Quick and beautiful email marketing campaigns
Campaign Monitor (CM) is our pick to create easy and beautiful email marketing campaigns. We’ve been using it for years, and we don’t plan on switching any time soon. Here are our top tips to help you make the most of Campaign Monitor:
1. Sign-Up to the Monthly Plan and Don’t do One-off Campaigns
Why? One of the most powerful tools CM has is its automation, which is only available on a plan. This will allow you to automate some of your email workflows letting CM do the heavy lifting for you and leaving you time to strategise and create more meaningful communication pieces for your customers. And plans are only $9 a month (at the time of writing). Totally worth it, if you ask us.
2. Use CM’s Templates
Yep, we said it. Here we are, fantasmagorical website developers working right here in our office, and we use Campaign Monitor templates! Why reinvent the wheel? Campaign Monitor tests all of their templates, and all of their templates are easily customisable. The key here is to modify the templates to suit your brand, and that’s where the true magic happens. Have a look at this example below: on the left is the CM template, and on the right is the branded Mettro version of the same template. Sweet, huh?
3. Be smart about the way you use your subscription
After using CM for a really long time, we’ve developed accounts not only for us, but also for a number of our clients. Most of these were using the pay as you go option. We have three entities we share the love on here: Mettro, Content Love and Raels Robertson. When we started doing automation we needed to sign up to the subscription plan and this meant we would have had to pay for each account … $27/month.
So what we did instead was combine our entities into one account because let’s face it they were all us anyway. We then setup individual templates for each of the entities under that account. Savings $18/month! And less accounts to manage.
4. Use their awesome support services
These guys produce some awesome content. Every few weeks we get a really concise email that has an article in there that answers a question, extends our knowledge or just plain floats our boat. So make sure you subscribe to their newsletter.
Before you tear your hair out jump on their website. Just like their newsletter, Campaign Monitor have a great website with easy to find information from tips and tricks to how to’s and design gallery. Check it out and get some inspiration.
If you can’t find the answer using the website or newsletter, use their support. CM would have to be by far one of the best on the internet as far as support goes. They are top notch! We tweet them, we get tweets back with answers. We email them, they answer promptly. So don’t sit there and sweat it out – ask for help!
5. Integration
CM integrates with loads of third party products including Salesforce… Integrating with third party products makes a difference to how you manage your contacts and workflows.
Check out the Campaign Monitor website for more information.
BTW. We do custom integrations for CM, we can do it for you. Just ask!
6. Get your tester list sorted from the get go
You do know you should test your emails BEFORE sending them right? Phew! Ok, now that we have that outta the way, my suggestion is to setup a test list from the get go. This test list should have all the people who will be testing your email/s as well as email addresses from different mail clients like Google mail for example. This is so you can test in these to ensure your email looks sweet. Top tip is to have a list with variables missing. For example, we do a lot of personalised emails Dear <firstname> . We purposely remove the firstname from someone in our test list so we can test how the email arrives if that field is blank. Check out this example below of where the field was obviously blank… not good hey?
7. Personalisation
We could talk for ages on this and no doubt our content controller aka Carolyn will be telling us we need to write a full post on this subject. Email is personal so you need to communicate with your audience personally be addressing them by their name.
Top tip: ask for their first name at sign up, if you are dealing with people like Drs say “Hi Dr Smith, don’t use their first name. ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS have a fallback. If there is no first name or any name the fallback should be graceful. eg. Hi there.