Zoho Campaigns Review 2022: Features, Pricing & More - The Motley Fool

Zoho Campaigns hasn't always been a force to be reckoned with when it comes to email marketing software, and it has yet to become a household name in the same way that Mailchimp and HubSpot Marketing Hub have.

But that could be about to change.

In 2018, parent company Zoho -- which also offers apps for customer relationship management (CRM), customer service, productivity, project management, and invoicing -- redesigned Zoho Campaigns and unveiled a host of new features, such as a drag-and-drop email editor and email templates.

The results have been impressive.

While Zoho Campaigns was previously held back by an outdated user interface and over-complicated workflows, it's now a user-friendly solution that can hold its own against the market leaders when it comes to its roster of features.

Who is Zoho Campaigns for?

Zoho's suite of products are normally aimed at small businesses, but given the robust nature of its feature set, Zoho Campaigns is suitable for any size business. Its 2018 redesign made it much easier and more intuitive to use with a more attractive user interface.

The learning curve is minimal for any email marketer, regardless of experience with this type of software.

Zoho Campaigns' features

Zoho Campaigns has a strong email editor, great autoresponder functionality, advanced segmentation, and detailed reports. This means you can create complex campaigns with highly tailored and personalized content.

Email editor

Zoho Campaigns has an excellent email editor. You can choose from basic templates to make a customized email or create your own highly customized emails from the HTML builder. Alternatively, you can reuse a template you've created or choose one of Zoho Campaigns' many fully designed email templates.

Its drag-and-drop email editor not only lets you add images, text, videos, buttons, tables, and HTML snippets, you can also change the layout and fully customize the design, as well as add polls, attachments, and calendar invites.

The advanced options allow you to add dynamic content, which enables you to display different content based on conditions such as the recipient being on a certain list or segment, or based on custom contact fields. You can apply multiple conditions to one email, meaning you can personalize every aspect of your email.

Zoho Campaigns allows you to add dynamic content to your email newsletters. Image source: Author

Once you've created the email, you can send test versions to up to five recipients, as well as preview how it looks on both mobile and desktop and by email client. Zoho Campaigns looks out for you and makes sure your emails are valid and compliant.

To ensure that your emails are technically correct and are more likely to end up in a recipient's inbox, Zoho Campaigns makes you send test versions of your first five emails and provides a reputation score based on its anti-spam criteria.

Contact management

When you're adding contacts to Zoho Campaigns, you can choose to add as many custom fields as you like based on the information that is important to you. For example, if you sell shoes, you might want to add a field to collect shoe sizes.

You can also choose the contact source, whether they came from a cold call, social media, a webinar, a trade show, etc. This helps you more effectively monitor the success of your campaigns.

When you add or import contacts, Zoho Campaigns prompts you to add these contacts to a list. You can create lists for any purpose, such as location, purchase history, or any custom field. Once you've created a list, you can then start to create segments based on a variety of different criteria, including:

• Demographic data such as age and location
• Contact source (social media, display ads, etc.)
• Subscribe date
• Last purchase date
• Purchase history

Zoho Campaigns also acts like a customer relationship management (CRM) system in terms of contact management as it gives you a customizable overview of the history of all interactions with your brand. This information includes:

• List membership
• Campaigns or autoresponders they have been sent
• Updates to their contact details
• Social media activity

Zoho Campaigns has CRM-style contact management functionality. Image source: Author

If you want to grow your email list, you can create a sign-up form and embed it on your website. You can either create your own or choose from one of Zoho Campaigns' many templates.

Autoresponders

Zoho Campaigns helps you create autoresponders by providing a series of templates based on your goal and target audience.

These automated series of emails can be triggered based on customer actions such as signing up for a list or not opening an email. You can base them on dates and time elapsed, or based around a season or event such as Thanksgiving. You can also send a sequence of emails to a specific group of contacts, such as customers who have made three purchases or spent a certain amount.

Zoho Campaigns provides templates to help you create autoresponders for specific goals. Image source: Author

Reports

With Zoho Campaigns, you can get reports on a per campaign or per list basis. This email marketing software gives you insight into and detailed analytics of all aspects of your lists, including list-specific data and campaign performance per list. This includes:

• Email opens per device, operating system, email client, and browser
• Unsubscribes
• Bounces
• Number of associated segments and forms

The campaign reports also give you detailed analytics about performance and insights into recently sent campaigns, the top five most successful campaigns you've sent, and monthly and yearly statistics. It's easy to compare campaigns side-by-side. The metrics you can track include:

• Opens (number and percentage)
• Clicks (number and percentage)
• Opens by location, device, and email client
• Performance over a certain period of time

While the reports are very detailed, they lack the revenue-driven metrics you can track with other email marketing software such as Mailchimp.

Zoho Campaigns' ease of use

Zoho Campaigns has a very modern and intuitive user interface that makes it a pleasure to use. When you first login to Zoho Campaigns, it displays a checklist of activities you should complete to create your first email campaign, and the list updates as you complete the tasks.

Getting started

The Zoho Campaigns technical team offers a personalized demo when you first sign up.

This helps you get started, find all the relevant features, and understand how you can make the software work for your specific needs. It also provides information about upcoming webinars to improve your email marketing skills.

User experience

Zoho Campaigns' user experience is on par with Mailchimp, which is our top-rated email marketing solution. It's easy to navigate, intuitive, and has well-organized navigation with drop down submenus that display further options. Moving through each step is a breeze and it never feels overwhelming.

You'll find helpful tips and explanations throughout the app, which are available as and when you are using a feature. Everything is where you would expect it to be, and a plus button appears at the top of the screen where you can quickly access common tasks without searching through the menus.

Zoho Campaigns' pricing

Zoho Campaigns offers a free plan, which allows you to send up to 12,000 emails per month to up to 2,000 subscribers. It also has three paid pricing plans, all of which provide good value for money, to fit all budgets.

Two of these plans -- Subscriber and Email -- are based on a monthly or yearly subscription, and one is based on the number of emails you send. The Email plan lacks some of the features of the Subscriber plan, including dynamic content and the ability to send polls as emails.

The Subscriber pricing plan starts at $5 for unlimited emails for up to 500 subscribers. The pricing then goes up as follows:

• 501 - 1,000 subscribers: $10 per month
• 1,001 - 2,500 subscribers: $25 per month
• 2,501 - 5,000 subscribers: $45 per month
• 5,001 - 6,000 subscribers: $50 per month

The Email pricing plans starts at $3 per month for up to 500 emails and then increases as follows:

• 501 - 1,000 emails: $5 per month
• 1,001 - 2,500 emails: $9 per month
• 2,501 - 3,000 emails: $10 per month
• 3,001 - 4,000 emails: $12 per month

The pay-per-email pricing plan, which doesn't include features such as dynamic content, design-up forms, and autoresponders, starts at $6 for up to 250 emails. The price then increases as follows:

• 500 emails: $12 in total (one-time payment, rather than per month)
• 1,000 emails: $22 in total
• 2,000 emails: $40 in total
• 5,000 emails: $80 in total
• 7,500 emails: $120 in total

Working with Zoho Campaigns support

The sticky help button takes you to a pop-up help center, with links to knowledgebase articles, as well as a 'request a demo' button, a link to the user forum for peer-to-peer support, user guides, and further support options.

Zoho Campaigns' sticky help button takes you to a help center with links to support options. Image source: Author

Zoho Campaigns doesn't provide live chat support, but it does offer email support and a callback service. It asks you to specify the urgency of your support request to ensure they provide the correct level and timeliness of reply.

Zoho Campaigns also displays its support email address and a toll-free phone number, which you can call 24 hours a day from Monday to Friday.

Benefits of Zoho Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns is a modern email marketing solution that lets you easily and quickly create complex campaigns and provides robust reports to help you optimize these campaigns. Its usability, attractive user interface, and strong roster of features make it a good choice for all email marketers, whatever level of experience you have.

The one to watch

While Zoho Campaigns hasn't gained the notoriety that goes with its chimp-based competitor, this email marketing software has what it takes to be a true pretender for its crown. Prior to its redesign in 2018, the solution was not very intuitive, which made it much harder to use. The features were (mostly) all there, but the user experience wasn't.

And Zoho Campaigns has something that Mailchimp doesn't: a whole family of apps from the same company that work together with no integrations necessary. Mailchimp had better watch its back, as Zoho Campaigns is coming for its crown.