Promoting a product or a service is an integral part of your marketing and with it of your business. Email marketing is one of the tools in your marketing toolbox that helps you send your product’s info, updates, and news about your business to your audience.
If you want to make a personal connection and engage more with your subscribers, all the while saving time, it’s time to start with email marketing. If you’re looking into a tool, you surely want it to be
- An easy to deal with tool
- With a ton of useful features
- Detailed and (hopefully) actionable reporting
- All the while not breaking the bank
If you’ve not noticed yet, these criteria can be contradictory at times. If it comes with a ton of features, most of the time it will also eat into your pockets. Or, if it’s easy to work with, it may not have that many features.
The email automation service Campayn gives you tools
- To design your emails in a snap, as it says itself
- To manage your lists
- To glean insight from your email analytics
- To capture contact details from the people who visit your site
- To follow up with your audience
All on a secure platform where the servers are located in Canada outside the Patriot Act jurisdiction area. And you can take it with you so that you can add contacts or study your analytics on the go. Sounds really good, so what’s the catch? Read on the find out if Campayn is for you.
Pros and cons of Campayn
Campayn is a marketing automation provider that you can use without prior knowledge – for all skill levels. Following industry standards, you can subscribe with a monthly fee and you access it via your browser. It has tools for you to build your signup forms and your emails as well as to manage your lists and put your followups on autopilot.
Pros
- Excellent price/quality ratio
- Forever free plan includes 500 contacts
- Import contacts from Gmail and Yahoo Mail without the detour via a csv file
- No credit card required at signup
- Everything is designed to be intuitive and easy to use
- Signup forms are included so you don’t need to hunt for another tool for your lead generation
Cons
- Complete automation suite only available in the highest tier
A little bit of background
In 2011, Campayn was founded by Alek Mirkovich and Nick Zinger. Since then, it has garnered customers such as Avon, NYC, and Mercedes-Benz.
Since it’s located in Toronto, Canada, it can provide superior privacy. Its data centres are outside the Patriot Act jurisdiction area.
Who is Campayn for?
Although Campayn focuses on SMEs, it’s also used by very large companies such as Airbnb, Avon, or Hyatt. So, if you’re looking for a flexible and comfortable way to design and send emails, Campayn is a good choice.
If you value privacy or have to comply with the EU GDPR, go with Campayn.
If you need to work across teams or departments to deep your campaigns, try Campayn.
Campayn user interface
Campayn was designed to be used by people of all skill levels. You see it in the signup process where you don’t need to open your wallet and hand over your credit card details. The signup process is also refreshingly simple and you don’t need to answer a ton of questions.
The ease of use is also reflected in the user interface. You’ll find its main navigation in the left side menu. Everything is well placed and clearly labelled without any obscure icons. Nothing is hidden behind endless menus and submenus. You’ll find your way within minutes and can get your task done with just a few clicks.
Even without the quick tour, you’ll find your way within minutes. The user interface is pleasingly clean and well structured. It’s well labelled and if you should find you don’t get the icons in the left side menu at first glance, just hover with your mouse over them.
Campaigns
You can either create a manual or an automated campaign. Manual campaigns are better suited for one-off mailings, for example for a newsletter and automated campaigns, jump to Automation.
If you want to send broadcast emails or newsletters, choose manual email. It’s easy to set up a one-off campaign. Start by choosing the template you want to use.
Give your campaign a name and then add your content to the chosen template. In your next step, determine your subject line and sender, and before you schedule your email, choose the contact list you want to use.
It’s easy to add content and to customise the chosen template with Campayn’s drag-and-drop editor. You can add pre-designed blocks, images, text fields, and other content to your email without a line of code. It’s just as easy to add merge fields to your email.
If you have web development skills, you can also upload your own custom HTML email.
Signup forms
Campayn calls signup forms Lead Gen Forms. You have for types of forms
- Hosted Form (aka landing page)
- Lightbox Form which will overlay on your site as a popup
- Website Form which you can embed anywhere that allows embedded code
- WordPress Form
Again, you can create a form within minutes. Similar to creating a campaign, it has the onscreen instructions and the same intuitive drag-and-drop editor.
List management, segmentation, and personalisation
Contacts are added to your lists by subscribing or when someone purchases something from within the past 12 months on your site. Of course, you can also import a csv file. That’s to be expected, but Campayn goes beyond: you can import it import your contacts directly from Gmail or Yahoo Mail (with a plugin). To weed out invalid emails so that your sender reputation stays high, Campayn verifies email addresses when you’re importing.
To send targeted and personalised mails, it’s a good idea to segment your list. You get segment with criteria such as email activity, gender, or device. Helpful is that you get contact level reporting.
Automation
You can set your campaigns on autopilot but only if you’re subscribed to Campayn’s highest account. Otherwise, you only have the option of sending an autoresponder. That is, an email can be triggered and then sent automatically. Campayn provides you with pre-built autoresponder templates but you can also design one from scratch. It’s practical that you can autoresponders directly within a list or a segment.
Campayn integrations
Out of the gates, Campayn integrates with popular social media such as Facebook and Pinterest. It also has an app store so that you can connect it to the services you’re using. If you want a custom integration, you can also use its API.
Campayn reporting
You see the email stats in your dashboard. Campayn tracks the “usual suspects” such as open rates and clickthroughs. You also get a report about the location of your subscribers and what devices they’re using, if you want to target by geography or optimise your content to the most used gadget.
The reports are generated in real time so that you can view campaign data as it comes in. Very interesting is that you get contact level reporting.
Support
Even if Campayn’s interface is pleasingly simple to use, you may still hit a block. Then, you can find answers in the searchable knowledgebase or contact the support team.
Reach out to the support team via email or its ticketing system. Campayn promises to answer within a few hours.
Pricing
Campayn bases its pricing structure on the number of contacts you have. Based on the contact numbers, it offers 3 plans. Basic and Unlimited are when you know you’re going to use it regularly. Then, you also can choose pay as you go when you don’t send emails regularly. It’s good to know that the credits never expire.
Is Campayn right for you?
If you’ve read through this whole Campayn review and you’re still undecided if it’s the right email marketing provider tool for you, then consider this:
- Do you want to do email marketing campaigns?
- And it has to be flexible, simple to use but also reliable?
- It also should be EU GDPR compliant?
- Do you also need a way to get the email address of visitors?
- And it should break the bank?
If you answered 3 or more times with a yes, try out Campayn. Moreover, it has very high reliability due to its anti-spam culture, double opt-in verification, and relationship with major internet service providers. And all this without any major niggles. Why not try it out risk-free and make use of its forever free plan for your first 500 contacts?
Original post here: Campayn review – flexible marketing automation
No comments:
Post a Comment