Campaign Monitor Email Marketing Review

Campaign Monitor in a nutshell

Key features and workflows

Creating emails and campaigns

It’s quite straightforward to set up a campaign using the software, and a drag and drop email templates make things even easier.

Emails sent/opened and links clicked

You can get a feel for how well your campaign is doing by looking at the reporting tools available via your dashboard. You’ll get critical marketing benchmarks like open rate and click rate and, if your marketing isn’t quite having the impact you’d like, Campaign Monitor can offer you advice on how to improve these key metrics.

Bear in mind, though, you can’t track open and click rates on any non-HTML emails, so you’ll need to use this format if you want any reporting statistics.

Deliverability rates and delivery by time zone

Campaign Monitor has an impressive delivery rate of 99% and regularly monitors its users’ bounce rates, spam complaints and unsubscribe rates. It uses this data to improve email formats in the future to ensure your messages will get through.

You can also schedule emails to go out at different times across different time zones; this way, your customers won’t be woken up by notifications in the middle of the night.

Creating and importing email lists

You can create email lists from scratch, or you can import a CSV list of contacts you already have. You won’t be able to import bought email lists, or any emails associated with gambling or pharmaceuticals, though. Otherwise, there are no restrictions, and you have a lot of freedom to choose your own headings.

Split tests and A/B testing

Basic A/B functionality is available with Campaign Monitor. You can send different variations of the same email to various segments of your audience and get analytics on the results. While you’ll only be able to send two different types of email per campaign, Campaign Monitor does provide advice on where you might be going wrong, such as tweaks to subject line, length, and word order.

Personalization

You can personalize just about every aspect of your campaigns, including content, copy, imagery and even emails delivered to customers based on previous purchasing habits.

Reporting and analysis

Good reporting, statistics and analytics are vital to the success of any email campaign. Luckily, the software offers a full suite of insight and reporting tools to help you make decisions in real-time.

Engagement reports

You’ll find a range of engagement metrics in your campaign dashboard such as open rates, number of bounces, customers that unsubscribe, number of social shares, and link clicks. The reports let you know what’s going well, and what you need to work on. 

Heat maps

You’ll have access to real-time tracking metrics to see which customers are engaging, when, and for how long.

Campaign comparison report

While Campaign Monitor offers a wide range of analytics via your dashboard, you can’t easily compare the results of two different campaigns.

Segmentation

Segmentation can be entirely personalized to suit your business. Create groups that cover geographic location, purchase history, personal interests and those that’ve engaged with past campaigns. You can create unlimited lists to cover every conceivable type of segmentation.

Social media tracking

All major social media platforms can be integrated into the software, and you can even get detailed analytics such as the number of times someone has shared your content via social media, and those buying as a result of social media marketing efforts.

ROI analysis

While you won’t find a return on investment analysis, you will get a list of instructions showing how you can calculate this figure yourself.

Integrations

You’ll find a decent range of integrations and add-on tools with your membership. As expected from most email marketing tools, you can integrate the software quite easily into just about every web building platform, as well as find apps to give you extra functionality.

Google Analytics

You can integrate Google Analytics into the software, primarily to give you more detailed information on links clicked, and heat maps to find out who’s visiting your site directly as a result of your marketing efforts. This lets you know which regions and segments might need more work.

API integrations

The platform has a flexible API that’ll allow you to integrate the software into just about any blog, content management system or other third-party app. You can integrate any software that uses Ruby, Python, PHP, .Net, Perl and Objective-C programming languages. 

eCommerce tools

Campaign Monitor has easy one-click solutions to connect you to Magento, Microsoft Dynamics, Shopify, WooCommerce and WordPress. However, you might have difficulty when trying to link other eCommerce platforms. 

CRM integrations

You’ll find some big name CRMs to integrate with Campaign Monitor, including Zoho, Insightly and Zapier. If you can’t find your particular CRM in the app store, get in touch with customer service as there’s usually a way to get it integrated.

Social media integrations

Integration is easy with most social media accounts. Find out how many times people are sharing your newsletters and products, as well as how many conversions you’re getting through social media.

Apps

Campaign Monitor has around 250 apps available in its store. Most are the kind you might expect to see across any typical email marketing tool like extra analytics options and eCommerce store integrations. 

However, Campaign Monitor goes a step further and invites you to build your own apps for the platform. So, if you have the developer skills, or can afford to hire someone who does, you could build precisely the app you need.

Plugins

You’ll find plugins for popular web builders like WordPress, Magento and Shopify.

Automation

Automation works via a pathway system. At the start of every email campaign, you’ll map out all potential responses and routes it could take, and when an email hits one of those criteria, an automated step is activated. 

For example, step one could be an initial contact. If the customer spends $200 or more, they’d then activate the VIP email and receive a discount in the next message. Or, if a customer doesn’t open the mail, you could set the campaign to issue a follow up a few days later. Automation is completely customizable so you can build any email pathway you’d like.

Design and ease of use

Drag and drop interface

You’ll start with a choice of hundreds of templates, and you can fully customize each one with a drag and drop tool. It uses a simple WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) interface, meaning you get to see exactly what your customer will see as you edit.

Landing page creator

You’ll have to download a landing page tool from the app store, and most are perfectly serviceable. You can direct traffic to your landing page from social media posts as well as email campaigns.

Email templates

From hundreds of different templates, you can choose emails tailored to special offers, outreach mails, newsletters and new customer welcome notes. Each template is fully customizable for fonts and colors, and the adventurous among you can even create a brand new HTML template from scratch.

Campaign Monitor pricing

Bear in mind, the prices listed above only cover up to 500 subscribers. For every 1,000 subscribers you add, you can expect to pay around an additional $30 per month. 

For example, if you had 3,000 subscribers on the Unlimited plan, you’ll need to pay $90 per month.

Customer service

Customer support is a little limited as there’s no phone or live chat available. You’ll need to email customer service and wait for a response. In addition, the online forum was retired back in 2018, which is a shame as it’d built up a strong archive of user-resolved issues. 

H3 Contact Information

https://help.campaignmonitor.com/

At the moment, you’re limited to the how-to articles on the website, which don’t always go into enough detail for newcomers.

My verdict 

Campaign Monitor is a very solid email marketing platform, and is a great addition to any medium sized business. With unlimited emails starting at just $29 per month, and a host of customization and automation tools, you’ll be able to run large marketing campaigns. 

However, it might not be for you if you don’t have a lot of experience in email marketing. The limited customer support means you might find yourself struggling with some of the more advanced features. In addition, if you have a lot of subscribers, things can start to get quite pricey very quickly. 

What I liked about Campaign Monitor

• Great automation tool
• Able to send unlimited emails
• Wide range of email templates
• You can connect to social media easily
• Good selection of reporting and analytics

What I didn’t like about Campaign Monitor

• It doesn’t have the best customer support
• The full suite of automation tools is only available on the highest paid tier
• Prices start to increase sharply the more subscribers you have