How I Got Wine from Campaign Monitor

First let me tell you a story. It’s actually Seth Godin’s story from The Purple Cow, a book about what it takes to create and sell something remarkable.

Seth and family driving in France, enchanted by picturesque cows grazing in lovely pastures. Kilometres and kilometres of cows. New cows suddenly are just like old cow, now cows are common. Now cows are boring.

“Cows, after you’ve seen them for a while, are boring. They may be well-bred cows, Six Sigma cows, cows lit by a beautiful light, but they are still boring. A Purple Cow, though: Now, that would really stand out. The essence of the Purple Cow—the reason it would shine among a crowd of perfectly competent, even undeniably excellent cows—is that it would be remarkable. Something remarkable is worth talking about, worth paying attention to. Boring stuff quickly becomes invisible.”

Campaign Monitor is my purple cow.

In the land of email distribution services there are some big players and companies with lots of features. How do you choose who to spend money with?

I looked at everyone’s websites. I tested the tools.

I like that CampaignMonitor.com has a self-explanatory website. The home page tells me about the immediate benefits I will see using the service: control, design testing, reporting, and the blowing-away of clients. Wow, they know what I need.

• Free sign-up. Yay!
• Easy set-up. Double yay! (Although it did take me a bit to realize all the moving parts for creating the on-site subscriber links and thank you pages. As a methodical beginner this was all fine, and now that I’ve done it once, I’m like a rocket ship.)
• Simple reporting of complex info. Love the opens, activity reports, subscriber reports—fantastic!

Plus, they have a rockin’ newsletter with lots of tips. It’s important that the company selling me email distribution actually understands how this works and writes a good newsletter.

And, they continue to provide value to the community by creating tools for designers, like this CSS Support Chart that details what CSS elements are supported in various email clients. Hello Superstar!

Campaign Monitor is my Purple Cow. They make email marketing “refreshingly simple”, which is also part of the tagline for Freshview, the company responsible for Campaign Monitor.

And “refreshingly simple” makes them my favourite. It makes them remarkable. So remarkable that I’m willing to recommend them to friends and colleagues, which is what I did recently on Lab with Leo.

Now how did I get that wine?

In June, Mathew from Campaign Monitor spotted me on Lab with Leo and sent me an email thanking me for mentioning Campaign Monitor. He also said, “We’d love to send you a Campaign Monitor shirt to say thanks.” Sweet!

Since James is the t-shirt wearer in our family, I picked a size for him. On a related note, James gets a lot of t-shirts from Threadless, who also use Campaign Monitor.

Somewhere along the line, I also ended up with 2 bottles of fantastic Australian wine from my Sydney-based friends at Freshview.

Remarkable service means I remark on the service.

Thank You for the Thank You.