If you’re using Campaign Monitor and your emails feel a bit ho-hum, the issue is rarely the platform. Most accounts barely use what’s already sitting there. The Campaign Monitor tips below come from years of looking at email programs that work and ones that don’t. They apply whether you’re sending a monthly newsletter or running a properly segmented automation.
1. Pick the Right Plan Before You Pick a Template
The first decision that matters isn’t design. It’s which plan you’re on.
Campaign Monitor is an email marketing platform with three tiers. Lite, Essentials and Premier. The plan you pick determines whether you get automation, advanced segmentation, send-time optimisation, multi-user access and proper testing tools. Pricing scales with the size of your contact list, not just features, so it pays to think about both at the same time.
- Lite. Entry-level. Send volume capped (roughly five times your contact count per month). Limited automation. Fine for occasional sends to a small list. Not where you want to be if you’re serious.
- Essentials. Unlimited sends, full automation workflows, spam and inbox testing, time-zone sending, multi-user access. This is where most small businesses should sit.
- Premier. Adds advanced segmentation, send-time optimisation, predictive analytics and phone support. Worth it if you’re running data-driven campaigns or managing multiple brands.
Annual billing usually saves you around 10%. There’s a free trial. There’s also a sandbox account if you just want to test the interface before committing.
The mistake we see most? Businesses sticking with Lite for years, then wondering why their email program isn’t going anywhere. If you can’t run an automation, you’re doing manual work that should be automatic. Upgrade and reclaim the time.
2. Start With a Template, But Don’t Stop There
Templates are not a shortcut. They’re a starting point.
Campaign Monitor’s templates are tested across major email clients (Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Yahoo). They render properly on mobile. They handle the dark mode quirks Outlook still loves to throw at people. That’s real engineering you don’t have to redo.
What you do have to do is brand them properly.
A template out of the box screams “off-the-shelf email”. A template branded properly, with your typography, your logo treatment, your colour system and your tone of voice in the copy, looks like it was built for your business. Subscribers don’t consciously notice the difference. They just trust one and ignore the other.
When you’re customising:
- Set your brand colours in the template’s global settings, not on each block
- Replace placeholder fonts with your brand fonts (use safe web-fallbacks)
- Build a header and footer you can reuse across every campaign
- Save the modified template as a master, so you’re not redoing this every send
- Add a clear unsubscribe and physical address in the footer (it’s a legal requirement, not a nice-to-have)
Build it once. Reuse it forever.
3. Set Up a Proper Test List From Day One
Every Campaign Monitor account should have a dedicated test list before it sends a single campaign.
A good test list contains:
- Your own email and the email of anyone who proofs campaigns
- An address at each major email client (Gmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo, Apple iCloud)
- At least one mobile-only inbox check
- A test contact with the first name field empty, so you can see how your fallback behaves
- A test contact with an unusual character in the name (apostrophe, accent) to catch encoding issues
Why the empty-name test? Because “Hi ,” is what subscribers see when personalisation breaks. It tells them that an automated system sent the email, and nobody checked it. Catch it before they do.
On Essentials and Premier plans, Campaign Monitor includes inbox preview and spam testing tools. Use both before every important send. They’ll surface rendering issues you’d otherwise find out about from the one client who replies, “This looked weird on my phone.”
4. Use Personalisation, But Build the Fallback First
Personalisation works. “Hi Sarah” earns more engagement than “Hi there.” The data on this is consistent across studies and decades.
But personalisation only works when it works. The moment it breaks, with “Hi {firstname}” sent literally, or “Hi ,” with no name at all, you’ve shown the subscriber exactly how the sausage gets made.
Two rules to live by:
Always set a fallback. In Campaign Monitor, you can specify a default value when a custom field is empty. Use it. “Hi there,” “Hi friend,” or just “Hello” all work better than a blank space or a broken tag.
Ask for the right fields at signup. If you collect a first name, you can personalise greetings. If you collect a salutation (Dr, Mr, Ms, Mx) and a surname, you can write to professional audiences correctly. Decide what you need and ask for it on the form.
Don’t over-collect. Every extra field reduces signup rates. First name and email are usually enough.
5. Segment Before You Send
Sending the same email to your entire list is the single most common mistake in email marketing. It’s also the easiest one to fix.
Segmentation in Campaign Monitor lets you slice your list by:
- Engagement. Who opened your last three emails? Who hasn’t opened anything in six months?
- Behaviour. Who clicked a specific link or visited a specific page.
- Demographic data. Location, signup source, and custom fields you’ve collected.
- Lifecycle stage. New subscribers, active customers, and lapsed customers.
Two segments will outperform one blast almost every time. A welcome series to new subscribers and a re-engagement campaign to dormant ones will lift your numbers more than any subject line tweak.
A practical starting point. Build a “highly engaged” segment (opened in the last 90 days) and a “dormant” segment (no opens in 180+ days). Treat them differently. Send your dormant list less, and use it for win-back campaigns rather than your regular updates. This protects your deliverability. Sending to people who never open emails trains the major inboxes to mark you as spam.
6. Turn On Automation You’d Otherwise Send Manually
Three automations to set up first, in order of payoff:
Welcome series. Triggered when someone joins your list. Three to five emails over two weeks. Introduce who you are, what to expect, your best content, and your offer. Welcome emails consistently get the highest open rates of any email type.
Abandoned cart or abandoned form. If you sell online or have a high-value enquiry form, trigger a follow-up when someone bails out partway through. Even one well-timed reminder recovers a meaningful percentage.
Re-engagement. Triggered when a subscriber hasn’t opened anything for a set period. “We miss you, here’s what’s new” or a simple “are you still interested?” Either wins them back or cleans them off your list before they hurt your sender reputation.
Campaign Monitor’s visual automation builder makes these straightforward to set up. The biggest hurdle isn’t technical, it’s deciding what the emails should say. Draft them as you would any campaign, then plug them into the workflow.
For more on getting your full content engine working alongside automated email, see Mettro’s content marketing services.
7. Mind Your Deliverability Setup
The most beautifully designed email in the world is worthless if it lands in spam.
Three things to check before your next send:
SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication. These are DNS records that prove emails sent “from yourbusiness.com” actually came from your business. Campaign Monitor provides the values. You (or your developer) add them to your domain. Gmail and Yahoo now require DMARC for senders pushing more than 5,000 emails a day, and the major inboxes deprioritise unauthenticated mail across the board.
Sender reputation. This is the score the major inboxes assign to your sending domain based on engagement and complaints. You can’t see it directly, but you can protect it. Don’t send to lists you bought. Don’t email people who’ve been inactive for a year. Make unsubscribing easy, so people unsubscribe instead of marking as spam.
Bounces and complaints. Campaign Monitor handles most of this automatically, removing hard bounces and complaint addresses. But check your reports after each send. A bounce rate above 2% or a complaint rate above 0.1% is a warning sign.
If this part feels out of your depth, get help. Deliverability is one of those things that quietly destroys an email program over months, then suddenly nothing lands. For setup support, see Mettro’s email marketing service.
8. Connect Campaign Monitor to the Rest of Your Stack
An email platform that doesn’t talk to your other tools is a silo. Campaign Monitor has direct integrations with most of the platforms you’re likely already using.
The most useful for small businesses:
- WordPress. Pull signups from your site straight into your lists. Built and maintained by Campaign Monitor.
- Shopify. Sync customer data, purchase history, and abandonment events. Lets you trigger automations off actual buying behaviour.
- Salesforce. Connects your CRM and your email marketing so sales and marketing aren’t working off two different versions of the truth.
- HubSpot. Available through third-party connectors. Syncs contacts and engagement data both ways.
- Zapier. If a direct integration doesn’t exist, Zapier probably has it. Useful for connecting forms, signup widgets and niche CRMs.
The full integrations directory lives on Campaign Monitor’s website.
Which Campaign Monitor Tips Should You Tackle First?
Most accounts underperform for the same handful of reasons. The plan is too basic to give you useful features. The templates have never been properly branded. Personalisation is set up without fallbacks. Automation is off. The list is sent as one block instead of being segmented. Deliverability is unchecked.
If you’re going to do one thing this week, pick segmentation. It’s the change with the biggest immediate lift, it doesn’t require an upgrade, and it costs nothing but a clear head and an hour in the platform.
For more on getting the strategy right before you press send, see our piece on how to run email campaigns that actually work.
If you want help getting your email marketing properly set up, including strategy, templates, automation and deliverability, we can help.
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