Campaign Monitor relaunches to bring enterprise personalization features to small businesses

Year after year, email consistently scores outsized ROI compared to other digital channels. Campaign Monitor’s stated 150,000+ paying customers in the hyper-competitive SMB email-service provider market is a testament to that.

The company has been growing month over month in the 10 years that it’s been around. This year, it’s relaunching with some major feature improvements — on the heels of a $250 million round from Insight Venture Partners.

Email ROI

One major reason email is so successful as a marketing channel is its inherent measurability. User A opens Email B and purchases Product C. That’s a tidy (and quantifiable) loop.

If only it were that easy. Email has also evolved to become a much more dynamic channel in the increasingly complex landscape of marketing tools. The problem is that we, as consumers, are being overwhelmed by marketing emails.

And, as it turns out, according to VB Insight’s newest report on email personalization, email is actually seeing a decline in click rates because people have increasingly less time and patience. Silverpop has found that more than 50 percent of people unsubscribe from email lists because they feel the content is irrelevant, too frequent, or both.

Personalized emails counter this trend.

The new VB Insight report shows how the majority of marketers successfully increased open rates and click-through rates (CTR) by employing some form of email personalization. This includes even the most basic personalization tactics, like name and subject heading — as well as more specialized personalization, like dynamic content and products.

I asked Campaign Monitor chief marketing officer Kraig Swensrud about how personalization applies to SMBs — with their limited budgets and level of customer data integration. “It’s obvious to most professional marketers that personalized and relevant email campaigns deliver better results,” Swensrud said, suggesting that personalization is the key to making the most of that budget.

“With the All-New Campaign Monitor we’ve added deep levels of personalization right into the email builder itself, and over every major section of content we now prompt the user with a “Who should see this?” button that guides them through the experience of personalizing that section.”

“Content personalization in Campaign Monitor is one of the particularly most-improved features,” Swensrud said. “For the past year we’ve focused on taking all of our personalization capability and bringing it directly into the email design experience. Subject line personalization, content personalization, dynamic image personalization, button personalization are features that all now live in the drag-and-drop editor, right in the context of creating the email campaign.”

Swensrud says Campaign Monitor’s drag-and-drop email design experience is the “world’s best.” Having taken dozens of briefings in the space, I’d be hard-pressed to argue that it’s not an excellent UI.

The all-new Campaign Monitor is generally available today. Pricing plans remain unchanged, with plans starting at $9 a month.