance late Saturday night through Sunday morning

Posted by David Greiner on September 14, 2007 7:37 PM

Apologies for the short notice, but we'll be taking MailBuild offline for a total of 8 hours between 8.30pm this Saturday night and 4.30am Sunday morning (US Central time - see this in your own time zone) to make some key hardware upgrades and add some additional layers of redundancy to both MailBuild and Campaign Monitor.

Don't worry, the maintenance will have zero impact on your client's subscribe forms or campaign tracking, everything will purr along as usual - they just won't be able to log into their account. If your clients schedule any campaigns to be delivered in this time-frame, they'll be sent as soon as the application is back online. We'll display a generic scheduled maintenance page to your clients during this time.

Update: The updates have been completed successfully and as of 12.30am we're back online. Thanks for your patience everyone.

0 comments so far

Standards in HTML email - let's make it happen

Posted by Mathew Patterson on September 10, 2007 3:44 PM

I know that most of you guys and girls reading this blog are web designers, and like me you are probably sick of having to code your MailBuild templates like it's still 1999.

Microsoft's Outlook 2007 dealt another blow to the dream of standards based HTML email, but it's not just a Microsoft problem. There are so many popular email clients, and such big variations between what they support, and how they render it. Over on the Campaign Monitor blog Dave has posted on why we need standards support in HTML email.

It's a call to arms for web designers to stop pretending HTML email doesn't exist, and to get involved in improving the situation. We'll be doing our best to get the message out, but we'll need your help. Have a read of the post, and leave a comment in support or disagreement.

The time is now for web standards in HTML email.

2 comments so far

Scheduled maintenance early Sunday morning

Posted by David Greiner on August 31, 2007 4:01 PM

We'll be taking the MailBuild application offline for a total of 4 hours this Sunday morning between 1am and 5am (US Central time - see this in your own time zone) to make some key hardware upgrades and add some additional layers of redundancy to both MailBuild and Campaign Monitor.

Don't worry, the maintenance will have zero impact on your client's subscribe forms or campaign tracking, everything will purr along as usual - they just won't be able to log into their account. If your clients schedule any campaigns to be delivered in this time-frame, they'll be sent as soon as the application is back online.

Update: We got the updates done faster than expected and as of 2.40am we're back online. Thanks for your patience (that is of course if you weren't sound asleep).

0 comments so far

Your client's invoices for MailBuild

Posted by Mathew Patterson on August 29, 2007 2:49 PM

We've covered a lot about rebranding MailBuild as your own product, but one area we get asked about is what client invoices look like when they are emailed, and in their billing history.

There is now a new help page that covers this topic (under billing), and reproduced here is a sample invoice showing what your client will see. You'll notice it is fairly generically branded, so we don't give you away, and it also has a prominent reminder that the charge on their card will be from CREATESEND.com.

Thanks to Richard, the MailBuild customer who suggested this addition to the help pages. We always appreciate hearing about things that need clarification or additional detail, just fire through an email to support.

0 comments so far

How does HTML email fit into the future of web design?

Posted by Mathew Patterson on July 23, 2007 6:07 PM

Over on the Campaign Monitor blog I mentioned my upcoming presentation at the Future of Web Design in New York.

The talk will be on html email in general, not just Campaign Monitor, and we are looking for your feedback as to what you think we should focus on. So if you have any suggestions or requests, leave a comment below or jump over into the new Campaign Monitor forums and join the discussion.

0 comments so far

MailBuild at Refresh Pittsburgh

Posted by Mathew Patterson on July 2, 2007 3:17 PM

If you are in or around Pittsburgh, you might be interested in joining Jason Head at the 25th July meeting of Refresh Pittsburgh. Jason will be doing a presentation on how to effectively use MailBuild for your clients, and generate income for yourself.

There's also a talk from Josh Sager that looks great about "Web Comics on the Internet: From Analog to Digital". Refresh meetings like this one are a great way to connect with the local web design and development scene.

There may already be a Refresh group near you - check out Refreshing Cities for a list. If not, then why not start one up yourself!

4 comments so far

Update on server status

Posted by David Greiner on June 28, 2007 11:06 AM

Hey guys. First off, our sincere apologies for the web site and application being unavailable the past few hours.

So what happened? We had a serious hardware failure on our web server that needed to be fixed right there and then. As soon as this was identified, our data centre technicians rebuilt the server, restored the backup and the system is now online and purring nicely. Under every other circumstance, we'd schedule some downtime and rebuild the server when you're all sleeping, but this just wasn't an option today.

A big thanks to those customers who dropped us a line about the issue, and thanks also for your patience as we resolved it. We're now making a number of changes behind the scenes to make sure this kind of issue won't take the site down with it moving forward. This is the first time we've ever had to take MailBuild offline, rest assured we're doing everything we can to ensure it's the last.

0 comments so far

Billing survey - the results are in!

Posted by David Greiner on November 2, 2006 3:05 PM

When we initially put our billing survey together, we were hoping for at least 50-60 responses so we'd have a decent range of feedback from different types of customers (from larger agencies right down to those doing some freelance on the side). Amazingly, we had almost 500 responses, most of them with thoughtful comments and ideas on exactly what would work for them.

The results

While we've been genuinely blown away with the number of responses, it was the results themselves that surprised us most. In the vein of trying to keep MailBuild as simple as possible, we were hoping there wouldn't be an equal response to each of the options presented, leaving us with a hard choice on which direction to take.

Luckily for us, an overwhelming number of you guys pushed the vote in a single direction. The vast majority of you were gunning for the ability for your clients to pay with their own credit cards, either at the standard pricing or a marked-up rate and you guys receive the difference.

After this, the next best popular vote was to keep things as they are now, where you pay on behalf of your clients and then invoice them yourself. Coming in a surprisingly unpopular last place was the ability to allocate your client credits from your own pool of pre-purchased credits.

Where to from here?

We're giving you guys what you asked. Today we're hard at work on adding the facilities to let your own clients pay for campaign delivery using their own credit cards. They can pay our default pricing of 1 cent/recipient plus the $5 delivery fee, or you can set a mark-up rate they should pay (say $10 delivery and 3 cents/recipient). If you go for the mark-up option, we'll collect your profit and then send it to you via PayPal at the end of each month.

We realize many of you are also happy with the current approach, so that will always be an option too. Billing settings will be controlled on a client-by-client basis. You might have some clients that you continue paying for, others that pay themselves at our wholesale rate and others you charge a mark-up and pocket the difference.

When we say we're hard at work on this, we're not joking either. Here's a sneak preview of an under development screen to set the billing options for each of your clients.

But, that's not what I voted for!

Inevitably there will be some of you guys who voted for the credit approach, but considering the fact that almost 6 times more people went the other direction we think this one was pretty cut and dry. Having said that, we'll never rule out other options in the future, but right now we're starting with the simplest approach that the majority of our customers have asked for.

A big thanks again to those who participated in the survey and helped make MailBuild a better product.

29 comments so far

Billing - tell us what you want

Posted by David Greiner on October 26, 2006 7:04 PM

Since we launched MailBuild we've been getting plenty of feedback and few great suggestions on how we could improve the way billing works to suit your needs. Some of you want your clients to pay using their own credit cards, others want to handle everything and charge a mark-up.

Before we decide which direction (if any) we take with a billing update, we'd love to hear from you guys on exactly what would work for you. If you have a spare 20 seconds, and that's all this will take, please cast your vote on what approach works best for you.

We've also included an area where you can add your own thoughts about what approach does and doesn't work for you, plus any other comments you'd like to add. This feedback really helps us shape MailBuild into the best possible product for everyone, so please don't hesitate to let it all out.

On a side note, we built this survey in about 2 minutes flat with Wufoo, a very slick form builder from the guys behind Particletree.

7 comments so far

Why we created MailBuild

Posted by David Greiner on July 20, 2006 6:38 PM

Ever since we started mentioning to our Campaign Monitor customers that we were creating MailBuild, we've been getting some great reactions.

Every so often though, a customer will ask us why we didn't just integrate the template functionality into Campaign Monitor and be done with it. This question is completely understandable and I'd like to quickly explain why we went down the separate app route.

1. From the almost endless conversations we had with our customers when we were making the decision, some but definitely not all had clients they knew would want to create and send their own emails.
2. We know there are plenty of designers out there that don't want to handle subscriber management and ongoing email design for their clients. Campaign Monitor just isn't for them and that's fine. If we combined both apps, 50% of the functionality in Campaign Monitor would be useless to them and just get in their way.
3. We love simple things that do what they should and nothing else. We know a lot of our Campaign Monitor customers feel the same and we hope our MailBuild customers will too.

By creating MailBuild, we could focus on all the specific features designers and their "get my hands dirty" clients need and none that they don't.

6 comments so far

It's Alive!!!!

Posted by David Greiner on July 18, 2006 4:57 PM

After a few months of development and a couple of weeks of testing, we're inches away from a public launch and the MailBuild blog finally sees the light of day. Just like the Campaign Monitor blog, we'll be using this place to keep you guys up to date with all the happenings with MailBuild.

The beta feedback has been overwhelming and super helpful. We've been squashing loads of bugs and even managed to added a few much requested features, which I'll go into in later posts. A huge thanks goes out to everyone who has been helping us with this. We really wouldn't have got MailBuild as stable as it is without your help. Please keep the feedback 'a coming.

0 comments so far