Campaign Monitor rescues generated emails for marketers

Marketers control emails sent out in campaigns, like the ones telling you about a new sale on widgets.

But developers have controlled generated emails, such as those with a confirmation link after you’ve signed up for something. When the time comes, the coders ask the marketing department for the body text.

Today, email marketing platform Campaign Monitor is announcing a new transactional email capability that puts those generated emails within its marketer-focused drag-and-drop platform, providing what it describes as the first service of its kind.

Originally founded in Sydney, Australia, the San Francisco-based company provides a platform that enables over 120,000 brands to conduct email marketing campaigns, including Apple, Facebook, Fitbit, and Buzzfeed. A recent VB Insight Buyer’s Guide on email marketing tools noted that the company has a five percent market share of the Alexa top 10,000 websites.

Campaign Monitor estimates that about 60 billion generated emails are sent to customers and would-be customers every month worldwide from websites and apps.

But “the job of the CMO [chief marketing officer] is to control the brand,” Campaign Monitor CMO Kraig Swensrud told me. CMOs and their marketing departments want to tweak the email text as needed, manage the look and feel, even add cross-promotions when the urge strikes.

They also want to A/B test different versions and make sure there isn’t a [Your name] variable showing where there should be, you know, your name.

For a Campaign Monitor customer like gift box provider Birchbox, he said, system-triggered emails are essential to maintaining good relationships with customers.

They represent the majority of the email communications most people have with brands, including discount offers, back-to-school promotions, welcome emails, order confirmations, password resets, purchase or subscription confirmations, account statements, travel reservations, and so on.

From the point of view of a website or an app, the emailing process works essentially the same way with Campaign Monitor’s new service, Swenrud said. Except now the guts of the email are routed through Campaign Monitor via an API, and optimized for nearly three dozen different kinds of emailboxes.

“Traditional email tools [for sites and apps] have been targeted at developers,” he said, including Mailgun, Amazon’s Simple Email Service (SES), MailChimp’s Mandrill, and SendGrid.

“This is targeted at marketers.”