Email Marketing Software Campaign Monitor

Campaign Monitor is an email marketing software for companies of all sizes. We help you build and grow your audience, give them a great experience, and learn more about your customers than ever before.

We send out more than two billion emails every month on behalf of our customers. We help our customers keep their subscribers coming back by making sure the emails they send are engaging, beautiful, and timely. We also help them maintain their reputations as email senders so that their messages make it to their subscribers’ inboxes (and not the spam folder).

We are a fully remote company with employees based in countries around the world. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and we value diversity at our company.

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Campaign Monitor | Blissfully SaaS Directory

Email Marketing Software Campaign Monitor

In 2022, marketers have more channels than ever before to reach customers. Savvy marketers use every combination of social media, direct mail, chat, display ads, SMS, web landing pages, and even the metaverse to get their messages in front of consumers. But it may surprise you to learn just how central email is to many successful digital campaigns.

According to recent research from HubSpot, one of our Editors’ Choice winners for email marketing tools, fully 64% of small businesses use email to reach customers—a higher rate than for any other digital channels save social media and websites. And whether it was due to isolation during the global pandemic or for some other reason, 77% of marketers saw increased customer engagement with email in 2021 versus 2020. It’s little surprise, then, that four out of five survey respondents said they’d rather give up on social media than on email.

To succeed at email marketing, however, takes more than a spreadsheet full of email addresses. You’ll need tools to help you compose, send, and track your emails, and even to integrate data from your email campaigns with your other backend systems. Fortunately, plenty of help is available. In this roundup, we tested 11 of the top email marketing platforms and rank the best ones. But what makes them the best? Here are some topics to consider.

What Is Email Marketing Software?
Email marketing software can manage your contact lists, help you design and send compelling emails, and track whether these were opened and read. Options range from text-based template solutions that marketers can quickly make their own to more complex HTML or JavaScript templates. The good news is that it doesn’t cost much to get started, nor is it an arduous undertaking. Many of the solutions in this roundup have affordable starter plans, and some even offer onboarding services for new customers.

Email marketing can take several forms. For example, some businesses might decide their most effective marketing tactic is a value-add newsletter delivered to a gated subscriber community. Others might want to tie their emails directly to their product and sales engines, so they can provide special offers and deals to recipients.

Each approach requires different tools for creating the source email and sending it to recipients. Email marketing tools can also help you segment your subscribers by demographic slices and engagement levels. And you’ll probably want to integrate with other back-end systems, such as the accounting system, the customer relationship management (CRM) system, and the inventory management system.

The Best Email Marketing Practices in 2022
Marketers have many more channel tools available to them these days than they did even just a few years ago. Social media, mobile and text marketing (see below), and even video campaigns compete for marketers’ budget dollars. With all those options available to them, many wonder if it’s time to give email the boot.

Statista global market valuation forecast for email marketing through 2027
(Image courtesy of Statista)
As we’ve said, email remains the most pervasively used communications channel in the world outside of verbal communication. According to market research firm Statista, the number of global email users will grow to about 4.5 billion in 2022, up from around 4 billion in 2021. That trend is reflected in Statista’s forecast of email marketing’s global market valuation through 2027. That forecast projects email marketing to grow to almost $18 billion by 2027. So let’s put thoughts of email’s demise behind us.

However, one important change for email marketing has been the increase in engagement on mobile devices, rather than PCs. Mobile users access emails throughout the day and wherever they are. Thanks to Apple Pay and Google Pay services, smartphones have also evolved as mobile payment solutions. This can make mobile email a one-stop shop allowing customers to go from marketing to purchase in a single session.

The increasing importance of mobile means you should pay special attention to the email designer and analytics sections of any email marketing service. The designer should provide at least a preview of how your email will look on a typical mobile device, and better yet, on several screens of varying sizes. Even better, the designer should also automatically render your email in a responsive format, meaning the HTML will correctly size images and other elements depending on the device used to view them.

You should also be able to segment your audience based on mobile device data. Some tools may force you to create custom reports to see this data, which means you may need to export it to a third-party business intelligence (BI) tool.

That leads us to another modern trend in email marketing tools, which is integration with other systems, most notably CRM. Some of the more advanced email marketing services have even begun to resemble CRM systems. It makes sense, because both types of software deal with managing and communicating with customers. Other email marketing systems will be able to plug directly into your existing CRM.

There is also a rising trend towards third-party e-commerce integration. You’ll find this in several of our contenders, including Editors’ Choice winner Mailchimp. These email marketing services generally offer several different but compatible services. You can create a store, process payments, and move it along with dedicated marketing and sales tools when you combine them.

Getting Creative: Email Plus More
So far, it might sound as though email marketing means the same staid, static messaging that everyone is used to, but this isn’t the case. Today’s marketers are finding innovative ways to combine traditional email marketing with other channels, including mobile and social media.

For example, SMS marketing is increasingly popular because it exploits an even more personal line of contact with customers. According to recent research, SMS has a 90% open rate compared to straight email marketing, hovering between 20-25%. That’s a clear difference, and it’s making marketers flock to platforms that support it. Email marketing vendors that have it right now include the likes of GetResponse and Mailchimp, among others.

But it’s risky for marketers to approach customers up through a channel they trust but is used mainly by friends and family. Some customers will react badly no matter what, but almost all of them will want to unsubscribe if they suddenly start getting ongoing SMS messages from people or organizations they don’t even know. That’s why savvy marketers don’t simply jump on new channels like mobile or SMS. They carefully consider the form those portions of their campaigns should take and the rules around creating compelling content, especially if it’s headed for smaller screens.

One way marketers can build more trust in their email messages is by incorporating user-generated content (UGC) into them. One popular example of UGC is a customer review of a product, like those you’d find on e-commerce sites like Amazon. However, UGC can also draw from other channels, including social media posts and comments in online forums, including your own support forums. According to a study by digital marketing tools vendor Tint, 62% of consumers say they are more likely to click on an image in an email when it’s a customer photo, rather than an image generated by the brand.

Still, other innovative ideas are being introduced to the realm of email marketing all the time. Take GetResponse, for example. It’s built a one-button live chat feature you can incorporate directly into your emails, which allows customers to go from reading an email to having direct interaction with sales or support people in a single experience.

AI and Email Marketing
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a big part of many digital marketing efforts, especially email. AI improves email marketing mechanics such as A/B testing and more intelligent audience segmentation. This can help you almost immediately since it quickly improves efficiency and lets you make better strategic decisions around building the right campaign for different customers.

AI can also help personalize email content right down to the individual customer level, depending on how much information you can feed it from your CRM and sales systems. With the correct data, AI can choose different content, modify customer experiences on the fly, and even interact directly with customers via an AI-enabled natural-language chatbot. If any of that sounds attractive, you need to look very closely at how a prospective email marketing service has implemented AI and what kinds of features it offers.

Another area where AI can help is with the marketing automation capabilities that most of these email suites offer to some degree. Automation technology is best suited for prolonged, email-based interactions or drip campaigns. But an important aspect here is tracking the customer journey and the various touchpoints customers face from initial contact to closing the sale. AI excels in these scenarios since it can drill down to an individual customer and process the exact data for the vast customer volumes that top global retailers might get.

Getting Started at the Right Price
For most businesses, the good news is that the cost to reach prospective customers via email is generally low, while the potential for profit is high. Estimates of the typical return on investment (ROI) for email campaigns vary, but most suggest it is somewhere around $40 per dollar spent. That’s one of the highest rates of return of any digital marketing category.

The email marketing contenders we review here have a vast price range. They start at about $3 per month to send out 500 emails per month in Zoho Campaigns, and they range to as much as $1,250 per month for up to 10,000 contacts in Salesforce Pardot.

Many email marketing plans include unlimited emails each month and bill you based on subscribers. If you have a small list, then look for a company that offers a free plan, a low-cost plan for several hundred subscribers, or even a pay-as-you-go plan. On the flip side, many of these services also offer high-volume plans with up to 100,000 or more contacts. Sometimes this requires a custom plan that has to be arranged directly with a sales rep. If you’re willing to commit, look for the companies that offer discounts if you pay yearly rather than monthly. A few also offer money-back guarantees.

Getting started shouldn’t be daunting. Generally, you’ll know right away whether you like a user interface (UI) or not, and most of the contenders we reviewed offer free trials so you can poke around before dropping any cash. Luckily, most of these services have modern-looking graphics and uncluttered layouts. These are not the complex business software UIs of yesterday.

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Be sure to look at the tech support details, too, since several vendors don’t make support as available as we would have liked. You’ll find that some offer 24/7 phone support, live chat, and email help, while others leave you to rely on online documentation and limited live support hours. The best services offer a combination of self-serve help resources—where you can search FAQs and articles to find your answers—as well as live support via chat or phone when you can’t solve an issue yourself. We cover all of these concerns in our reviews, plus you can get an overview in the feature chart.

The Secret Sauce: Email and Automation
Beyond sending newsletters, the best email marketing services offer custom autoresponders. These help you stay in touch with your contacts with automatically generated emails based on special occasions (such as their birthday or anniversary), welcome emails for new subscribers, or thank-you emails for recent purchases, to give some examples.

The most advanced email marketing services offer custom workflows to specify triggers based on actions (such as opening an email or making a purchase) or on inaction (such as ignoring emails). With these services, you can also set up a series of emails (such as tutorials) to send to segments of users, and you can pause or stop a campaign at any time. You can also move contacts into new segments once they’ve completed their tutorials.

This kind of email marketing automation trick is mapping out what marketers call “the customer journey.” That journey amounts to the sequence and conditions your email marketing app must consider before sending out an automatic email. Depending on the app, this can be as easy or as complex as you’d like, but planning is critical.

A small retail business, for example, might want to send an automatic blanket email to all its customers before every holiday sale. They might also extend that to specific brands too. Suppose a customer bought an item from Vendor X, for example. In that case, the business might want to automatically send that customer an email if there’s a new product from the same vendor, especially if it’s on sale.

Those are basic examples. More complex possibilities include crafting several emails with the same message but optimized for specific subsets of your customer list. These optimizations could be around the products they’ve purchased, their location, or whether they’ve ever called your product support line, to name just a few. Whatever information you’ve collected about them can be relevant.

This level of customization can get very complex, so it’s important not to get overwhelmed at the start. Building a map to help automate your email marketing starts with what you want to tell customers, when you want to say to it, and why. Follow that plan, and you’ll quickly build a journey that might start with a welcome email post-purchase and gradually drill down to ever more targeted offers as your relationship with that customer grows.

As you’re planning that journey, you’ll come across all the details you need as you go, like which customer segments should be on different journeys, what those journeys need to look like, and mainly how to track your automated campaigns.

Tracking Your Performance
Launching email campaigns isn’t much help unless you can track your successes and failures to make adjustments quickly. All of the services covered here offer some level of tracking, whether it’s simple open and click rate data, color-coded charts and statistics, or even integration with Google Analytics. Once you’ve got some data on your campaign, you can tweak your content to see what works using features like A/B testing, where one part of your audience receives an email built one way and another set of people get the same email built differently.

In addition to A/B testing, many services now offer multivariate testing, which involves using multiple variations of an entire campaign to test which one performed best. Services that offer this feature include Campaigner and Mailchimp. Search engine optimization (SEO) is another important factor for content and landing pages. The right keywords can directly lead your subscribers from their email platform onto your website.

(Editors’ Note: Campaigner is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company.)

Whether you’re looking for a simple email marketing solution or one with full automation and advanced capabilities, there’s a wide range of solutions out there, and one of the contenders we’ve reviewed here should be a solid fit. You’ll see vendors focused on expanding their internal features while others develop significant partner and integration ecosystems. What’s the constant? Email marketing remains the foundation and the starting point, making it a great place to start your digital marketing journey.

campaign monitor templates

Here’s some inspiration for your email design from some of the best campaigns out there–plus easy-to-download templates you can use for your business.

Note: this roundup is part of a whole week’s worth of email content on Tuts+ Web Design–check out the Mastering HTML Email learning guide for more!

What is Campaign Monitor?
They’ve been called “the hottest 10 year old startup” (Forbes) and “the biggest Australian tech company you have never heard of” (Financial Review). But if you work in marketing or manage a business, you probably know them as “that program you use to send emails”.

Campaign Monitor is an email marketing tool. It’s a simple, drag-and-drop email builder, made for created branded campaigns, sales pitches, and more.

Campaign Monitor stands out for being up to date on the latest trends in email marketing. They were ahead of the curve in marketing automation and user journeys; their 2019 email marketing predictions is a smart, data-driven read.

Inspiration: The Top 100 Email Marketing Campaigns
Campaign Monitor has compiled a list of the 100 best email marketing campaigns ever sent. It’s sortable by email type: marketing offers, newsletters, announcements, and events–brilliant design-inspiration!

Tips for Writing Emails People Will Read
Some time ago, I wrote an article for Campaign Monitor about how to craft an email that people will actually read. Here are some of the best suggestions and rules to follow:

Trust the data: Campaign Monitor has tools for analyzing almost every aspect of your email. Check out what links get clicked on the most, or which email send times lead to the highest open rates, and adjust accordingly.
Be consistent: Make your message consistent. Readers want to know what they’re going to expect–it gives them a reason to open the email. Are they motivated to read your Thursday update because they know they’ll want to enter the weekly giveaway? Will they open your monthly newsletter because they like reading the customer story feature every month?
Experiment: Once you have a general formula, try mixing things up. Guest writers, new formats, or different lengths are great ways to try new things in your audience’s inbox.
Design Time: The Best Email Templates for Campaign Monitor
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  1. Switch | Business Newsletter
    Switch Business Newsletter
    Switch
    Switch is a responsive business newsletter template; simple and striking, and ready for you to assemble in the StampReady email template builder. As well as being compatible with major email platforms like Campaign Monitor, Switch is also plays nicely with the Mailster plugin for WordPress, available on CodeCanyon.
  2. Igodo 400
    Igodo 400 – Responsive Email with Mailchimp Editor StampReady Online Builder
    Igodo 400 – Responsive Email with Mailchimp Editor, StampReady & Online Builder
    Created in January 2018, but updated with great regularity, this responsive email builder has 400+ modules for content blocks in email. Another example from Psd2Newsletters, you can download their template builder to your desktop and build with the simple drag-and-drop composer.
  3. Matah
    Matah Responsive Email Set
    Matah | Responsive Email Set
    This Campaign Monitor template, with its light blue accent color and easy-to-read font choices, is a top seller for Campaign Monitor themes. It’s also compatible with Mailchimp, Freshmail, Moosend, Constant Contact, and more.

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  1. Scope
    Scope – Marketing Email Notifiations
    Scope – Marketing Email Notifiations
    A minimal, white-on-white template that’s great for apps, product launches, or start-up companies.
  2. Plazma
    Plazma Email-Template Online Builder
    Plazma Email-Template + Online Builder
    Plazma has 40 different content blocks to choose from, with unlimited colors and variations.
  3. Cleveland
    Cleveland Email-Template Online Builder
    Cleveland Email-Template + Online Builder
    Cleveland is a newer template to the market, created in June 2018. It has 20 modules for building emails with a simple drag-and-drop builder. There are multiple export options, including HTML, Mailchimp, and Campaign Monitor.
  4. Market
    Market – Responsive Newsletter with TemplateBuilder
    Market – Responsive Newsletter with TemplateBuilder
    A simple template that’s been a bestseller since it was created by designers EverPress last year. Includes 24 color variations and 28 different elements, including 3-column, grids, tables, 4-column images, and text boxes in different configurations.
  5. Koble
    Koble Business Email Set
    Koble | Business Email Set
    Want to write a newsletter that people will actually read? Aiming to convert readers into customers? Check out Koble, a business email template package with 200 (!) unique modules. This 2.0 version is updated with the ability to create responsive emails in some unsupported media query apps, using a hybrid solution.
  6. Kent
    Kent – Responsive Email Set StampReady Online Builder
    Kent – Responsive Email Set + StampReady Online Builder
    This starry theme is one of the most unique templates on the list, with bold typography choices. Choose full-color, eye-catching images for your emails to really get the attention of your readers.
  7. Hogar
    Hogar Responsive Email Set
    Hogar | Responsive Email Set
    With detailed design elements such as rounded buttons, grid-style blog articles, and video components, this template is useful for marketers and businesses.
  8. Notify
    Notify – Notification Email Themebuilder Access
    Notify – Notification Email + Themebuilder Access
    The Notify template specializes on notifying your subscribers of certain messages, like welcoming them to their profile, sending a thank-you message when they’ve made a purchase, or sending a forgot password reminder.
  9. Bolder
    Bolder Minimal Newsletter
    Bolder | Minimal Newsletter
    A responsive template featuring simple borders and grid-style design. This demo is pretty muted, but we think it would look great with some brighter color choices and images, too.
  10. Happy
    Happy – Responsive Christmas New Year Email Templates with Stampready Builder Access
    Happy – Responsive Christmas & New Year Email Templates with Stampready Builder Access
    It’s never too early to start planning your holiday campaigns! Add this template to your library so you’re ready to go when December rolls around.

Find more Campaign Monitor templates created/uploaded within the last year on Envato Market.

Conclusion

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