Campaign Monitor is undoubtedly one of the best software for managing email marketing campaigns; it is a robust platform and can be adapted to any company. If you are not a developer and don't know any code, it has many pre-made templates to use. I highly recommend Campaign Monitor; it is perfect, does what needs to be done, and is very easy to use.
It works great as an onsite relay to provide email sending functionality without having to pass through the firewall in order to reach the Office 365 gateway. This is particularly evident when using older programs. A lot of the older, no longer developed, programs will only allow a hard coded port to send email. Office 365 uses a non-standard SMTP port for security. This does not allow the hard coded SMTP ports to use this service. Exchange gives you the control to change those ports and securely use the standards without compromise.
Campaign Monitor’s support is great. They have a great help page built out to help answer all your questions, and if you do have a question or issue that needs extra support, their support team responds within a couple hours to help resolve the issue.
The email builder is very clean and easy to use. It makes A/B testing, personalization, and dynamic content easy to implement.
I appreciate the insights reporting that Campaign Monitor provides. We use that regularly for our quarterly reporting to track list growth, as well as campaign performance from a high level.
The automation is very straight forward and has truly transformed our marketing. The learning curve is pretty low, so my entire team knows how to use it to create and edit automated email journeys.
Managing different subscriptions requires some thinking and setup with custom fields/lists/segments. It's not really 'out of the box' to set up.
The WYSIWYG editor is pretty locked down, which makes it idiot-proof, but would be great to have a little more control over padding, line height, kerning, etc.
The templates, while useful, are very locked down, This makes it very usable from a novice's standpoint, but also very inflexible from a designer's standpoint. Creating several version of the email campaign and using A/B testing was a powerful and easy-to-use feature, and the system also provides the option of automating the sending of emails once an A/B testing criteria is reached
The ability to track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns in real-time is what makes Campaign Monitor interesting to use. All the vital features that we need to run professionally designed email campaigns that look wonderful on any device so that we boost our business are included in this platform.
Office 365 does use secure non-standard ports for SMTP connectivity causing a problem with older programs. SMTP Email Delivery from Exchange solves this problem by giving the network admin full control over ports and specific program connections. While we do use both Office 365 and the SMTP Email Delivery we find that a mix is needed in order to meet all expectations for our end users. The majority of our SMTP communications, for users, go through Office 365 while the majority of our applications and servers do go through the SMTP Email Delivery service.
