Campaign Monitor Comparison and Review

Pros:

• Unlimited picture hosting (Market Standard is 5-10 MB)
• Can create A/B test campaigns (to test subject line, from name, time sent)
• High quality campaign reports (scored 5 out of 5 stars)

Cons:

• Fewer than 100 email templates available
• Long wait times for customer support
• Live chat support not available

Conclusion:

Campaign Monitor is great for email marketers who know HTML coding and the average user who wants to create professional-looking email campaigns. Their Customer Service did not have the fastest response times, but they are very thorough and helpful. The highlight of Campaign Monitor is their Reporting as the reports generated by the service are accurate and incredibly detailed. Another perk is their unlimited image hosting space.

Ease of Use

Campaign Monitor scored 4 of 5 stars for Ease of Use. The service offers 41 email templates, which is less than our Market Standard of 100 templates. However, these are moderately flexible in that you can add multiple columns but cannot edit and replace images on the template. Their image hosting space is well above our Market Standard of 5 to 10 MB allowing you to store an unlimited number of images in the interface. Campaign Monitor has an excellent WYSIWYG editor, which is a tool that lets you see exactly what is going in your email as you design it. But, their email creator does not  let you drag and drop images and contact blocks into templates which typically makes designing the layout a little more difficult for beginners.

Features

Campaign Monitor offers an automated program called a spam checker that makes sure your email campaign will not be flagged as spam by your recipients’ email accounts. They call this their “design and testing tool,” which runs emails through major filters to see what results are returned, but it costs $5 per test. They also let you take advantage of an autoresponder that allows you to send a standard welcome message to your new subscribers confirming their sign-up. Campaign Monitor also features A/B testing within campaigns, which allows you to test specific elements of your email in order to produce more opens. Their system is also compatible with Google Analytics, which is a tool that tracks the traffic of your readers from your email campaign to (and throughout) your site.

Managing Contacts

Campaign Monitor scored 4 out of 5 stars for Managing Contacts. Their system will allow you to import contacts from Excel and cut and paste contacts into the database. This service also automatically removes unsubscribes and bounces from your contact list, making it easy to have a “clean” email list.

Campaign Reports

Campaign Monitor scored 5 of 5 stars for Campaign Reports. Their reports accurately reflected the users’ actions in all of our tests. These reports display opens, forwards, number of clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, spam reports, and links in the email that were clicked on the most. All reports can be displayed in graphs and exported into a spreadsheet.

Customer Service

Campaign Monitor scored 3 out of 5 stars for Customer Service. They do not offer phone or live chat support. Campaign Monitor has 24/7 email support, which thoroughly addressed every question we had, but they took at least seven hours to respond to our emails.

Pricing

Campaign Monitor’s indefinite free trial gives you an unlimited number of emails for up to five contacts. Their pricing is both email-based and contact-based because you can opt to send unlimited emails to all of the email addresses in your contact list, which starts at $15 for 500 contacts, or pay $5 per campaign plus 1 cent per email sent. For $7.50 per month Campaign Monitor allows you to send up to 250 emails, 1500 emails for $20, 2500 emails for $30, among other plans.