Super Simple SEO

We'd like to let you know about a special offer we're currently running on our Super Simple SEO book. 

Until August 31, you can purchase a PDF copy of this indispensable SEO guide for just $3.50 (before tax) if you use the code SUMMER18 at checkout.

About the book

Super Simple SEO is a friendly, jargon-free guide to optimising a website for Google. It outlines the same strategies and tips that we used to turn Style Factory from a website that nobody visited into a popular business blog that attracts 30,000 visitors a month.

You can buy the PDF version of Super Simple SEO here.

Note: although the book is available in Kindle format on Amazon, this offer applies to the PDF version on sale from this site only.

If you're thinking of starting a business, or improving an existing one, you're going to need the right tools for the job.

In this post we look at 10 types of app that can make your workflow more efficient and lead to an increase in business growth.

---

1. A productivity suite

Before you can do anything remotely exciting in your business, you’re going to need some apps that can take care of the boring (but very important) things: a reliable email account, file storage and productivity tools.

The industry leading productivity suites which provide all the above are Office 365 and G Suite (formerly Google Apps) - and it's quite hard to choose between them.

As such you might like to read our Office 365 vs G Suite review. This explains the core differences between the two productivity suites, as well as outlining what alternatives are available.

---

2. A website or e-commerce platform

It goes without saying that you'll need a website for your business. But with many website building platforms available, it's important to make the right decision regarding which one to go for.

If you're not intending to sell services goods online (i.e., your website is more of a portfolio or 'brochure' site with business ultimately taking place offline) then Squarespace is often a good bet for startups, because it's easy to set up a site with it, the templates are strong, and you get access to support.

Wordpress is another great option - and one that will give you more control over the aesthetics and functionality of your site - but there is a bit more of a learning curve involved.

If you’re selling products and services online, more thought is required. Although it's tempting to just embed a Paypal button on a web page to handle online transactions, there are much more sophisticated options available to you.

Ultimately, if you're serious about e-commerce, you’re going to need a platform you can use to to build a fully functional store: one that can adequately cater for things like product variants, shipping, tax rates and abandoned carts.

If you're starting from scratch and don't already have a website, then it's worth taking a look at tools like Bigcommerce, Shopify or Squarespace.

If you've already got a website you might find that Ecwid is a good solution for you (it's a 'widget' that's designed to add e-commerce functionality to an existing site).

---

3. Email marketing

A large mailing list is VITAL to the growth and long-term success of a business. 

Not only can email marketing provide a fantastic return on investment, it's a great way to share content widely (something which can build great brand awareness and even improve SEO).

Many new business owners think that a mailing list is simply a bunch of email addresses stored in an Excel spreadsheet that get emailed via Outlook from time to time.

Taking this approach is a big mistake. Dedicated email marketing tools allow you to capture email addresses via your website, host a large mailing list online, send beautiful HTML e-newsletters, automate communications and track results easily.

There are many great apps available - our favourites are probably Getresponse (which we use for Style Factory e-newsletters) and Mailchimp.

For more information about your options in this area, you can check out our email marketing tool comparisons here.

---

4. Growth hacking tools

Once you've got your website live and your email marketing app sorted, the next thing you'll need to do is grow the number of people visiting your site and joining your mailing list.

Now, there are a multitude of tools to help you do this. For example, you'll find apps that let you run A/B tests on your site pages to find out which is most likely to convert a visitor to a subscriber; tools that let you create video recordings of your visitors' behaviour on your site and analyse it; and 'welcome mats' which encourage mailing list subscription before any other action is taken on your site.

You'll find an exhaustive list of growth-hacking apps over on the Kissmetrics site, but for me, there are two particular aspects of growth hacking to zoom in on and prioritise when starting a new business: social sharing, and lead generation. You basically want to make it as easy as possible for somebody to share your content or subscribe to receive more of it. 

Tools like Sumo can really help you here, providing everything from sharing buttons to live chat to data capture 'welcome mats.'

You can get a free trial of Sumo here. 

Other similar services worth investigating include Addthis and Sharethis. 

---

5. CRM

CRM stands for ‘customer relationship management’, and these days the acronym is usually used to refer to cloud-based software that allows you to keep track of and manage the business relationships between your organisation and your leads and clients.

Typically, a CRM app will allow you to

• capture, organise and analyse leads
• track communication with leads and clients
• allocate tasks to your team
• manage your ‘sales pipeline’ (i.e., identify leads and track how the process of converting them to a client is going)
• manage customer enquiries via a support ticketing system

Now, as with email marketing, many new business owners rely on Excel to handle all this sort of stuff - which, as with mailing list management, is a bad move when there are so many more sophisticated options available to you.

At the cheaper end of the CRM spectrum you'll find products like Capsule or Nimble; but you can pay big bucks for more sophisticated tools like Salesforce.

Which product is right for you will really depend on the nature and complexity of your business, but either way, finding the right CRM tool will usually be vital to ensuring that it grows successfully.

---

6. Cloud based accounting

Cloud-based accounting apps are increasingly popular and worthy of serious consideration over traditional spreadsheet usage.

A cloud-based accounting solution is connected to your bank account, meaning that all your transactions are imported into your accounting software in real time (i.e., no more copying and pasting transactions from your online bank account into a spreadsheet).

Not only that, but these apps you to raise branded invoices and produce detailed reports at the click of a button. They can give you access to in-depth analysis of your company finances, and make preparing a tax return significantly easier.

Because of these advantages, if you use a bookkeeper, it often makes sense to hire one that works 'in the cloud'.

Industry leading cloud-based accounting apps include Xero and Quickbooks.

---

7. A notebook

An oft-overlooked aspect of running a business is the amount of note-taking it involves.

From capturing brainwaves to taking minutes to jotting down a phone number of a potentially useful contact, you will find yourself taking a host of notes in your business life.

So, it makes sense to take them in the best possible way - and in my view, that's digitally, using a dedicated notekeeping app.

There are a plethora of notekeeping apps out there to choose from – but Evernote’s got to be one of the best.

It allows you to place text, images, files and research all in one digital workspace which you can then share with friends, colleagues and family. You can access Evernote across all your devices, meaning your notes are always with you. 

If you use a productivity suite like G Suite or Office 365 however, you may find that their 'Keep' and 'OneNote' products meet your needs perfectly well.

---

8. A to-do list

To-lists have been part of running a business since the year dot. They're a surprisingly vital part of running and growing a business: without them, nothing gets done.

As with much else in the business world, they've now moved online. And again, there are loads of options available.

Todoist is a simple but effective app for managing, as the name suggests, your to-do list. It works across devices and is available as Chrome extension too, meaning your uncompleted tasks are always following you around (perhaps I’m not selling this as well as I should). Nifty features include being able to turn emails into tasks and categorise tasks by project.

Wunderlist is another good option - for a few more, check out The Guardian's guide to to-do lists...

---

9. A scanner

Because so much of our working lives now involve storing documents in the cloud, having a scanner has become more important than ever.

And the good news is that you no longer need a dedicated device for this: you can use your phone.

Scannable is a must-have app for anybody who needs to scan or photocopy stuff. You just hover your phone above a document and it gets scanned quickly onto your device. You can then email it, save it to Evernote or plonk it in a cloud storage system like Dropbox or Google Drive. 

Dropbox now has its own scanning app too, which allows you to quickly get your stuff onto Dropbox.

Particularly if you need to get documents onto an accounting or CRM tool app quickly

---

10. A social media manager

Most businesses end up struggling to manage several social media profiles at once. It can be tricky to keep on top of them all or analyse what’s working and what’s not across all your channels.

This is where an all-in-one social media management tool like Hootsuite is invaluable. You can use tools like Hootsuite to manage all your social media accounts in one place; schedule messages across your profiles; measure your social media campaign performance and assign tasks to your team messages to ensure that all messages generated by your social media activity get answered.

All this improves your social media comms, or frees up time to do other important stuff!

Alternatives to Hootsuite include Sendible and Buffer.

---

We hope you've enjoyed this article - do feel free to add your thoughts on it using the comments section below (note: if you're reading this post on a mobile device, you may be viewing the 'AMP' version which disables comments. Clicking here will take you to the normal version, where you can add your comment).

---

Get more content from Style Factory

If you enjoyed this post, please join our mailing list for more great content. From web design to data capture to SEO, you'll get a host of useful articles on all aspects of running a business. 

Bigcommerce is running a free online conference which may be of interest to readers of the Style Factory blog. Called 'Make it Big,' the event runs from August 6-10, 2018, and involves 25+ e-commerce experts and business influencers, including:

• Steve Case, Co-Founder of AOL

• Pauline Brown, former North American Chairman of LVMH, INC. and current Harvard Business professor

• Web Smith, Founding Team Member, Mizzen + Main, Founder of 2PM

• Ezra Firestone, Founder, Smart Marketer

• Rick Cesari, the marketing mastermind behind GoPro, Sonicare and the George Foreman Grill

You can register free here.

Here's what Bigcommerce has to say about the event:

"The 5-day conference is free and online — meaning you don’t need to travel anywhere but to the closest WiFi connection.

Why Attend?

Learn how to get geeky about your data to uncover what is working and what isn’t. The goal is to double down on successes, test new channels and cultivate a growth marketing mindset across your entire team.

1. Focus: learn how to get geeky about your data to uncover what is working and what isn’t. The goal is to double down on successes, test new channels and cultivate a growth marketing mindset across your entire team.

2. Build: from community to immersive UX experiences, find out how the best brands out there are conveying value on their sites to drive traffic away from Amazon and to their owned properties.

3. Inspire: the bleeding-edge of retail innovation is at your fingertips. Whether you launch AI chatbots or optimize for voice commerce, inspire your employees and your customers to use tech for good — and fun, too.

Reserve your spot now, and learn from the greats on how to Make It Big."

Mad Mimi review - picture of the Mad Mimi logo

In this Mad Mimi review, we take a look at the pros and cons of one of the cheapest email marketing tools available.

Our overall rating: 2.5/5

When it comes to picking a tool for sending out these HTML e-newsletters, there are simply tons to choose from: Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Getresponse, Aweber…the list, if you’ll pardon the pun, goes on.

Superficially, these products allow you to do the same thing: put attractive marketing messages in inboxes. But they can differ enormously in terms of both price and features, and it can be difficult to know which one to use. 

In this review we take a look at one of the cheapest e-marketing tools out there: Mad Mimi. Is it cheap and cheerful, or does it cut too many corners to make it a suitable email marketing solution for your business?

---

Mad Mimi pricing 

As alluded to above, Mad Mimi is very competitively priced. In costs terms at least, it's fair to say that it wipes the floor with key competing products. There are four main plans, each with several pricing sub-tiers.

Basic

• $10 per month allows you to host and send e-newsletters to 500 email addresses
• $12 per month - 1,000 email addresses
• $16 per month - 2,500 email addresses
• $27 per month - 5,000 email addresses

Pro

• $42 per month allows you to host and send e-newsletters to 10,000 email addresses
• $59 per month - 15,000 email addresses
• $89 per month - 25,000 email addresses
• $139 per month - 35,000 email addresses

Silver

• $199 per month allows you to host and send e-newsletters to 50,000 contacts
• $279 per month - 75,000 email addresses
• $369 per month - 100,000 email addresses
• $549 per month - 150,000 email addresses
• $749 per month - 250,000 email addresses

Gold

• $1,049 per month - 350,000 email addresses.

All the above plans allow you to send an unlimited number of emails. The key difference between the four tiers (other than the facilitation of different mailing list sizes) is to do with speed: the more expensive the plan, the faster Mad Mimi's emails will send your emails out.

The prices, as alluded to earlier, compare very favourably with those of competing products. For example, with Mad Mimi, paying $42 a month entitles you to email a database comprising 10,000 leads; Getresponse charge a monthly fee of $65 for mailing a database this size, Mailchimp $75 and Campaign Monitor $89.

Similarly, Mad Mimi is also much cheaper than its competitors when it comes to emailing smaller databases: using a list containing 1,000 records costs $12 with Mad Mimi, $15 with Getresponse, $15 with Mailchimp and $29 with Campaign Monitor.

(A quick note about the Campaign Monitor prices: the figures quoted above are for their cheapest plans, which do not permit the sending of unlimited emails; it costs significantly more to send an unlimited number of emails out using Campaign Monitor. See our full Campaign Monitor review for details).

Unlike many competing products, however, there doesn't seem to be a free trial available for Mad Mimi. Key competitors Mailchimp, Getresponse and Aweber all offer free trials (with Mailchimp's being particularly generous - you can use it indefinitely with a list of up to 2000 subscribers).

Utlimately it has to be said that Mad Mimi is cheap for a reason: it does not have nearly as many bells and whistles as the competing products referred to above.

Drilling down into the product's features gives you an indication as to why the monthly fees are so much lower than the competition's.

---

Interface

Mad Mimi's interface is simple to use, if rather brightly coloured!

Key features are easy to find (thanks to large text links and big buttons) and users new to the world of e-marketing will find sending e-newsletters and creating autoresponder campaigns with Mad Mimi pretty straightforward.

When evaluating Mad Mimi, the only thing I found difficult to do was send a test email: there's no obvious 'test' button anywhere to be seen when you are designing your email; rather, you need to click a 'preview' button to see a full screen version of your email, and then locate a 'test' button at the bottom of that screen.

---

Templates

Unlike many similar products, Mad Mimi does not provide the user with an extensive range of templates to choose from.

Instead, you are given one theme (albeit with a few layouts geared towards specific applications - product promotion, quick updates, newsletters etc.), and a range of colour schemes to choose from.

Essentially, you add your own branding through uploading a header image, using a drag and drop builder to add your content and selecting suitable fonts to display it in. More adventurous users can use HTML to design more bespoke templates.

This approach is very basic, but it does mean that putting together e-newsletters is straightforward. Personally, however, I'd much prefer to be able to choose from a variety of pre-designed layouts and tweak them as desired.

A more serious issue however relating to Mad Mimi's themes is that they are not, as far as I can tell from experimenting with them, responsive — i.e., they won't adjust in size automatically to suit the device an email is being viewed on.

This contrasts very poorly with key competitors Getresponse, Aweber, Campaign Monitor and Mailchimp, all of which allow you to create fully responsive versions of your newsletters.

Now to be fair to Mad Mimi, the one and only template available seems to be designed in a way which, although not responsive, is pretty readable on a phone. But in this day and age of mobile devices being used as a primary way to access the internet, it would be much better if the Mad Mimi template was fully responsive.

---

Autoresponders

Autoresponders are e-newsletters that are sent to your subscribers at intervals determined by you – you can set them up so that immediately after somebody signs up to your list, they receive a welcome message from your business; a few days later they could receive a discount code for some of your products; two weeks later they could receive an encouragement to follow you on Twitter...and so on. Autoresponders tend to be a key part of e-marketing solutions.

With Mad Mimi, the autoresponder functionality is solid but basic: setting up 'drip' campaigns as Mad Mimi calls them is very straightforward.

However, you are limited to sending emails based on time intervals and event dates (birthdays, anniversaries etc.) — and nothing more sophisticated. Other products, particularly Getresponse and Mailchimp, provide much more functionality in this area and allow you to send autoresponders that can be triggered by specific user actions or information, for example:

• opens and clicks
• changes in contact preferences
• completed transactions
• completion of a particular form
• visits to particular pages on your website.

This sort of functionality tends to be referred to these days as 'marketing automation' — and if you need anything like this you from your email marketing tool, you will need to look elsewhere for it.

---

Analytics

Mad Mimi offers a clean, simple analytics interface that makes understanding the basics of what's happened with a mailout easy.

You get access to all the absolutely essential stuff — open, clickthrough and unsubscribe rates etc. — and the Google Analytics integration is good too (Mad Mimi will rewrite the URLs in your emails so that any traffic from specific Mad Mimi mailouts is easily trackable in your Google Analytics reports.)

However, you won't get anything like the sort of reporting functionality that's offered by other leading email marketing products.

For example, if you want to find out information about the devices your e-newsletters are being opened on, the ROI of emails or geographical data, you will be disappointed. 

As with much else about the product, Mad Mimi provides on a very stripped-down, basic approach to reporting.

---

Split testing

In addition to the lack of responsive templates, another serious omission in Mad Mimi is the lack of split testing.

With most other similar products, you can run A/B tests on portions of your database to see which subject header or content type generates the most opens or clickthroughs (the winning subject header / content automatically being sent to the remaining data).

There's none of that in Mad Mimi, unless you want to start segmenting your database into test pots and using separate, manual broadcasts to test different content types.

---

Integrations

Mad Mimi provides quite a few useful integrations — you can connect the product to a decent range of third party apps in a variety of ways.

The list of Mad Mimi integrations includes apps such as:

• Google Analytics
• SurveyMonkey
• Batchbook
• Highrise
• Freshbooks
• Salesforce
• Etsy
• Zoho CRM
• Facebook
• Bigcommerce
• EventBrite
• Capsule CRM
• Drupal

You'll find an exhaustive list of Mad Mimi integrations here.

---

Support

Two types of support are available from Mad Mimi:

• a set of searchable online resources
• email support.

Certain email marketing products (notably Getresponse and Aweber) offer more here: with both of these, you'll get not just email support but live chat and, in the case of Aweber, phone support too.

---

Mad Mimi review conclusions

There are two strong aspects to Mad Mimi.

First: it's very cheap. Very cheap.

Second, it's easy to use.

These two factors may be enough to convince users to purchase a plan, and if you're on a budget, it's hard to think of any mainstream e-marketing tools that will allow you to broadcast so many e-newsletters so cheaply.

Mad Mimi has its flaws, but it will nonetheless tick quite a lot of e-marketing boxes, particularly where the owners of large databases are concerned.

However, many users will find that there are some noticeable omissions when it come to the functionality available in Mad Mimi, particularly when it comes to responsive emails, autoresponders and split testing. If you are serious about growing your business, my view is that you need these sorts of features in your e-marketing toolkit. 

Finally, a few templates wouldn't go amiss: when you consider that Aweber users can avail of 700+ templates, Getresponse 500+ and Mailchimp 100+, it makes the offering from Mad Mimi look positively scrawny.

The pros of using Mad Mimi

• As mentioned frequently above, the price. It’s possibly the cheapest email marketing tool out there. At the very least it is significantly cheaper than all the best-known email marketing tools – Aweber, Mailchimp, Constant Contact, Getresponse etc.
• Because the emphasis of Mad Mimi is deliberately on 'simplicity', it's very easy to use, and shouldn't put off newcomers to email marketing. 
• It integrates with a wide range of third party apps.
• A good range of integrations with other apps is available.

The cons of using Mad Mimi

• The autoresponder functionality is fairly limited - you can create autoresponders ('drips') based on when people sign up to your mailing list, but that's more or less it. Other systems, such as Getresponse or Mailchimp allow you to create autoresponders based on a whole other range of variables - clickthroughs, purchases and more.
• There is only, in effect, one email template available.
• E-newsletters are not responsive (mobile friendly).
• You can't really do A/B split testing  (other similar tools allow you to test subject headers or content variants against each other using a sample of data and, based on the results, rolls the best performing versions out to your data).
• Support is via live chat or email only, although Mad Mimi say that they will schedule calls by arrangement if 'really, really' necessary. 
• There's no free trial

---

Alternatives to Mad Mimi

If you're considering Mad Mimi as an e-marketing solution, then chances are you're on a budget. As such, you might want to think about Getresponse.

Although Getresponse isn't as cheap as Mad Mimi, it is still one of the more reasonably-priced tools of its kind available, and comes with a truckload of extra functionality that you won't find in Mad Mimi - for example responsive emails, advanced autoresponder / marketing automation options and split testing. You can sign up for a free trial account here. 

Mailchimp is also worth a look for those on a budget - again it's a more expensive tool than Mad Mimi (and marginally more expensive on the whole than Getresponse) but it's free version is pretty good: you can send 12,500 e-newsletters per month to a maximum of 2000 addresses.

---

General advice on how to create an e-newsletter

If you are interested in creating e-newsletters and e-marketing campaigns in general, you may enjoy our article on how to create a newsletter and our introduction to autoresponders.

And finally, if you've used Mad Mimi yourself, do feel free to give your thoughts on the product in the comments section below (note: if you're reading this on a phone, you're probably seeing the AMP version, which disables comments - if so, click here for the regular version which allows you to add them!)

---

Free resources on email marketing from Style Factory

For excellent free resources on all aspects of running an online business - from email marketing to SEO to web design - make sure you subscribe to our updates via email. You'll receive e-newsletters containing all our latest advice and reviews - essential stuff for kick-starting your business. Click here to subscribe for free today.

---

In this Campaign Monitor review, we look this well-known e-marketing solution, highlight its key pros and cons, and try to help you decide if it’s a good tool for your company’s e-marketing requirements.

Our overall rating: 3/5

---

What is Campaign Monitor?

Campaign Monitor is a web application that allows you to capture data to an online mailing list, manage it, and send HTML e-newsletters to it.

Like Getresponse, Mad Mimi, Aweber and Mailchimp, it’s widely used by businesses to

• send mass mailouts
• program autoresponders (automated emails that are triggered by certain user actions, such as joining a mailing list or buying a product)
• analyse the results

Like some of the aforementioned products, it now also facilitates marketing automation.

We'll explore all these key features in depth shortly, but first, let's take a quick look at Campaign Monitor pricing.

---

Campaign Monitor pricing

I guess we're starting with the bad news first: the price. There's no way around the fact that Campaign Monitor is one of the most expensive tools of its kind.

There are three types of Campaign Monitor plan: 'Basic', 'Unlimited' and 'Premier'.

The key differences to watch out for are as follows:

• 'Basic' plans limit the number of emails you can send in a given month to 5 times the database size limit - so for example, if you were on the 500 records plan, you could send 2,500 emails, and so on. It also restricts your use of autoresponders to basic drip campaigns (no segmentation or 'branching' functionality allowed!).
   
• 'Unlimited' plans remove the cap on the number of emails you can send, and allows you to make use of more sophisticated autoresponder functionality (involving 'branching', where user actions — opens, clicks etc. can trigger emails). It also gives you access to faster email support and inbox and spam testing options, along with the option to tailor e-newsletter send times to best match your subscribers' time zones.
   
• In addition to the features on the 'unlimited' plan, 'Premier' Campaign Monitor plans give you access to phone support; you also get some template controls which are designed to prevent your team creating communications which are wildly off-brand. Possibly the most useful feature on Premier plans is send time optimisation - this sends your e-newsletters according to when they are most likely to be opened (Campaign Monitor works this out by looking at your subscribers' previous behaviour when opening emails).

How much you pay for each plan depends entirely on your database size - we're dealing with a sliding scale, but I'll highlight three scenarios to give you an idea of how much you might pay to host a small, medium-sized or large list with Campaign Monitor:

• At the cheapest end of the pricing scale, using Campaign Monitor with a database of 500 email addresses will cost you $9 per month on 'Basic', $29 per month on 'Unlimited' and $149 per month on 'Premier.'
   
• In the middle of the pricing scale, hosting a database containing 15,000 email addresses will cost you $129 per month on 'Basic', $249 per month on 'Unlimited' and $399 per month on 'Premier.'
   
• At the top end of the pricing scale, you can expect to pay $299 per month to host a database containing up to 50,000 email addresses on the 'Basic' plan, $699 per month on the 'Unlimited' plan and $889 per month on the 'Premier' plan.

A quick look at Campaign Monitor's competitors' pricing reveals just how much more expensive the product is compared to alternative email marketing tools.

For example, it costs $29 per month with Campaign Monitor to send an unlimited number of emails to a database containing a mere 500 records; by contrast Getresponse or Mailchimp both charge roughly half that ($15) to send an unlimited number of emails to a database containing 1,000 addresses.

At the more expensive end of things, if you're hosting a database with 50,000 records on Getresponse or Mailchimp, you will pay $250 or $240 respectively or a month to send an unlimited number of emails to your database. The Campaign Monitor equivalent price? An eye-watering $699 per month.

On top of that there is no free trial of Campaign Monitor available – the best that you’ll get is a so-called ‘free account’ which allows you to try out everything the system can do except, crucially, send any mass mailouts.

By contrast Getresponse gives you a 30 day fully functional free trial (which can be used with 1,000 subscribers), and the free Mailchimp plan is actually pretty usable ongoing (so long as your list does not exceed 2000 subscribers and you limit your sends to 12,000 emails per month).

There's no getting away from it: Campaign Monitor's pricing is extraordinarily high. Which is a shame really, as there is an awful lot to like about the product, as we'll discover below.

---

Templates

Templates represent one of Campaign Monitor's strongest selling points. There are around 50 Campaign Monitor templates available; this is far less than the number offered by competing products, but they all look great, and I generally prefer them aesthetically to what's on offer from Mailchimp, Aweber, Getresponse and so on. 

Campaign Monitor templates are very professional in appearance, and they are responsive (meaning they’l l adjust themselves to display nicely regardless of whether you are looking at e-newsletters on a desktop or mobile device). They’re also robust – so far I’ve yet to experience any niggles with how they display in any email clients.

Campaign Monitor templates are attractive in appearance and one of the stand-out aspects of the product

The templates also allow you to incorporate a decent selection of web fonts – this is a very nice touch, and means your e-newsletters can look a bit slicker than some sent by competing systems (Getresponse and Aweber don't permit use of web fonts; and the web fonts you can use with Mailchimp are all very boring, to the point where several of the 'safe' ones look more interesting!)

The drag and drop editor is easy to use, and populating your email with images and content is very straightforward; as the below marketing video shows it's very easy to get some extraordinarily slick results with Campaign Monitor.

There is one potential headache with the templates worth considering though – if you are using the RSS-to-HTML email option (i.e., you are using an RSS feed from your site or blog to populate and trigger e-newsletters), you can’t use the normal (read fancier!) templates and will have to make do with a very basic template. This means having to do without web fonts and using a radically different design than the one you might be using in your standard e-newsletters.

To be fair, this is also an issue with some of Campaign Monitor’s competitors but they generally offer a wider range of RSS-to-email templates, making the incongruity between ‘normal’ and RSS e-newsletters less of an issue.

Finally, as with similar tools, you can always import your own HTML template – this is a straightforward enough process, and you can make use of Campaign Monitor’s various tags to ensure that you can subsequently use its in-built template editor to edit or personalise content in future.

---

Importing and exporting your data

Importing data into Campaign Monitor is very straightforward - you can import from all the common database formats you'd expect, i.e.,: 

• XLS
• XLSX
• CSV
• TXT (tab delimited)
• vCard

You can also simply copy and paste the contents of one of these file types directly into Campaign Monitor, which will usually make very good job of separating out the fields (you can then map or rename these as appropriate). 

There are certain requirements that Campaign Monitor have around what you import - for example you should not import bought or rented databases, lists that have not been mailed in a long time, or data associated with gambling or pharmaceutical products.

These restrictions are fairly similar to those imposed by other e-marketing services and are there to reduce the risk of you or Campaign Monitor being blacklisted by email providers for spammy activity.

Exporting your data is easy too - you can export entire lists or segments to CSV format very easily.

---

Data segmentation

One thing I really like about Campaign Monitor is its flexibility around data segmentation. It allows you to send emails to multiple segments or lists at once — something which is not possible on Mailchimp or Aweber (Getresponse permits it though).

Additionally, it's super easy to exclude segments or lists from mailouts. So if your business has complex requirements regarding data segmentation, Campaign Monitor is worthy of some serious consideration.

---

Automation 

Autoresponders

Like most e-marketing tools, Campaign Monitor allows you to send autoresponders – automated 'drip' emails that you program into the system so that when a user joins a mailing list, they automatically receive a series of pre-programmed emails — or, in Campaign Monitor parlance, 'subscriber journeys.'

Setting subscriber journeys up in Campaign Monitor is extremely easy and the interface for doing so is very well laid out. 

I have a couple of niggles however: first, in order to add a new email to a user journey, you have to pause the whole journey.

Second, and more annoyingly is the fact that journeys can't be triggered by data imports - your user has to sign up via a form or added individually via an API in order to be added to a marketing automation cycle. This contrasts negatively with products such as Getresponse and Mailchimp, both of which do facilitate the triggering of user journeys via bulk import of email addresses.

Marketing automation

Like several competing products, Campaign Monitor now offers not just basic autoresponders but 'marketing automation' too. Marketing automation goes beyond simple 'drip'-style campaigns by allowing you to use specific triggers to send emails.

These include:

• opens of particular emails
• clicks on certain links
• purchases of particular products
• visits to particular pages on your site

Examples of marketing automation triggers being used in Campaign Monitor

A flowchart-style interface with 'yes/no' conditions is provided to allow you select triggers and set the conditions for sending particular emails to your subscribers. It's very easy to use and won't involve a steep learning curve.

For an overview of how it works, the below video is quite helpful:

RSS-to-email

Another way you can automate your email broadcasts in Campaign Monitor is by triggering them via RSS. 

This allows you to use an RSS feed from your site to automatically send a newsletter to your subscribers - a typical application of this is blog RSS feeds being used to notify your subscribers of new posts on your site. 

You can populate RSS-triggered emails with either snippets of content from the feed, or entire articles.

As discussed above, the only negative aspect of this functionality is that you can't use normal Campaign Monitor templates to send RSS-powered emails; this means they will be a bit off-brand.

---

Sign-up forms and landing pages

Campaign Monitor's sign up forms are easy enough to configure and implement.

Some competing products give you more options when it comes to sign up forms, allowing you to create pop-ups, for example, or make use of javascript forms which allow you to the format colours and fonts of forms without needing to code.

If you're a Wordpress user, you'll have more options on this front, with a dedicated Campaign Monitor forms plugin available which allows you to create fancier forms.

One nice feature of Campaign Monitor which relates to sign-up forms is its ‘Enlist’ iPad app, which allows you to capture data on-the-go at events using an iPad (it’s great for musicians who want to collect email addresses at gigs, for example, or for companies wishing to capture prospects at sales events). It works both offline and online, which is fantastic – if you use Enlist offline, you can just sync any data you’ve captured to Campaign Monitor account when you’re online again.

Campaign Monitor's 'Enlist' iPad app - a great way to capture data at events

Less fantastic is the lack of a landing page creator – to be fair, many similar tools don’t offer one either (Getresponse and Mailchimp being the obvious exceptions) but it would be nice if Campaign Monitor allowed you to create landing pages that looked as nice as say, the Enlist app’s beautiful forms.

Technically, you can create landing pages for Campaign Monitor – you will need to code them yourself though or avail of a third party app (many of which are quite expensive).

---

Interface / ease-of-use

One of the best things about Campaign Monitor is its interface.

A lot of thought seems to have gone into making it clean, intuitive and clutter-free, and to be honest, Campaign Monitor is probably the most user-friendly e-marketing tool I’ve used to date.

Everything is really straightforward and the system will really appeal to people who are not tech-savvy, or relatively new to e-marketing.

I have recommended Campaign Monitor to certain clients (those who need to send their own mass mailouts but are not at all comfortable with the thought of doing so!) on the strength of the easy-to-use interface alone.

---

Analytics

Campaign Monitor’s stats are easy to access and review.

In addition to getting ‘big picture’ stats on open rates, clickthroughs and unsubscribes, you can get good individual level information: for example, you can see exactly what an individual user has done with your emails – opened, ignored, clicked etc. – and where and when they’ve done it (very Orwellian).

You can also export stats easily to PDF format too, which is very handy for sending reports over to clients in a simple, digestible format.

Campaign Monitor gives you a very detailed view of each subscriber's activity - so long as you don't mind playing the role of Big Brother...

However, competing products let you do far more on the stats front — for example, compare campaigns side by side; auto-segment people who open emails into new groups for additional mailouts; or get an overview of what time of day most people open your messages.

For most users, I suspect the reporting features in Campaign Monitor will be sufficient — but power email marketing users may feel a little bit short-changed by its analytics offering.

---

Split testing your e-newsletters

Split testing in Campaign Monitor is available and very easy to do…but the functionality is extremely basic – you can only test two versions of an email against each other (based on subject header, sender or content).

Most other e-marketing tools are much more advanced in this regard, allowing you to split test a larger number of variants against each other (and different send times).

Getresponse for example allows you to split test 5 messages against each other on all plans; and Mailchimp allows you to split test 3 or 8, depending on how expensive your plan is.

Campaign Monitor's split testing options are very basic in nature - only two variables can be tested against each other

So a 'could do better' for Campaign Monitor here.

---

White labelling

A feature which as far as I can tell is unique to Campaign Monitor amongst e-marketing products is its ‘White Label’ option.

This allows individuals or businesses to rebrand Campaign Monitor as their own e-marketing product and resell it at a price of their choosing above Campaign Monitor’s normal fees.

This is potentially good for the person or agency reselling Campaign Monitor, but a potential rip-off for anyone the white label version is sold on to, because they will simply be paying over the odds for an already expensive e-marketing tool.

I would prefer to see Campaign Monitor offer a more affiliate-based sort of approach to all this, where resellers are rewarded with a percentage of the monthly fee for each referral. Allowing agencies to rebrand Campaign Monitor is fine, but in my view it should be Campaign Monitor that coughs up for referrals onto new customers…not the customers.

---

Support

Campaign Monitor support is email-only on the 'Basic' and 'Unlimited' plans - you can get phone support too, but you'll have to be on a pay-through-the nose 'Premier' plan to avail of it.

My experience of their support team's responses to queries has been good, but the general situation compares negatively with some other providers - Getresponse and Aweber, for example, both provide a wider range of support options (with Getresponse providing email and chat support and Aweber offering phone support on all plans).

---

Conclusions / pros and cons of using Campaign Monitor

For me, Campaign Monitor's main strength lies in the quality, flexibility and robustness of its templates. They are beautiful and in my experience emails created with them never fail to display accurately in all major email clients.

Campaign Monitor is also an extremely easy product to use by comparison to some competing email marketing solutions. The interface is intuitive, and the marketing automation features are a joy to use.

As such Campaign Monitor represents a good option for businesses who are keen to ensure their brand is always faithfully reflected in their e-newsletters, and those who don't have too many in-house technical skills.

But with so many competing products out there which cost so much less to use, you have to ask yourself if these advantages are enough to justify some very high fees. 

Additionally, there are some holes in Campaign Monitor's functionality, especially where split testing and the ability to trigger user journeys by data import is concerned. Again, this makes you wonder about the pricing.

So the bottom line for me is that Campaign Monitor is a solid product with gorgeous templates and a great interface...that is sadly prohibitively expensive to use. As such I usually recommend an alternative.

---

Alternatives to Campaign Monitor

For me, there are two obvious alternatives to Campaign Monitor: Getresponse and Mailchimp.

Whilst their templates are not quite as attractive as Campaign Monitor's, and their interfaces not quite as slick, both are nonetheless pretty straightforward to use, come with a similar if not more comprehensive feature set. 

In Getresponse's case, you also get CRM and webinar functionality (which tie in well with the marketing automation features). And its data segmentation options are as flexible as Campaign Monitor's (you'll need to note that segments are called 'saved searches', however).

Crucially, both products are much cheaper and come with free trials / plans:

• Free trial of Getresponse
• Free trial of Mailchimp

---

Pros and cons of using Campaign Monitor

Pros of using Campaign Monitor

• Its interface is excellent and extremely easy to use.
• The templates are beautiful and robust — and faithfully reproduced in all major email clients.
• You can use certain web fonts in templates — you are not restricted to boring web-friendly fonts.
• The data segmentation options are great — you can send to or exclude multiple segments and lists in mailouts
• Its ‘Enlist’ app for iPad is a great way to collect data offline at events.
• The automation features are comprehensive and easy to use.

Cons of using Campaign Monitor

• It is VERY expensive by comparison to its competitors.
• Split testing is limited to 2 variants.
• There is no (proper) free trial.
• Its reporting functionality is fairly basic.
• Support is email-only on all but the most expensive plans.
• Although not exactly a ‘con’ (well, depending on how you read the word!), its white labelling option is rather sneaky – an affiliate program would be a fairer way to reward people for referrals.

---

Related articles

• Getresponse review
• Getresponse vs Mailchimp review
• Aweber review
• Mad Mimi review