Campaign Monitor Review

Campaign Monitor is a business-oriented web application that empowers you to create, manage, and send HTML newsletters to an online mailing list. Designed to send mass mailouts or to program autoresponders and analyse the results, Campaign Monitor is the best solution to train new staff and send newsletter within a matter of minutes.

Usability

Despite it lacks some of the core features available in Campaigner and MailChimp, Campaign Monitor also has advanced functionality normally not found in other tools. Registration for the service is straightforward: name, email, password and you’re ready to handle the platform. The first thing you’ll notice in Campaign Monitor is a pleasantly laid out dashboard surrounded by well-designed call-to-action. The interface is Campaign Monitor’s highest point: simply put, user-friendly and much easier to use than those of its competitors. It’s easy to understand what to do next. One of Campaign Monitor perks is the ease with which it carefully follows the “contact lifecycle”: you can track when it’s added to a list, what email campaigns he received, and his response rates, click throughs and unsubscribes.
The quite limited amount of third-party integration forces you to add contacts from Gmail by copying and pasting or by uploading a file (.CSV, .XLS, XLXS).

Features

Since 2004, Campaign Monitor gives you great features including autoresponders to welcome new contacts and mail them on special dates, social sharing with Facebook and Twitter, drag-and-drop email designer to build snappy email template you can preview on desktop and mobile, unlimited image hosting, customizable email content for each contact, hand-coded designs supported – inline CSS included -, re-brandable interfaces, broad subscriber management and list segmentation. Talking about integrations, Campaign Monitors offers a proper choice: Shopify, Zapier, Salesforce, Podio, Enlist, Unbounce and Wufoo. The list is open and growing, it supports a variety of setups and keeps on getting bigger.
The Inbox Preview tool is one of the most appreciated feature: because no two email clients display messages quite the same way and you need to keep an eye on results, the tool generates screenshot of your email design in popular email clients (Outlook, Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and many others). The mobile optimization is considerable: Template Builder, a powerful resource that gives you full control over every aspect of email design, works nimbly on design for mobile devices offering snapshots and previews. You can take advantage of the iOS app to add subscribers on the go. There’s more though the Worldview feature displays in real-time on a world map, who, where and when subscribers are opening your emails, clicking links, sharing on social media and forwarding.

Support

The Campaign Monitor interface is well laid out, easy to use and prompt. The service provides solid online user guides and FAQs to help you learn everything you may need. You can send an email to support through their form and even look inside customer forums for help, but there is no way to reach a human either by phone or get live access to support. If you need to speak to someone by phone for support, Campaign Monitor it’s not the best option for your needs.

Price

Even it’s not the most fully-featured, Campaign Monitor is one of the most expensive or above average tool of its kind. As with many competitors, Campaign Monitor’s subscription fee depends on the number of contacts and number of messages you want to be able to send each month. You can choose between two options: the pay-by-campaign option is 1¢ per subscriber, plus $5 per campaign and the pay-per-month option is based on your number of contacts. The last one splits into two plans: basic plan, based on the emails you send each month, and an unlimited plan, based on number of contacts granting you unlimited number of emails sent each month. You can spend $9/month for sending up to 2.5k emails or $29/month for unlimited emails to up to 500 contacts, $29/month for sending up to 12.5k emails or $59/month for unlimited emails to up to 2.5k contacts, $49/month for sending up to 25k emails or $99/month for unlimited emails to up to 5k contacts. For higher volume you can get a customized plan.