Finding the right email marketing solution has become crucial for businesses aiming to thrive and succeed. With countless tools available, navigating the options and making an informed choice can be overwhelming.
This article reviews two popular email marketing software solutions: Campaign Monitor and MailerLite.
We’ll compare the key features side by side to provide you with valuable insights to determine which tool is the better fit for your business in 2023.
Campaign Monitor vs MailerLite: Quick overview
Both tools offer good features for all business types. However, they’re not specifically ecommerce focused.
MailerLite vs Campaign Monitor: which tool is right for you?
Let’s find out.
But before we get into a detailed feature-by-feature Campaign Monitor vs MailerLite comparison, here’s a quick review of the two compare.
Campaign Monitor vs MailerLite comparison: Feature by feature
Here’s a comprehensive Campaign Monitor vs MailerLite comparison of various features.
Ease of getting started
MailerLite offers a clear-cut and intuitive interface, making it a breeze to get started. Additionally, it provides instructions that beginners will find particularly helpful in getting started.
However, the signup process for MailerLite involves answering multiple questions. This can be slightly inconvenient if you simply want to test the platform before fully committing to it.
Campaign Monitor, on the other hand, follows a standard signup process without the need for a credit card upfront.
However, we found that using certain standard functions, such as creating new segments or signup forms, can be challenging without the help center.
Which one has an easy initial set-up, Campaign Monitor or MailerLite?
Both Campaign Monitor and MailerLite offer a simple and easy initial setup.
MailerLite, for instance, incorporates other items that make it easy to use. For example, its email verifier feature helps clean contact lists, improving deliverability rates.
Additionally, it allows users to sell digital products directly on the platform, providing added convenience for businesses looking to monetize their offerings.
MailerLite wins. Despite both platforms being straightforward for the most part, MailerLite’s ease of use positions it as the preferred option for beginner marketers.
Building an email campaign
You require a good email campaign builder to make your email campaigns visually appealing and well-performing.
In this Campaign Monitor vs MailerLite comparison, we’ll compare the capabilities of their respective email campaign builders. Here’s a quick comparison:
- There are 120 beautiful templates.
- There are 90+ modern templates available on paid plan.
- You can easily add personalized features to emails.
- You can add personalization features to emails, but it’s not very straightforward.
- Dynamic content blocks are available to use.
- Numerous content blocks to use out of the box, like timers, social media, surveys, products, etc.
- You can access your saved modules and editing history
- It automatically builds three emails for you using your store’s brand style.
- It allows sharing on Facebook and Twitter.
- You have the option to resend emails that are unopened.
- You can add social media posts directly to your email from Facebook and Twitter.
- Product listing element allows you to add products directly from your store.
Both Campaign Monitor and MailerLite offer intuitive email campaign builders with easy-to-use, drag-and-drop functionality.
Both platforms allow you to add your company’s brand elements easily.
With Campaign Monitor, you can lock sections of templates after adding your brand logo and style. This ensures your brand elements are replicated in future campaigns, saving you time and maintaining consistency.
Additionally, Campaign Monitor automatically generates three templates using your brand style from your store, providing a headstart in creating visually appealing campaigns.
MailerLite falls slightly short in this aspect. While you can upload your brand logo, colors, styles, and fonts in MailerLite, the tool doesn’t include them in future campaigns by default.
That means you may need to manually add them each time, which is quite inconvenient. Furthermore, access to the HTML editor is limited to higher-tier plans in MailerLite, potentially restricting customization options for users on lower-tier plans.
Both Campaign Monitor and MailerLite offer stunning templates that help you create modern-looking campaigns.
However, Campaign Monitor surpasses MailerLite in terms of template variety, providing 120 beautiful templates to choose from.
On the other hand, Mailerlite provides interactive elements that Campaign Monitor lacks.
Campaign Monitor takes the lead as it provides more templates than MailerLite and less plan-based restrictions.
Marketing automation
Email marketing automation enables you to engage customers effortlessly at every stage. For example, you can automate welcome emails to be sent automatically to customers who subscribe to your newsletter.
Both tools offer beginner-level marketing automation features. They differ in the level of sophistication and functionality.
Campaign Monitor offers a basic and user-friendly marketing automation feature. It provides a pre-built workflow specifically for welcome emails. You may also build custom automated campaigns.
However, Campaign Monitor has a limited list of triggers for automation emails, including subscribers joining the list, entries/exits for a segment, triggers with a date, and a few more.
It doesn’t allow the addition of other marketing channels to automation workflows. On the positive side, Campaign Monitor provides transactional emails, which can benefit small business owners.
MailerLite, on the other hand, provides 15 prebuilt templates for the most common business scenarios. It supports automated email campaigns, such as welcome series, abandoned cart series, order confirmations, cross-sells based on specific categories, etc.
Although Mailerlite lacks on-site behavior triggers, the rest of the offering seems to be quite decent.
MailerLite wins here as it provides more templates and more triggers to launch your custom workflows.
Signup forms and landing pages
Which tool offers the best signup forms and landing pages, Campaign Monitor or MailerLite?
Both platforms provide features to grow your contact list efficiently, but there are differences in customization options and functionality.
MailerLite offers many options for creating signup forms and landing pages. It provides over 40 visually appealing landing page templates you can choose from or build your own from scratch.
Additionally, MailerLite allows you to add interactive elements to your landing pages, such as:
- Countdown timers
- Scroll animations
- Quizzes
- Surveys
- Client testimonials
It also provides pre-built signup form templates and integrates with Stripe, enabling you to sell products directly from your landing pages.
Furthermore, MailerLite allows you to conduct A/B tests to optimize the performance of your forms and landing pages, while Campaign Monitor doesn’t.
Campaign Monitor offers more limited options for signup forms. It allows you to create a signup page, a simple popup, or embed the code onto your website to display a built-in form.
However, Campaign Monitor doesn’t provide landing pages. The signup page can be used as the simple landing page to collect subscribers. The forms offered by Campaign Monitor are basic, with only text and fields for entering information.
While they’re easy to customize in terms of font and button color, they lack advanced customization options. Also, Campaign Monitor doesn’t provide analytics specifically for signup form performance.
However, managing lists and segments is straightforward, and there’s an option to add the opt-in for multiple lists.
MailerLite emerges as the winner in this category due to its comprehensive features and greater flexibility in creating visually appealing and interactive forms and landing pages.
Segmentation
When comparing Campaign Monitor vs MailerLite in their segmentation capabilities, both platforms offer segmentation features with some limitations.
MailerLite provides basic segmentation options that allow you to categorize your customers based on the following:
- Email engagements
- Geographical location
- Subscription date, groups
- Time inactive
- Personal details.
The groups feature enables you to categorize contacts based on their location manually. However, MailerLite lacks advanced segmentation options based on:
- Onsite behavior
- Purchase behavior
- Lifetime value.
This limitation makes it less suitable for ecommerce businesses that require more advanced segmentation capabilities.
On the other hand, Campaign Monitor offers engagement segments, but only for users on their highest-tier plan. The segmentation options provided by Campaign Monitor are limited to:
- Subscriber details
- Custom fields (if available)
- Campaign activity.
Unfortunately, segmentation based on purchase behavior is missing, a significant limitation for businesses relying heavily on customer transaction data.
MailerLite wins. The fact that Campaign Monitor provides segmentation features only for users on the highest tier plan makes MailerLite a better option, which provides it for free. However, both platforms lack segmentation option for ecommerce businesses.
Analytics
MailerLite offers a comprehensive reporting dashboard with standard analytics features. Users can track the following:
- Email campaign activities
- Customer engagement
- Link tracking
- Click maps
- Open
- Bounce rates.
The visual presentation of data is simple and easy to interpret. Additionally, MailerLite allows for A/B testing on various elements of emails to optimize performance. This is a unique feature that few similar tools offer, giving MailerLite a distinct advantage over Campaign Monitor.
Advanced features, such as location-based reports and heatmaps, are available with the Pro plan. Integration with an ecommerce store provides basic ecommerce insights like revenue reports, purchases, and conversion rates.
Campaign Monitor, on the other hand, provides basic email campaign analytics, including opens, clicks, delivery rate, bounces, devices, and location. However, it lacks more advanced insights like revenue tracking and order numbers.
The analytics provided by Campaign Monitor is limited in scope compared to MailerLite. So, MailerLite wins
Customer support
Let’s find out which tool offers the best customer support. Here’s a quick comparison.
- 24/7 customer support for all paid users
- Available on the free plan for the first 30 days
- 24/7 email support for all paid plans
- Not available
- Available on the free plan for the first 30 days
- Unlimited chat support for the Advanced plan
- Phone support available for the highest-tier plan
- Not available
- Email Marketing Academy
- Help center
- Blog
- Webinars
- MailerLite Academy
- Help Center
- YouTube tutorials
- Knowledge base
- Blog
Both MailerLite and Campaign Monitor offer 24/7 email support for paid plan users. For free plan users, MailerLite offers support only for the first 30 days. This is a limitation as these users don’t have access to any support after 30 days.
Campaign Monitor lacks 24/7 chat support, which MailerLite offers. But MailerLite offers the chat support option only with the Advanced plan.
Unlike Campaign Monitor, MailerLite doesn’t offer phone support, even with its top-tier plans.
Both platforms offer tons of online learning resources and guides to help new customers use the platforms efficiently.
It’s a tie as both tools have certain limitations. MailerLite lacks phone support while Campaign Monitor lacks chat support.
Integrations
Campaign Monitor offers a decent list of 100+ integrations, including popular ecommerce stores, such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento.
It also integrates with CRM tools like Salesforce and CMS tools like Drupal. These integrations allow seamless data synchronization and automation between Campaign Monitor and these platforms.
On the other hand, MailerLite offers over 140 integrations. But it lacks native integrations with major ecommerce websites like Wix and OpenCart, which can be a drawback for ecommerce stores on those platforms.
Additionally, the available ecommerce integrations for MailerLite, such as Shopify, have received poor ratings in the Shopify App Store.
While both Campaign Monitor and MailerLite offer integrations with various tools and platforms, Campaign Monitor has a stronger presence in the ecommerce space. It has native integrations with popular platforms like Shopify.
This makes it great for businesses looking to integrate their email marketing platform with their ecommerce stores seamlessly.
Campaign Monitor takes the lead, as it offers seamless integration with ecommerce platforms.
Compatibility with other marketing channels
Campaign Monitor and MailerLite offer different options for compatibility with other marketing channels.
Unlike MailerLite, Campaign Monitor allows you to send SMS campaigns. This can be valuable to your omnichannel marketing strategy.
However, it’s worth noting that Campaign Monitor currently doesn’t have a standardized offering for SMS credits and pricing plans. Also, the SMS functionality is available only in the USA.
On the other hand, MailerLite focuses on Facebook retargeting as an additional marketing channel. With the Advanced plan, you can leverage Facebook retargeting to reach your contacts on the popular social media platform.
If SMS marketing is crucial to your strategy, Campaign Monitor provides the capability, albeit with limited availability and pricing.
But if Facebook retargeting aligns with your marketing goals, MailerLite is the better choice.
It’s a tie. You can choose either MailerLite or Campaign Monitor, based on your requirements.
Though, neither offers multiple marketing channels to help you run an omnichannel marketing campaign. For that, you’ll need tools like Omnisend that integrate SMS, email, and push notifications into seamless workflows.
Campaign Monitor vs MailerLite: Price comparison
When it comes to pricing, Campaign Monitor and MailerLite have distinct approaches. MailerLite is the more affordable option, offering scalable pricing plans for small businesses.
The availability of a free plan further enhances its appeal, providing beginner marketers with helpful features such as:
- 12,000 monthly emails
- Email automation,
- Basic reporting
- One website
- Ten landing pages
- Signup forms.
Conversely, Campaign Monitor is a relatively expensive email marketing tool. The tool has no free plan, but you can sign up for a 14-day free trial.
When it comes to paid plans, both tools offer tiered pricing based on the number of contacts. Both tools also offer a custom plan for enterprises and businesses with a large contact list of over 100,000 contacts.
Let’s quickly compare the paid plans of Campaign Monitor and MailerLite.
As evident, Campaign Monitor is the more expensive of the two, although they both offer similar features.
Regarding pricing, your choice of tool will depend on your business needs and budget. In terms of affordability, MailerLite is a more cost-effective option compared to Campaign Monitor.
For contact lists greater than 50,000, Campaign Monitor doesn’t provide any pricing information, while MailerLite offers transparent and affordable plans.
MailerLite’s pricing plans are transparent and straightforward. Therefore, MailerLite wins.
Summary: which one wins?
Campaign Monitor or MailerLite: Which is best for your business in 2023?
Here’s a quick recap of the Campaign Monitor vs Mailerlite comparison to help you answer that question.
3.6
3.9
1,000 subscribers – $29
5,000 subscribers – $49
10,000 subscribers – $89
50,000 subscribers – $299
1,000 subscribers – $10
5,000 subscribers – $32
10,000 subscribers – $54
50,000 subscribers – $239
- 14-day trial
- 12 000 email sends
- Unlimited audiences
- 1 website
- Up to 10 landing pages
- Unlimited popups
- Segmentation
- Limited automation features
- Full reporting
- Very easy to use
- Has simple navigation
- Beautiful email templates
- Real-time reporting analytics
- Nice and clear interface
- Good signup forms and landing pages
- Website building functionality
- Numerous professionally-designed email templates
- Better tracking and reporting capabilities
- Better price
- Lacks ecommerce insights
- No signup form templates
- They are relatively expensive for the features they offer
- Few integrations with ecommere platforms
- Strict new account approval process
- Lack of advanced reporting and automation features
- Solopreneurs,
- Bloggers
- Non-profit organizations
- Bloggers
- Solopreneurs
- Non-profit organizations
- Startups
- Email marketing beginners
- Ecommerce Businesses
- Ecommerce businesses
- Experienced marketers that wear many hats
Hopefully, this comparison between Campaign Monitor and MailerLite has provided valuable insights to help you choose the right platform based on your requirements.
Both tools cater to the core marketing needs of solopreneurs and small businesses, but they have distinct differences.
MailerLite stands out as an affordable and beginner-friendly option, making it a great platform for novice marketers. Additionally, it provides a user-friendly interface and a generous free plan, allowing users to get started with email marketing without significant financial investment.
On the other hand, Campaign Monitor is relatively expensive. Besides integration with some ecommerce stores, other Campaign Monitor features are just basic.
Some of the Campaign Monitor’s features aren’t worth the price and this makes MailerLite a clear winner.
For ecommerce businesses, however, both tools lack essential features. So if you run an online store and want a tool that can integrate seamlessly with your ecommerce platforms, opt for Klaviyo or Omnisend.
Read full reviews
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Our team strives to be accurate and unbiased in reviewing email tools. However, we recognize that mistakes can happen, and it’s essential for us to stay up to date. If you come across any errors or things that need to be reviewed again, please let us know.