Take the case of the following scenario – You are not a married person and obviously, you do not have any kids [Hopefully!]. But for some reason, you receive promotional emails from a vertical e-commerce website during their online shopping festival and guess what; the promotional email contains offers highlighting Baby Products. And to make things worse, the email campaign has zero-personalization and it is quite likely that the same email was sent to all their customers [without taking any personal traits of the customer into consideration]. As per a report, 86% of customers feel that personalization played a major role in their purchase decisions. This is the era of hyper-personalization and marketers have a plethora of information about customers – Age, Sex, Browsing History, Social Media information, Purchasing History, etc. which can be extremely helpful in charting their ‘hyper-personalization marketing’ strategy.

It is of prime importance that when an email campaign is sent to the customer; it is designed well, conveys the relevant information, is personalized, clearly has the ‘Call to Action’ and has a ‘well-designed subject line’ so that the recipient opens the email. To summarize, a sub-standard subject of an email campaign results in low ‘open rate’ and average email content & design results in low ‘Click-Through Rate’. Email marketing companies are also leveraging the power of Machine Learning [ML] & Artificial Intelligence [AI] in order to cater to the hyper-personalization requirement of email marketers. Entrepreneurs Ben Richardson and David Greiner faced a similar problem where they could not find email marketing a tool that could suffice their requirements and that is what made them co-found ‘Campaign Monitor’.  ‘Campaign Monitor’ is a global email-marketing company that offers a full range of email solutions to help marketers create meaningful, lasting connections with their audience. ‘Campaign Monitor’ streamlines every part of the email marketing process and the beauty of the product lies in its elegant design & scalability across different verticals.

Campaign Monitor – Overview

Campaign Monitor is an email marketing platform that companies can use to design personalized messages to its customers. Once a campaign is created using ‘Campaign Monitor’, tracking & analytics that is integrated with the dashboard can be used to measure the effectiveness of the campaign. The platform also provides list-management tools in the ‘List & subscribers’ tab where a brand can create segmented lists in order to send ‘personalized email campaigns’ based on the customer’s profile & other important data points about the customers in the list.

Along with personalized email campaigns, Campaign Monitor can also be used to create personalized customer journeys. Campaign Monitor can be integrated with close to 250+ platforms; some of them being Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, SalesForce, etc.

Campaign Monitor – Features

Design customer-centric emails – Once the marketer logs into the Campaign Monitor dashboard, he can use the drag & drop mechanism to create simple, yet beautifully designed emails. Due to the simplicity of the interface, designing email campaigns is a very simple task.

Insights & Analytics – Similar to Google Analytics, ‘Insights’ feature of Campaign Monitor helps in tracking the CTR, open rate, engagement, and geographical coverage of the audience. It also provides analytics through which marketers can improve the performance of a campaign.

Automation Emails – Through the ‘Journey’ feature, a marketer can set up customer journeys as well as RSS campaign to send automated updates from the customer’s website. You can choose the appropriate ‘Industry Vertical’ [Media & Entertainment, Publishing & Digital Media, Retail, Travel & Hospitality, Travel, Hospitality, etc.] and your intent of sending the email campaign. You could send a personalized welcome-email on signup or send an email in order to keep a customer engaged on the platform.

While creating the ‘customer journey’, you should choose the end-goal of the campaign. You could choose from the following options

• Drive a series of actions
• Drive conversions
• Increase email engagement

Smarter Transactional Emails – Transactional emails are triggered by your own site or app, typically in response to a user’s action, such as an order confirmation or a plan renewal. They are some of the most valuable emails a company send but usually, aren’t measured or optimized. ‘New sign-up email’ is an ideal example of a transactional email and is used to welcome a new user. Transactional Email can be created using the Email builder feature and there is also an option to import your own design. This category of email is triggered on demand and you can choose from a portfolio of ‘wide range of designs’. API or SMTP can also be used to send email directly from your site or app.

Campaign Monitor – Email Campaign Creation

Campaign Monitor has a number of templates that can be used for creating an effective email campaign. It has a WYSIWYG editor through which you can design campaigns by using the ‘drag & drop’ facility. The design of the campaigns can be optimized for different mediums namely, desktop, mobile, tablet, etc. There is also an option to import HTML template or HTML design, but you might need certain coding knowledge to use the HTML feature.

A/B Testing or Split Testing is used widely by designers & developers to compare two versions of a web-page and measure the overall performance of the test. Campaign Monitor provides a facility of A/B Testing where a user can create two versions of the same campaign. This also helps in figuring out which design works well and designing a long-term marketing strategy. In a nutshell, Campaign Monitor can be used to send personalized email campaigns and trigger automated workflows based on customer behavior.

Campaign Monitor – Pricing and Third Party API integration

There are three plans of Campaign Monitor – Basic, Unlimited, and Premier. The Basic Plan costs $9/month, Unlimited Plan costs $29/month, and Premier Plan costs $149/month. Below are more details about each plan

Basic Plan [$9/month]

• 2,500 emails across campaigns and automated emails
• Customer support via email
• All core email marketing features Use our drag-and-drop email builder and professionally-designed templates to launch completely branded email campaigns.
• Insights analytics suite
• Basic marketing automation

Unlimited Plan [$29/month]

• Unlimited emails across campaigns and automated emails
• Priority customer support via email
• All core email marketing features
• Insights analytics suite
• Basic marketing automation
• Advanced marketing automation
• Unlimited inbox previews
• Time zone sending
• Unlimited spam testing

Premier Plan [$149/month]

• Unlimited emails across campaigns and automated emails
• Premier phone and email support
• All core email marketing features
• Insights analytics suite
• Basic marketing automation
• Advanced marketing automation
• Unlimited inbox previews
• Time zone sending
• Unlimited spam testing
• Send-time optimization
• Advanced link tracking
• Template management for teams

In case you are using emails occasionally, you can use the ‘Pay per Campaign’ feature of Campaign Monitor. Further details about pricing can be found here.

Campaign Monitor – API Integration

Campaign Monitor has a robust third-party API support and using those APIs, you can connect all your core business apps to meet your unique email marketing and automation needs. You can also integrate the platform with popular Content Management System [CMS], Blog, and other third-party software. Based on the ‘core requirement’ of the email campaign, you can use the third-party APIs from the host of services mentioned below

• Account
• Campaigns
• Lists
• Clients
• Segments
• Subscribers
• Templates
• Transactional
• Webhooks

More details about API integration can be found here.

Campaign Monitor – Conclusion

There are number of companies that provide ’email marketing’, some of them being SendPulse, Moz, LeadsRx, SocialPilot, etc. and each of them have flexible pricing structure & variety of features. Campaign Monitor’s extensive feature-list, attractive pricing strategy, excellent customer-support makes it an ideal choice for companies that plan to use email-marketing to welcome new customers and retain existing customers. You can also create simple, yet effective surveys using Campaign Monitor.

In case you are Campaign Monitor use, do leave your feedback in the comments section.. You can log on to Campaign Monitor in case you want to give Campaign Monitor a spin!