Disclaimer: Thank you to Campaign Monitor who sponsored this post and provided me with 1 month trial membership in order to review their website and services
Email lists for blogs: it has always been something I sign up for but was always unsure about utilizing for myself.
The idea of it intimidated me. Every email list I signed up for seemed to just be bleeding over with content, never missing a beat, sometimes to the point of an overwhelming amount of information showing up in my inbox on a daily basis.
How did they come up with all this stuff? How can they manage to write a new email to us on a regular basis? Where do these bloggers find the time?
Providing regular blog content was time-consuming enough for me. There was always so much to write about and yet, so little time. I didn’t believe I had it in me to also concoct a new email for every new post, holiday, or month that passed. The thought exhausted me and I refused to consider it.
Campaign Monitor showed me how wrong I was.
Campaign Monitor: Basic Plan
Training Videos
Before I even begin to dive into the system and its services, I’m going to skip right over to the training videos. Being new to all this, Campaign Monitor utilised its own services and kept me updated via email on how to begin my new life with an email marketing plan.
As one of their customers, they made sure I knew where to find all the help I needed. My favourite part was that they arranged it in a simple timeline on the right-hand side, which made it easy to know what my next step was.
Even a millennial like me can feel uncomfortable in a new environment online and the setup at Campaign Monitor really helped me feel as if they were holding my hand along the whole way.
Lists & Subscribers
As the name suggests, this is a list of your subscribers. There is a master list and it can further be broken down into as many different boxes as you like. These are called “segments.”
Your segments can be split up in a seemingly infinite amount of ways, depending on what data you have on your subscribers. You can create segments by age group, location, favourite syrup… If you gave them the option to give you this information, you will be able to group them according to it.
This will help you target your emails to the appropriate customers.
Campaign
A Campaign is a one-off email sent for a specific promotion. This can be sent immediately or scheduled for a future date.
I would say this is best used for one-shot promos and specials happening around holidays or anniversaries. Think of instances like a 4th of July sale, Black Friday, a one-time special to celebrate 100K subscribers, etc.
The email can be designed from scratch or customised from the many templates provided by Campaign Monitor. They have plenty to choose from and it’s easy to brand it to your own!
What I love best about this is that you can set up a full year (and maybe more) of promotional codes, discounts, and specials scheduled to be sent out at the appropriate date leaving you with fewer tasks to worry about, especially during those busy, high-stress holidays.
This can particularly be useful for evergreen content/products that you can cycle every year.
For examples of evergreen content that I could reuse each year, here are my Valentine’s Day mishaps!
Automation
Automations are where you create “Journeys” for your subscribers. These are preset paths that your subscriber will follow with your emails.
If you are stumped on how to begin, Campaign Monitor also provides suggested Journeys to help you get started.
For example, since my website is a small travel & personal blog, I have set up my first Journey to follow these steps:
- Once a new subscriber signs up, they will immediately receive a thank you email with a quick introduction to what they can expect out of my website and how it can benefit them to read my blog posts.
- After a couple of days, an email of my most recent blog post will be sent, along with blurbs and links to my Top 3 most popular blog posts
. On the 7th day, a special offer will be sent for a discount code for one of my travel planning documents or services.
Learn more about the other side of this blog on The
Fobulous Life ofthatdamnhoney here .
The Campaign Monitor system will walk you through steps, allowing you to create responses, time delays before a follow-up email is sent out, and a variety of other factors to give you detailed control over your campaign.
The beauty I find in this is the ability to keep in regular contact with your subscribers. Never will I feel like I disappeared for 3 months only to bombard them with updates on a particularly productive quarter. These automations help you build a relationship with your subscriber as you create new content for them to come back for.
Things I would request:
I would appreciate being given some options of generic templates for the opt-in disclaimer at the bottom of the emails. For someone like me who is new to all this, it would save me some time and debate over researching if I need to write my own, if there is a generally acceptable template that would cover my bases, or if simply copying something online is safe and recommended for this part.
In relation to the above, I would really like an added ability to turn it into a branded template to the header and footer that I could choose to automatically implement to all mailers going out. Consistency is key to branding and sometimes, even we get our own branding wrong. Being able to create a template helps a lot!
Transactional
Much like the Campaign content, these seem to be a one-off email with the difference that it is triggered by an action from the subscriber. Some examples of this would be signing up for the mailing list, adding items to their cart, or making a purchase. This would be the follow-up email to those events.
This will involve some coding on your end, even if it’s just copied and pasted. You’ll need to add code somewhere, so check with your hosting provider to see if they can provide assistance with
Insights
Did the person open the email, but not the links?
Were there click-throughs, but no purchase?
Was there a successful purchase that may warrant a follow-up discount code for a future buy?
You’ll get all this information and more in this section, allowing you to figure out what’s working, what isn’t, and improving your marketing game as you progress.
Apps
I personally did not utilise this tool, but it does allow for integration into all sorts of websites. From WordPress to Shopify and Google Analytics, you can get all these data to speak to each other.
However, in keeping with an honest review, installing the plugin to WordPress made me nervous. While it was noted that the plugin was upgraded and improved, encouraging users to update their plugin ASAP, the rating for the app was very low and the reviews did not seem promising.
Some people mentioned that their website’s functionality was impacted by the problems of the plugin and I didn’t want to risk that.
It was the one negative I found in my whole experience with Campaign Monitor, so I’m hopeful that they have or will continue to fix the issues. Clearly, they have a lot of users who believe in the company but have an isolated disappointed with the plugin.
Final Thoughts
I love that Campaign Monitor really puts you in a fill-out-the-form, drag-and-drop environment to help ease the tension of learning not just a system, a program, and a service – but effectively walks an entrepreneur through yet another hat he/she will need to wear for their business.
Learning how to be yet another complete department in order to run your business can be overwhelming, but with the services of Campaign Monitor, I was able to learn a good chunk of what information I should be seeking to share with my subscribers, how I should be presenting it, and how to use my critical thinking skills to find an implement a reasoning behind the emails you send to your subscribers.
Campaign Monitor also helped me get excited about the business side of blogging again. As I tested out features, watched the tutorials, and learned about email marketing, I slowly started to build a sense of pride with the Campaigns, Journeys, and Transactional emails I was building up.
Honestly, after my sponsored month of usage is up, I find it very likely that I will continue to subscribe to Campaign Monitor on my own dime. I do recommend the company and the system because of their helpfulness and ease of use. Also, for $9/month, they are at a very affordable price for a small blog.
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