Campaign Monitor
Email marketing platform with a strong drag-and-drop builder
What it does
Campaign Monitor is a designer-friendly email marketing platform now owned by Marigold (the company formerly known as CM Group / Selligent / Cheetah, formed by CM+SG+Emma consolidation). Its lane: drag-and-drop email builder that produces genuinely good-looking templates without hand-coding HTML, plus list segmentation, A/B tests, automations, and a Client Manager mode used by agencies to run branded campaigns for many clients under one account. Feels more like a brand tool than a data-heavy marketing automation platform.
Free tier
No
Starts at
$12/mo
Setup
easy
Key features
Integrates with
Shopify, Salesforce, WordPress, Zapier
Who this fits
- Designers and agencies who want visually strong emails without fighting a template editor
- Nonprofits and mission-driven brands that value editorial polish
- Small marketing teams (2-15) running newsletter and campaign work, not full lifecycle automation
- Agencies managing multiple clients (Client Manager mode is legitimately good)
- Publishers running content-driven email lists under 50k subscribers
Who it does NOT fit
- E-commerce brands running lifecycle flows tied to purchase behavior (Klaviyo wins outright)
- SaaS companies needing product-triggered emails and deep event data (Customer.io or HubSpot)
- Teams that want SMS, push, and multi-channel in one tool (Brevo or ActiveCampaign)
- Anyone chasing the cheapest per-subscriber option (AWeber, MailerLite, and Brevo all beat it as lists grow)
- Founders needing native forms + CRM + automations under one roof (ConvertKit, HubSpot, Brevo)
Pricing
Real gotchas
- **Cost-per-subscriber scales aggressively as lists grow past 50k**, with reviewers on TrustRadius and G2 noting the bill outpaces competitors like AWeber and Mailchimp at scale (TrustRadius Campaign Monitor pros/cons, 2025). Model the 100k-subscriber bill before committing.
- Marigold-era product roadmap is uncertain - Selligent and Emma live under the same parent, and Campaign Monitor has seen fewer major feature releases than Klaviyo or ActiveCampaign.
- Automation is meaningful but shallower than HubSpot or ActiveCampaign - conditional branching and true lifecycle flows are limited.
- No native SMS, no push, no landing page builder (or a very thin one) - single-channel email tool.
- Client Manager is Premier-tier and adds seats-per-client billing that surprises agencies.
Integrations that matter
Otto’s take on this tool
Recommend Campaign Monitor when: business_size is 2-15, use case is newsletter or content-driven email marketing, design quality matters (nonprofit, brand-forward, publisher, agency), and list is under 50k subscribers. Do NOT recommend for e-commerce (Klaviyo), for SaaS lifecycle (Customer.io, HubSpot), for teams needing SMS/multichannel (Brevo), or for anyone whose primary decision criterion is price at scale. Flag the Marigold parent-company situation so users know product velocity is slower than the challenger brands.
Affiliate disclosure: if you sign up through the link above, Ottomately may earn a referral commission at no cost to you. We only feature tools we have actually used or vetted through our recommendation engine.Partnership: Varies via PartnerStack via PartnerStack.
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