Campaign Monitor Review
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- Date Established
- 2004
- Location
- San Francisco; Sydney
Pros
- Easy to use
- Robust features
- Free trial
Cons
- No free plan available
- Somewhat costly
- Customers report binding contracts
Campaign Monitor Overview
Campaign Monitor focuses on streamlining every part of the email marketing process, but I would be remiss if I did not comment on how gorgeous the product itself is. It is clear that while usability and convenience were important in the design, the team that created this email marketing software also wanted it to be aesthetically pleasing. Tying functionality and design together well is something many software companies attempt to do, and not all of them succeed, but Campaign Monitor does this with an air of easy grace. The program has its flaws — particularly for very advanced users — but businesses looking for email marketing software that can meet the vast majority of their needs (with minimal fuss) would do well to give Campaign Monitor a look.
Keep reading our full Campaign Monitor review to see if this email marketing software fits the bill for your small business.
Table of Contents
Pricing
Campaign Monitor pricing breaks down into three payment plans: Basic, Unlimited, and Premier. We think that Campaign Monitor offers good value for money when compared to their other email marketing software, especially now that this app offers such competitive features as email segmentation and automation.
Basic Plan
The Basic plan starts at $9/month and increases with list size, so keep in mind your bottom line might be considerably higher at 2500 contacts, for instance, you’ll pay $29/month.
Here’s what you’ll find at the Basic level:
- Send up to 12,500 emails
- Customer support via email
- Drag-and-drop email editor
- Templates
- Reports on key KPIs, subscriber growth, and engagement
- Marketing automation to plan engagement over time
- A/B testing
Unlimited Plan
The Unlimited plan starts at $29/month and increases with your list size. For example, if you have 2500 subscribers, you’ll pay $59/month. Here’s what you get with this plan:
- Unlimited emails to your list
- Priority customer support via email
- All core email marketing features
- Insights analytics suite
- Unlimited marketing automation to your list
- Unlimited inbox previews
- Time zone sending
- Unlimited spam testing
- Countdown timer
Campaign Monitor Premier
The Premier plan starts at $149/month and increases with your list size. This plan includes:
- Unlimited emails to your list
- Premier phone and email support
- All core email marketing features
- Insights analytics suite
- Unlimited marketing automation to your list
- Unlimited inbox previews
- Time zone sending
- Countdown timer
- Pre-built engagement segments
- Send-time optimization
- Advanced link tracking
- Content editing permissions
Cloud-Based (SaaS) Or Locally Installed
Campaign Monitor is entirely cloud-based and requires no download to run on your computer.
Hardware & Software Requirements
Campaign Monitor supports the following browsers:
- Chrome: Current versions, Windows and macOS
- Firefox: Current and previous major versions, Windows and macOS
- Safari: Current and previous major version, macOS only
- Edge: Current and previous major Chromium-based version, Windows only
Specific Size Of Business
Campaign Monitor’s full suite of email marketing tools could serve any size of business well. Due to the increasing cost with list size, however, we think larger businesses could find a better value with another platform.
Ease Of Use
The sign-up process for Campaign Monitor is painless, requiring a minimal amount of information from new users: name, business, email, and a password.
Sending the campaign is straightforward, and Campaign Monitor walks you through the process. If you haven’t created a contact list up until this point, the program will prompt you to do so. After you’re pleased with your test, you can schedule the email to be delivered immediately or at a set time in the future.
We found that Campaign Monitor rated highly across consumer review sites for easy-of-use and we can agree. It is a fairly intuitive platform that most users won’t have any problems with once they get over the initial learning curve.
Features
Campaign Monitor has a well-developed set of core features.
- Email Editor: You get access to scores of drag and drop templates that scale automatically to mobile and desktop views. More technical users can import HMTL designs, but they won’t be able to modify the HTML of existing templates.
Campaign Monitor Web Capture 2020 Segmentation Example
- Templates: Pick from hundreds of templates, all designed by professionals to show off your products.
- Preview: Before sending out your email, you can view what the email will look like to recipients on both desktop and mobile devices.
- Surveys: Using Campaign Monitor, you can add surveys and forms to your email campaigns, allowing you to gather feedback and comments from your subscribers.
- Split Campaigns: As mentioned earlier, Campaign Monitor allows users to create two versions of the same campaign with their A/B email testing feature.
- Automation: You can set up a series of timed emails that will be sent to all new subscribers.
- Email Analytics: Users have access to a basic but well-rounded set of analytical tools that includes information about bounces, clicks, opens, unsubscribes, spam complaints, and social media activity.
- Sign-Up Tools: In addition to the ability to create sign-up forms for new subscribers, Campaign Monitor allows users to create list segments to target specific sub-groups of users and the ability to create custom fields for user data.
Campaign Monitor Web Capture 2020 Example of Sign-Up Tools
- Transactional Emails: Campaign Monitor lets you create and optimize triggered emails based on the even you set.
Web capture of Campaign Monitor 2020
- Segmentation: In what is becoming an industry standard, Campaign Monitor uses techno-wizardry to send your pre-made, customized templates out to your audience, determining which segment to use based on each recipient. You can create segments based on gender, purchase history, and more.
- Campaign Monitor API: Developers looking to create their own integrations can utilize Campaign Monitor’s robust API.
Customer Service & Support
At a glance, Campaign Monitor’s customer support options are a bit sparse, lacking real-time support in the form of live chat or even phone service. This is somewhat alleviated by the quick response time of their 24/7 email-based support team and a solid, searchable knowledge database.
- Email Support: This seems to be the company’s preferred avenue of contact. Shortly after signing up for the service, you will likely be contacted by a representative asking if you would like any help and providing a direct email address at which to contact him or her. You can also contact the company at any time using this form. Answers to my questions came quickly, within an hour or two.
- Help Database: Users can access an online knowledgebase by entering their question into a search field, which will return a selection of potentially useful articles or forum posts. You can also browse through the software’s user guide, which is broken down into 10 categories.
- Forums: Campaign Monitor maintains an active user forum; this requires a separate login.
- Guides: The company’s web design roots show through in their prolific offering of guides. Some of these guides deal specifically with how to use Campaign Monitor (e.g., newsletter software), while others focus on the general principles of email marketing. Regardless, they are worth perusing if you are considering subscribing to this service.
User Reviews
At first glance, Campaign Monitor looked to have predominately positive reviews with no major concerns. However, here’s what we found:
- Trustpilot: 2.5 out of 5 stars with 83% of reviews giving Campaign Monitor the worst rating possible.
- G2: 4 out of 5 stars with most people rating the service highly, and a larger reviewer pool
- Capterra: 4.6 out of 5 stars with another high amount of reviewers in the mix and most giving favorable reviews
We are the first to remind our readers about negativity bias, which essentially shows that people tend to be more motivated to complain rather than give praise. However, what we saw in some Campaign Monitor reviews raises some red flags for me. I’d like to be able to chalk the Trustpilot negative reviews up to said negativity bias, but we’ll need to take a closer look. Here’s what the negative reviewers had to say.
Negative Reviews
- Contract Issues: We do not like to see contract problems come up with any service, let alone an email marketing software. Unfortunately, that seems to be the problem with some reviewers. Customers say they had trouble closing their account or that they were on an automatic contract renewal with strict cancellation policies requiring 30 days’ notice.
- Sudden Account Closures: While we see this issue quite often in the world of payment processing, not so much in email marketing software. But again, we spotted several complaints of accounts closing with no notice.
- Poor Customer Service: Several customers said that customer service was non-responsive. These issues range from wanting to closes an account or needing technical help.
Positive Reviews
Users also had a lot of positive things to say about Campaign Monitor, too. The site also keeps a list of notable satisfied customers.
Here’s what people like about Campaign Monitor:
- Ease Of Use: Users can get up and running with Campaign Monitor almost immediately, thanks to the simple, intuitive interface and great email templates.
- Customer Service: Despite lacking phone or chat support, Campaign Monitor appears to satisfy customer queries with fast, responsive email technical and sales support for quite a few users.
- Clear, Easily Understood Reporting: Customers praise the presentation of the reporting tools, which they say allows them to easily understand and use the information presented to them.
- Automation: Some users love the ability to easily create sets of autoresponders that send preprogrammed emails to new subscribers at set intervals.
Integrations & Add-Ons
The last time we reviewed Campaign Monitor, we criticized them for being “weak” in the integrations department. That problem has been rectified. Now, hundreds of different integrations are available, including everything from Google apps to Shopify to Facebook. Here are the highlights:
- Google Analytics
- WordPress
- Magento
- Salesforce
- Microsoft Dynamics
- Slack
- Unbounce
- Much more!
Campaign Monitor also has an API that users can access to build their own apps.
Security
Campaign Monitor uses physical and digital safeguards to protect user data.
Databases are protected by access restrictions, and key information, such as passwords, is encrypted when stored. SSL (HTTPS) is used throughout the application to transmit sensitive information, such as credit card details, which are not stored on Campaign Monitor servers.
Data centers are physically guarded by five levels of protection: security cards, fingerprint scans, video surveillance, locked hardware, and vibration detection. A proximity card and PIN are required just to enter the building.
Data is mirrored to a backup server in case of malfunction.
Anti-Spam Protection
As one might expect, Campaign Monitor frowns on spam and abides by the CAN-SPAM Act, so don’t expect to be able to send emails with false headers for long. Campaign Monitor goes a step further, however, by defining spam as “any email you send to someone who hasn’t given you their direct permission to contact them on the topic of the email.”
To catch spammers, Campaign Monitor is tied into the spam reporting systems of major email service providers such as Outlook. If more than .03% of your emails are marked as spam, you’ll receive a warning and be contacted by the company with advice on how to fix the problem. More serious or repeat infractions can lead to account suspension.
And finally, the company is highly transparent when it comes to uptime, showing if systems are currently operational as well as a history of past incidents, what they were, and how long they took to resolve.
Final Verdict
Lately, there has been a trend towards making email marketing accessible to a broader user base by simplifying programs and improving or eliminating unnecessary features. The danger, of course, is the potential loss of utility for more serious marketing campaigns.
Campaign Monitor gets minimalism right in my opinion. The majority of email marketers will find the tools they need to get the job done without having to wrestle a bloated interface to the ground. Additionally, having access to all of the program’s features at every pricing tier makes the software feel complete in a way that many of its competitors don’t. However, we do encourage you to take advantage of the free trial before signing any contract.
One final note: Be sure to read all the terms and conditions of your contract, including any automatic renewals or fees, because customers specifically called this issue out in our research.
Still want to shop around? Check out some platforms that offer generous free email software plans in our post The Best Free Email Marketing Software Programs.
Chris Motola
Finance Writer at Merchant Maverick
Chris Motola is a writer, programmer, game designer, and product of NY. These days he's mostly writing about financial products, but in a past life he wrote about health care and business. He's a graduate of the University of Central Florida.
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Organization Name: SPA Computers Ltd
One of the most unethical and unscrupulous companies out there. Do not use campaignmonitor.com. When everything works it is all fine. As soon as things stop working then you have no hope. Their support is a complete bunch of idiots. The will not do any refunds even though we only had data in the account for 24 hours and then removed it. They have stopped our campaigns despite the fact that we have been sending out campaigns with no problems. No, we have to try and get through to someone with half a brain cell to understand our problem. We are doomed. Have had to export all our data out and use another provider. They also charged us £100 4 days before it renews for data we can’t use and now they are going to charge us again. Again, we can’t use our account but they are happy to charge us.
This comment refers to an earlier version of this review and may be outdated.