CM Commerce review: The good, the bad, and the ugly in 2024

CM Commerce, formerly known as Conversio, has joined the Marigold group of companies. It is now affiliated with the Campaign Monitor email platform. Both platforms share similar branding and complement each other in various functions.

CM Commerce is a marketing automation and email marketing platform primarily designed for ecommerce businesses. It’s known for its user-friendly interface, robust integration options, and intelligent marketing bot named ‘Maggie.’

Unsurprisingly, CM Commerce boasts a Shopify rating of 4.6 out of 5. However, is this a surefire indicator that it’s the ideal tool for your needs?

Not necessarily.

This post offers a detailed CM Commerce review to assist you in making an informed decision. You’ll discover its key features, pricing options, and how they compare to key competitors.

Let’s dive in.

Is the tool right for me?

CM Commerce receives acclaim for its user-friendliness and excellent customer support, making it an excellent choice for beginners in email marketing. Other CM Commerce benefits include its ecommerce-oriented features like reviews, shipping coupons, etc.

Let’s look at which businesses would find this tool most beneficial and which should explore other options.

CM Commerce proves to be an excellent email marketing tool, especially for those new to ecommerce. However, it does have its drawbacks. In the next section, we’ll assess several CM Commerce pros and cons across different features.

CM Commerce screenshots

CM Commerce features: An in-depth review

Email marketing tools in ecommerce enhance sales through automation, product recommendations, and cart reminders. They also aid in precise audience targeting, which increases engagement and customer loyalty.

This section will provide insights into the extent to which CM Commerce can accomplish these goals. However, before delving into the specifics, let’s briefly compare these features with its primary competitors.

Looking at the table, it’s evident that CM Commerce lacks several features compared to its rivals. For example, it doesn’t provide a landing page builder, unique coupon codes, or communication channels beyond email.

Now that we have a basic grasp of what the tool can do, let’s dive into a thorough CM Commerce review.

Ease of getting started ★★★★☆

Starting with CM Commerce is a breeze. The signup process involves a five-step setup where you customize your brand, update billing info, and set up features like cart abandonment and popups.

Here’s the cool part: CM Commerce adds a touch of gamification to the mix. For instance, activating a popup gives you two additional days for your trial period. It’s a clever way to keep users engaged and trying out features for longer.

Changing settings and getting familiar with the platform is just as easy. Everything is only a few clicks away. Although the main menu differs slightly from other platforms, we found it pretty intuitive.

You won’t be bombarded with questions during signup, which is nice.  However, you’ll need to verify your domain and sender’s email info before fully exploring newsletter functionality.

Building an email campaign ★★☆☆☆

Next, we’ll discuss the platform’s email builder. CM Commerce has a distinct approach in this area, which might confuse users.

Essential settings like the email subject line and preheader location are located in an unexpected place. Moreover, changing images or templates can be a bit of a puzzle. It took us some time to figure out exactly how to do it.

Finding templates is also a challenge; there are no visual templates ready. You’ll have to start from scratch or pick from its limited layouts. These are available for occasions such as:

• Sale
• Product launch
• Store news

Regarding branding, adding your logo is a straightforward process during the onboarding stage. However, we noticed an unusual limitation: you cannot modify or resize it within the email builder afterward.

Personalizing emails is possible, but again, it’s not easy.

On the plus side, the CM Commerce email builder provides unique features such as a reviews element. There are also shipping coupons, and “buy one get one,” and “refer to a friend” elements.

Overall, CM Commerce’s email builder could be more user-friendly. What’s worse, the email builder experienced crashes and displayed error messages during our exploration. 

Marketing automation ★★★☆☆

Automation is vital for ecommerce businesses as it streamlines operations, and scales with growth. The automation aspect of CM Commerce presents a mixed experience. While it offers essential functionality, it falls short in terms of user-friendliness.

CM Commerce provides a selection of pre-built templates tailored for various business scenarios. The good part is that all of these are copy-ready, meaning they can be launched out of the box.

Additionally, the platform includes a dedicated section for automation recipes and ideas. This offers users valuable guidance and inspiration.

CM Commerce also supports triggers and actions based on events like:

• New orders
• Cart recovery
• Subscriptions
• Coupon creation

For more flexibility, the platform offers controllers such as delays, various criteria-based splits, and stop actions.

On the flip side, CM Commerce marketing automation lacks a drag-and-drop interface, which some users may find less intuitive. Additionally, it doesn’t support integration with other channels like SMS within the workflow.

Signup forms and landing pages ★★★☆☆

In this section of the CM Commerce review, we’ll explore the tool’s list-building capabilities.

CM Commerce provides a limited selection of pre-built signup forms, offering only one suggested popup design and one embedded form option. While you can modify to these designs, your layout choices remain constrained.

It’s also disappointing that CM Commerce doesn’t offer landing pages.

Additionally, it’s worth noting that the form builder lacks a certain degree of user-friendliness. Certain settings can be a bit problematic, particularly when incorporating custom fields.

CM Commerce supports default opt-in email confirmation and subscriber preference pages. But we found room for improvement in terms of their intuitiveness.

Additionally, it’s important to note that signup forms don’t automatically appear in your store. You’ll need to add the snippet manually or integrate the CM Commerce slug into your Shopify theme. This can be straightforward for tech-savvy marketers but challenging for those not familiar with coding.

On the plus side, the tool does provide signup form performance analytics. This way, you can track impressions and conversions for each form. 

List management

Within CM Commerce, you can organize your subscribers through segments and lists. This provides a structured approach to managing your email contacts.

Additionally, CM Commerce makes it relatively straightforward to import your subscriber lists.

However, one notable absence is that of a tags functionality. This might limit your ability to create detailed audience segments, potentially challenging businesses with complex targeting needs.

Segmentation ★★★☆☆

Segmenting contacts helps businesses send personalized messages to specific groups. 

With CM Commerce, you can segment your lists based on the following:

• Number of orders placed
• Total spend
• Time elapsed since an order
• Specific product interactions
• Email engagement

Furthermore, you have the option to select from seven pre-defined audience segments categorized by engagement. These include:

• “At risk” repeat customers
• Active repeat customers
• First-time buyers
• Inactive repeat customers
• Potential buyers
• Prospects
• Repeat customers

While CM Commerce offers great segmentation options, some criteria are notably missing. For instance, users could benefit from segments targeting average order value, lifetime value, and abandoned cart data.

Analytics ★★★☆☆

Analyzing campaign performance and using data for decision-making is essential. Let’s explore how CM Commerce performs in this aspect.

The platform features a performance dashboard for your selected time period. It offers data on metrics such as:

• Total revenue
• Revenue from workflows
• Revenue from newsletters
• New subscriber counts
• Average product reviews (including star rating breakdowns)
• Overall customer experience ratings

You can also track performance metrics, including open rates, unsubscribe rates, and click-through rates. Furthermore, there are click map reports at your disposal. These highlight the most engaging sections in your newsletters or campaigns.

Despite these valuable insights, some features are missing. These include geolocation data, device-specific reports, comprehensive ecommerce insights, and real-time analytics.

Customer support ★★★★☆

CM Commerce offers two primary support channels: Email and live chat. These channels can be valuable for resolving queries, seeking guidance, or troubleshooting issues.

However, it’s worth noting that phone support isn’t available with CM Commerce. 

That said, CM Commerce provides a comprehensive help center. This resource is a repository of guides aimed at helping users utilize the platform effectively.

Moreover, there’s a training academy, a blog, and eBooks available to customers seeking additional assistance.

Integrations ★★★☆☆

CM Commerce has established robust integrations with ecommerce platforms such as Shopify, Bigcommerce, and WooCommerce. This allows users to effortlessly incorporate email marketing and automation into their ecommerce operations.

Apart from this, the range of integrations offered by CM Commerce is somewhat limited. You can browse them on its website, organized by categories, such as:

• Popups
• Loyalty reward programs
• Remarketing
• Search
• Notifications

Nevertheless, each of these categories contains only one or two available apps. This is a lot less than what most other email marketing platforms offer.

Compatibility with other marketing channels ★★☆☆☆

In addition to email marketing, CM Commerce needs better compatibility with other channels, such as SMS, and web push notifications. You can’t directly integrate these channels into your automated email campaigns to enhance your results.

There’s a built-in integration that permits the use of Facebook Lead ads. However, this feature is restricted to users on higher-tier paid plans.

CM Commerce pricing plans ★★★☆☆

While CM Commerce doesn’t offer a free plan, it does provide a 14-day free trial with access to essential features. Notably, CM Commerce has also gamified this trial experience. It offers additional trial days as rewards for specific actions taken during the onboarding process.

This provides a great opportunity to test the tool and experience its capabilities firsthand.

As for the paid plans, CM Commerce follows a tiered pricing model. This means that the cost varies depending on the number of contacts you want to email and the features you need.

Based on your needs, there are two plans you can pick from: Starter and Growth.

Here’s a pricing breakdown for CM Commerce’s paid plans, categorized by the number of subscribers.

Now, let’s evaluate how CM Commerce’s pricing stacks up against its competitors — Omnisend, Privy, and GetResponse.

CM Commerce offers competitive initial pricing. But as your contact list grows, the costs can escalate significantly.

This means that the tool is budget-friendly for small businesses or those with few subscribers. But for larger companies or for businesses with extensive contact lists, it’s pretty expensive.

The positive aspect is that the Growth plan allows for unlimited email sends, regardless of the subscriber count.

When examining the features, the other tools in the comparison offer a higher value proposition. Additionally, certain unique features in CM Commerce, such as product reviews, customer feedback surveys, and Facebook audience sync, are only available in its high-tier plan.

Furthermore, all the platforms listed in the table offer a free plan, while CM Commerce doesn’t provide this option.

CM Commerce competitors

This article has already discussed the key CM Commerce pros and cons.

In light of some of the tool’s shortcomings, it may not be the right tool for you. If you need a landing page builder, more integrations, or a cost-effective solution, consider exploring other options.

Here are our top three picks.

Omnisend

Omnisend stands out as a top ecommerce marketing platform, ideal for businesses of all sizes. It offers advanced features even in its lower-tier plan, making it a worthy alternative to CM Commerce.

Omnisend also provides robust analytics, gamification features, and advanced automation. As if that wasn’t enough, the platform offers one of the most generous free plans. Moreover, its award-winning customer support team is available to assist users 24/7.

Privy

Privy is another email marketing platform and a strong CM Commerce alternative, especially for list-building. It offers visually appealing forms with modern designs, including gamification features. Additionally, users often give high ratings to Privy’s email builder.

Unfortunately, similar to CM Commerce, Privy also falls short in terms of integrations. If this is a key factor driving your search for a CM Commerce alternative, you should explore other options.

GetResponse

If you want an alternative to CM Commerce that offers more than just email marketing, GetResponse is worth considering. Like Omnisend, GetResponse supports various additional channels such as SMS, push notifications, Facebook pixel, Google ads, and Facebook ads.

Moreover, GetResponse stands out as a highly comprehensive, user-friendly, and cost-effective tool. It offers an array of features and even provides a free plan for users with basic needs.

CM Commerce review: Wrap-up

CM Commerce is an email marketing tool that’s suitable for small ecommerce businesses. Yet, its compatibility with your unique needs and financial resources will dictate whether it fits your business well.

Additionally, when compared to similar tools, you’ll discover that you can obtain additional features and access various marketing channels at a comparable price.

For example, if you seek advanced ecommerce capabilities at an affordable price, Omnisend and GetResponse are great options. Additionally, Omnisend stands out with its exceptionally well-developed email+SMS communication, and top-notch customer support.

If your priority is crafting visually appealing emails, signup forms, and landing pages, Privy could be an excellent choice for you.

And for individuals who may be uncertain, there’s the option to sign up for a free plan or take advantage of a free trial. Investing in a tool only when you’re confident in its effectiveness is essential.

FAQs

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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.