CakeMail now in beta (6)
preview of CakeMail
The Code Kitchen has entered in beta this week for CakeMail, and from what I’ve seen, it’s a solid product. They previously demo’ed Cake in BarCamp2Montreal, where the team said they were targeting agencies, who would then resell it to their customers, making it the first white-label email platform.
I went through the beta. First, the registration email was ironically flagged as spam, which should be the last thing to happen to a newsletter platform. It also lacked any info about the pricing, and I haven’t been able to customize the interface as it was advertised, or get to an option to white-label it. Now, a comparison with Campaign Monitor is due, which is actually the standard for newsletters. I found Cake was much easier to use, the process of creating and sending a mailing is much more logical than Campaign Monitor’s crowded interface and options. And I would say I will be using for current projects instead of CampaignMonitor, if it’s priced right. You can also go try CakeMail.
As an aside, I met yesterday Francois Lane, who founded the company, and he said there was also a lot of work done in internationalization, and they are looking to spin off the localization application for CakeMail as a separate product as well.
Hi, Heri. Thanks for the review; we’re happy to hear you found it easier to use than Campaign Monitor!
We’ll look into the registration address issue right away (this is the first time we’ve heard of there being a problem, but once is one time too many as far as we’re concerned!). As you can appreciate, there are a myriad different reasons why that could have been marked as spam, some of which are outside our control. Could you let us know what email client and spam filters you are using? Thanks!
A few important clarifications:
- Other companies do offer varying degrees of white/private labeling. The difference with Cake is that it’s a dedicated white label platform, meaning we *only* deal with resellers and there will be no CakeMail brand targeted at end-users.
- The interface you tested is what the end-user sees and thus cannot be modified by the user. As we mentioned in our email to you, there’s an additional step for customizing (namely: downloading the HTML templates and CSS files); sorry if that wasn’t clear. White labeling means you actually host the interface on your own server with your own domain name and you can change the interface however you please, from placing your logo in it to redesigning it altogether. All communication between the interface and the API is through encrypted XML.
- Unless our resellers request otherwise, our wholesale pricing will not be disclosed to the general public because resellers are free to price things however they want, depending on the services they offer. Suffice it say that Cake offers wholesale pricing that is very competitive compared to the industry average. Prospective resellers are welcome to contact us for wholesale pricing details.
[...] everybody. I talked first with Francois Lane, from the code chicken, which is developing CakeMail (preview). We talked about how his company was started and also about his next planned product, a [...]
Hi Heri,
Mathew from Campaign Monitor here. It’s great to see new ideas coming into the email newsletter application area.
We’d love to hear your feedback about what you find confusing or complicated about Campaign Monitor - we’re always looking to improve the experience. Drop us a line any time.
duncan: will send an email today with more details.
thanks for the comment too. although the part about customization and whitelabelling cakemail is now clear to me, i think you should make it clearer on the website. say, for instance, make an obvious button “customize interface”. instead, i landed on a page that invited me to write a mailing.
matthew: i used campaign monitor for 3 different projects and always find myself wondering how to add emails to a campaign. i use the service to launch websites and am always asking myself if i am doing the right thing. seems to me that what i want to do is never suggested.
@Heri: Yes, after your comment we realized that we need to add additional info right in the interface, likely on the confirmation page at sign-up, which should address all the points you raised.
We’ve been working on this for so long that we tend to forget that this new way of doing things may not be so obvious to everyone initially! ;)
[...] CakeMail has launched!!! (August 15th) [...]
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