With the recent upgrade of the Tendenci membership management CMS platform to Tendenci 5.0, we thought now was a great time to consider integrating a 3rd party email marketing application instead of using the in-house Tendenci newsletter module. We have started testing a few of the popular ones including MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Campaign Monitor so that we can better help our clients create successful email marketing campaigns.
Last week, I drafted and sent out my first email newsletter campaign using Campaign Monitor. I was truly impressed with its ease of use and cool features that most email marketing applications don’t have in one package. Here are my top 5 reasons Campaign Monitor is an awesome email marketing tool:
1. Drafting and editing an email newsletter template has never been so easy! Anyone who has ever put together an email newsletter knows you’ll spend 1/4 of the time writing the content and 3/4 of the time editing and formatting your newsletter. Campaign Monitor greatly reduces your time spent creating the newsletter with their new vertical split editor, drag and drop functionality, drop-down menu selection to personalize messages, and an expandable WYSIWYG editor that automatically adjusts in size as you add content to it.
2. Reporting and Tracking tools like no email campaign has seen before! Campaign Monitor’s Worldview is the coolest new web marketing feature I’ve seen and that is just 1 of the numerous tools they offer with their email marketing program. You can easily see a summary of the campaign in the Snapshot view that includes unique opens, clicks, shares, bounces, unsubscribed, top links clicked and more. Click on one of the overview items on the snapshot to dive deeper into the results of your email campaign, and export all the data into any .csv or excel spreadsheet. You can compare your recent campaign to past campaigns, track google analytics to see sales and conversion rates and even see who is sharing across social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
3. Campaign Monitor Integrates with Tendenci 5.0 and oh so many other online platforms! In addition to standard integration with Tendenci 5.0, Schipul can integrate Campaign Monitor with most website content management systems including WordPress, Drupal and Joomla. Campaign Monitor also plugs-in to a number of different software programs including Google Analytics, WuFoo, Salesforce CRM, Shopify, and others.
4. Your email campaign is delivered instantly! No more waiting hours after you press send for your email newsletter campaign to go out. Campaign Monitor lets you send your campaign instantly, or you can schedule it to go out at a specific date and time. You also have the option of sending a test email to up to 5 email addresses at once before sending out the real campaign. You also can pay a small fee to submit your email newsletter through a design and spam testing before you send to ensure the best success rate.
5. Set-up and automate segmented and customized marketing campaigns! Campaign Monitor’s Lists & Subscribers tools enable you to import, segment, personalize, and target specific demographics with ease. You can create rules within your subscriber list to create and automate multiple A/B email tests and measure the results with simplicity. Campaign Monitor also automatically clean-ups your subscriber list with unsubscribes and bounced emails and helps you avoid sending spam. You can even sign up to receive new subscriber activity through an RSS feed.
I actually look forward to creating my next email newsletter using Campaign Monitor. I also am addicted to the Worldview reporting feature.
I want to add that Campaign Monitor does have the option for agencies and designers to rebrand their email marketing interface and resell to their clients. Schipul will not be doing that, and clients will be charged directly by Campaign Monitor at their base prices.
Want to learn more? You can schedule a live demo with us, sign-up for one of our free webinars on Email Marketing and Newsletters or check out Campaign Monitor’s website!
