Campaign Monitor: Good, Basic Email Tool
September 01, 2017
Campaign Monitor: Good, Basic Email Tool
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Campaign Monitor
We use CM in the Marketing department - only one user at the moment. We use it for email marketing but also some list management and lead generation/list collection. As an email marketing tool, we can track email activity (opens, clicks) and also contact viability (bounces, etc) to ensure we have a clean and updated list.
- The design interface is easy to use: drag & drop and very intuitive.
- The campaign metrics are displayed in an easy to digest manner.
- The automation flows are easy to create - a bit basic but not complicated.
- Contact management needs some serious work - it is list based so every contact (unique or NOT) is counted towards your allotment. To me this delineates this product from being a CRM - they really should have contact records and different list memberships. This also skews the way people are billed probably so you have to keep an eye out on this.
- Lists and segmentation need a lot of back work and setting up to use. You have to assign characteristics to contacts when they are uploaded so if you have to plan ahead strategically on how your future lists will look.
- Although their email designer is very easy to use, sometimes I wish there was a bit more flexibility in customization.
- For our operations now, I've definitely seen some good returns on our email marketing campaigns but I think it's more of a right message-right time kind of situation. Email marketing is a great lead nurturing tool that many companies underutilize
- The data tracking (opens, clicks) has been really interesting for our sales team to digest - it's new to them so it's a good piece of data intel for them
- I think sooner rather than later I will switch over to a marketing automation tool to better integrate my emailing efforts and website tracking (and CRM integration), this standalone tool doesn't do enough
I haven't used Constant Contact in ages. Couldn't tell you right now how it compares as email marketing tools get updated so frequently. That's a great thing about this platform and stream of technology - it changes so much. If you are thinking of evaluating tools, it's best to do demos from a wide range of tools (even if you have used them before) to see if they have updated functionality that you used to hate or added something really cool. MailChimp is a good tried & true sender. Sometimes I think the interface is a bit too basic but I am a more experienced email marketer. I use it for my non-profit work and my less-technically-savvy colleagues are able to use it with ease.