Today I’m excited to get a chance to test drive some new e-Mail marketing software, and when you hear my review, I think you’ll want to try it too. The software is called Campaign Monitor and you can find more details on setting up a free trial account and trying it for yourself.
Registering for a free account was simple and easy, and Campaign Monitor can even suggests a strong password that you can use (or make up your own). Once you create an account, Campaign Monitor brings up a quick 4-min video on getting started, and I’d highly recommend you watch it (even though it is very simple to get started on your own).
I started by clicking on “Create a New Campaign” and I was prompted for a Campaign name, an e-Mail subject line (that can even include the personalized name of each recipient), and a “from” line with name and e-mail address (for who the campaign e-mail will show as in the “from:” e-Mail address).
Next up I chose the content template. There were lots of great pre-defined and professional looking templates to choose from like newsletters, announcements, feedback forms and even discount offers. If you want to get even fancier, more unique or even a matching look for your website, you do have the option of creating your own HTML template. Since I’m new to the game, I chose one of the standard newsletter templates and yes there are 50+ to choose from (some samples below).
From here, you can drag graphics like your logo from your desktop onto the easy-to-use template and personalize it even further. I added in the mybeerbuzz.com logo and a photo that we use for much of our social media on the page. There are easy tools to change the graphic size, the alignment (centered, left, right), a link to branch to if someone clicks on the graphic, Alt Text for the logo and even top and bottom margin spacing. I added in text using the easy in-line editing and even customized my fonts, colors and sizes…and yes spell checking is built in. Next I easily added in a standard button like “Buy Now” and linked it to my web site. There’s even a spacer-tool to drag elements around the page to create spacing between your elements.
You can check out the design of your campaign and even preview what it will look like on a computer screen AND a mobile device (yes the software is mobile-friendly). I opted to preview the campaign and I was even able to send a test campaign to my own e-mail to preview it even further or to test any personalized content you add from your data file. I personalized my subject line with first name so it was cool to see that work. I don’t know how may times you’ve received a “Dear Recipient” newsletter title so knowing the personalization works before you send everything was a great idea.
Next up you choose who you want to send the newsletter to and depending on what mailing lists you may have added already, you can choose an existing list of e-mail addresses or even import a new mailing list. In my case I created a simple test e-mail list to try things out, but I look forward to trying a larger list. I used Excel to create a simple CSV file with e-Mail address and name and dragged it to Campaign Manager’s import window. Campaign Manager also allows you to choose pre-created lists from partner organizations like Salesforce, Shopify, magneto or Microsoft Dynamics.
It’s really that simple to create a campaign and from here you can choose to send the e-mail immediately or even schedule it to go at a specific time to target different time zones or days of the week.
Perhaps my favorite part of Campaign Manager was checking on the campaign results. Once you send your e-mail, you can visually track your campaign on a map (World View) and even see how each user interacts with your campaign. There are also dashboard-style analytics that allow you to track how many people open your campaign, how many messages bounced and how many were not opened. You can also see what your recipients clicked on and where they were located (globally) or drill down for more details and see a graphic representation of your campaign message and how users interacted with the page.
Campaign Manager also allows you to create what they call a “journey” to further contact your customers in an automated way to follow up on their responses to your campaigns. You can specify who should get the follow-up message, what the message should be, how soon the follow-up e-mail is sent and even a conditional message based on any demographic data you have in your e-mail data file. This option allowed me to welcome new customers with a new message and even follow up with a special offer 2-days later. I kept things fairly simple, but I did see how easy it was to setup further automated communication.
Overall I found Campaign Monitor easy to use, full of robust features and even easier to track the effectiveness of my campaigns. As you can see, my initial test was a very small and controlled campaign. I do plan to continue testing my campaigns even further and digging even deeper into the newsletter templates and automated follow up features. I will follow up with anything else I discover, but be sure to check this out for yourself and let me know how you make out.
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