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What I love (and don’t) about Campaign Monitor

Five positives and five negatives

Campaign Monitor is a popular email marketing platform, particularly for smaller businesses or those with a lower marketing budget.

So, what are the benefits and drawbacks from someone who uses this platform regularly for both general public communications and marketing to niche professionals? I’ve used several popular email platforms – as well as Campaign Monitor in all its iterations over the last decade – and there are definitely positives and negatives in all of them. Currently, Campaign Monitor is my go to for several reasons including, ease of use, cost effectiveness and distribution and analytics ability.

The Positive

  • Ease of use. The platform is very simple for even the laymen to use. To set up your campaign and input the text into a template OR upload a HTML template is relatively simple with few steps. Being able to test your emails is also useful in proofreading and testing readability.
  • Availability of basic analytics is useful for making decisions on what time to send your emails, which topics are most popular and the placement of your stories or order of.
  • Adding new contacts and lists are easy and clear. It’s especially useful to set up test lists so a group of internal staff or stakeholders can all review the email before it goes out.
  • Duplicating campaigns when you wish to use the same template is very simple! It’s a great feature and makes life easy when you don’t have to start from scratch.
  • Automation. Setting up automation for email campaigns is simple with Campaign Monitor and works really well. Being able to set timelines between each email (e.g. one day or five between days one and two) is very useful and takes less manpower or scheduling time than manually sending each email.

The Negative

  • Templates can be tricky. With Campaign Monitor, there is only so much you can do with the templates which can make trying to add in additional images or move alignment difficult. I often end up using an imported HTML email which takes a lot more work and resources.
  • Once someone unsubscribes you cannot resend to them easily. This is due to privacy laws but sometimes it seems to happen without the person clicking unsubscribe. Could be a glitch.
  • Mobile rendering can be difficult and doesn’t always show up correctly even if the preview page showed it looked correct. I find in mobile Outlook apps, often headlines are scrunched together or alignment of images is out.
  • Sending test emails to multiple people is painful. You have to insert multiple names and emails manually to send to a test group for proofing. Otherwise you need to send the campaign to a test group then duplicate that campaign and send again.
  • Manual deletions of lists to stay under cap. It is frustrating that you need to remove lists as you go or risk jumping up into the next billing group. The platform doesn’t overwrite previous lists with the same name or set an auto delete so you do manually have to jump in and remove lists periodically.

There you have it, five positives and negatives about Campaign Monitor. However, it still remains one of the simplest email marketing platforms particularly for those with little time to develop emails or those that aren’t highly skilled designers.

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