26 Of The Best Campaign Management Tools
Campaign management tools are essential parts of campaign execution for teams and organizations around the world. Regardless of if you’re a small or large team, campaign management tools will make your day-to-day work much easier.
If your work intersects with the agency, marketing, or creative worlds (or you work in those fields), you know how complex and intricate the planning of campaigns can be. Campaigns are a group of actions taken to work towards a goal. For example, your brand could launch an advertising campaign papering New York City subways, with the goal of increased brand awareness. There would be many components to that campaign, including hiring and working with a creative agency to develop the actual ad, deciding on ad copy (text), defining your target audience and picking where you want it to run, or coordinating social media add extensions. Campaign management is the process of organizing all parts of said campaign.
What Is Campaign Management?
Campaign management is important because when you’re working on an upcoming campaign, it can be dizzying trying to balance and keep track of all of the necessary planning materials. Then, when you start working on the campaign itself, you’re inundated with creative assets, feedback, and deadlines. By the time the campaign actually goes live, you’ve spent countless hours trying to organize and streamline everything. It can be truly daunting.
Thankfully, there are a bounty of campaign management tools that can help you keep all of your materials in check, up your chance of project success, and assist you in executing a flawless campaign. We’ve broken down 25 of our favorite campaign management tools that fall into both the free and paid categories. We’ve also split the tools out into specific categories to make things a bit easier easier.
Email Tools
Email is an essential part of campaign marketing — if someone is subscribed to your email list, they’re either a loyal customer or are genuinely interested in learning more about your product. How you execute email marketing strategies or advertising campaigns are critical parts of your overall brand efforts. Below, we’ve rounded up some of our favorite campaign marketing tools that fall into the email category and can help you nail your next campaign.
1. Hubspot
Hubspot is a at the top of our campaign management tools list because it is used by thousands of companies. Their offerings are broad, but we really love Hubspot for their straightforward email marketing capabilities. With Hubspot’s email feature, you’re able to design custom emails with a drag-and-drop feature (which you can also get help on from a company like Mail Bakery) and send to a designated list of contacts.
With Hubspot’s email marketing, you can A/B test, include personalization in your emails, see how much revenue from your business is directly attributed to each specific email, and monitor tons of other analytics.
Cost: Hubspot has a set of free marketing tools for small teams, and prices start at $800 for larger teams who need a premium version of the software, which includes SEO and blog creation tools.
2. MailChimp
Similar to Hubspot, MailChimp is a drag-and-drop email editor that has email personalization, A/B testing, and device optimization. MailChimp also has a wide variety of templates you can use to build and design the email of your dreams. The pricing of MailChimp is what really differentiates it from HubSpot — the tool starts at $30 per month for 2,500 contacts, and scales up from there.
Cost: Free plan available for sends to under 2,000 contacts. Paid starts at $30 per user per month, no set-up fee.
3. Drip
If you’re in the eCommerce or DTC business, Drip is a great tool to on top of the campaign marketing tools list. The tool allows you to track exactly how someone has interacted with your brand through direct integrations to popular stores like Shopify, and use that data to inform what type of emails you send them. Their enhanced marketing automation and workflow split testing are valuable tools for brands of all sizes.
Cost: Free trial, accounts start at $49 per month
4. Constant Contact
Constant Contact is a great campaign management tool to use if you’re new to sending emails. The drag and drop features are insanely easy to use, which is why this is on our list for best campaign management tools. With Constant Contact, you can segment emails, utilize powerful list building tools, set up welcome emails, and send triggered email series. You can also use this tool to schedule social media posts.
Cost: Constant Contact starts at $20 per month.
5. Snovio
Snov.io is an all-in-one cold outreach automation platform that lets you take full control over your lead generation and sales organization processes, helping you to contact prospect you are interested in with a highly personalized message at a right time A wide choice of its tools and features, from email finding and verification to building complex email sequences, will enable you to streamline your outreach efforts and scale your business.
With Snov.io you can easily:
- Find single and bulk email addresses
- Check email lists for validity
- Send highly personalized triggered email messages
- Automate follow-ups
- Track engagement
- Research competitors, and many more.
Use this marketing and sales automation tool to fill the sales funnel way faster and reduce the campaign’s cost-per-lead.
Cost: Forever free plan. Paid plans start at $33/month.
6 . EmailOctopus
EmailOctopus is a really great choice if you want to focus purely on email campaign management. It comes with all the tools you need to create beautiful campaigns, including an easy-to-use email editor and a library of templates. Plus, there’s an automation feature for setting up time-based autoresponders like welcome emails and onboarding sequences. You can also segment your mailing list into groups using custom fields and recent campaign activity to send more targeted campaigns to the right people.
Cost: EmailOctopus offers a generous free plan for up to 2,500 subscribers with prices starting from just $24/month for larger lists.
Project Management Tools
Project management tools are absolutely crucial throughout the campaign planning process, and an addition to our campaign planning tools list. They provide a central hub for all assets, communication, approvals and documents to live in, and act like an archive for all completed tasks related to the project. If you’re feeling overwhelmed by your to-do list and want improved organization, we’d highly recommend looking into a project management tool for your team.
7. Hive
Hive is a comprehensive all-in-one project and campaign management tool — the only tool you need to open in the morning to get your work done. Hive takes project management to the next level with native chat, native email, over 1,000 integrations and flexible project views, which include Gantt, Kanban, calendar, portfolio and table view.
The building blocks of Hive are action cards, which exist inside of larger projects. Inside these action cards, teams can upload files, provide feedback with proofing and approvals, tag each other, or provide general commentary.
Teams at all-star companies like Starbucks, Uber, and Google work in Hive. Here you can learn more about the app’s full list of features.
Cost: Free 14-day trial, starts at $12 per user per month.
8. Trello
Trello is a great option for small teams or individuals looking to utilize a simple project management tool. The tool is Kanban board-based, which is a project management methodology started by an industrial engineer in the 40s. Cards are the basics of Trello, which you can organize into different phases on the board.
You can also color-code and attach images or files to the cards, and invite team members to collaborate on a board with you for a more interactive experience. One major negative with Trello is that each board only corresponds to one project, so if you want to create two bigger projects, you need to make two boards.
Cost: Free for basic, or $9.99 per user for Business Class monthly
9. Todoist
Todoist is one of the simplest productivity apps that allows you to group tasks together based on projects, and you can filter by tags, which you can color code.
A favorite Todoist feature is its “Karma.” Karma is basically its way of game-ifying productivity so you keep using the app. It assigns points to tasks you complete and other things you do in the app. View your Karma in the top, right-hand corner of your app.
Cost: Todoist is free for basic, personal accounts and supports up to 80 active projects and five people per project. The premium version, which offers extra features and more projects/people, is $28.99 per year.
10. Asana
Asana is a visually appealing project management tool created by one of Facebook’s founders, and easily ranks among the best project management tools. Used by creatives and teams all over the world, Asana’s dynamic format and design keeps users engaged and active in the platform. Asana helps people and teams increase overall accountability and improve communication.
Cost: Pricing starts at $10.99 per month when billed annually.
11. Casual
Casual is a unique project and campaign management tool that helps team visualize tasks and ideas into easy-to-understand workflows. This tool works well for people who are new to the project management scene and want a simple, visual tool. Some of Casual’s other features include sub-processes, templates, milestone measurement, and deliverable tracking.
Cost: Pricing starts at $9 a month for up to 2 users.
12. Quorum
Quorum is a campaigning tool built to help campaigns, NGOs, political parties, and unions organize their teams and actions on the ground. In other words, it helps them organize and engage their community of supporters. Quorum is also used by corporations planning to launch powerful and targeted campaigns locally or on the field and that wish to manage teams of local ambassadors.
The web platform and mobile app help push information and actions to local ambassadors, centralize the information collected by the ambassadors on the field and, for the most advanced campaign, target priority areas in the field based on geoprofile function in Quorum.
Cost: Free demo upon request, starts from $65/month.
13. Newoldstamp
Newoldstamp helps you promote your company using email signature marketing. Personalize calls-to-action in every email sent by your team to increase brand awareness and improve CTR rates. Your outreach can rise with this type of marketing, leading to more leads for the business as a whole!
When it comes to features, with the email Signatures Central Management, you have complete control over the company email signatures. You can request a custom generator that will be tailored to your requirements. Your signature marketing campaigns are fully branded and include features like centralized dashboard management.
Cost: The price of the package is based on how many employees you have, starting from $6.
CRM Tools
CRM (customer relationship management) tools are an essential part of every campaign and work as key campaign management tools — they’re ideal for maintaining the customer relationship throughout the campaign lifecycle. They also generally help keep the sales cycle running smoothly, which is important, since sales are usually the end goal of every campaign. Here are a few of our favorites.
14. Salesforce
Broadly speaking, this powerhouse company provides an array of CRM, marketing automation, and analytics tools. Before Salesforce was founded in 1999, companies often had to build their own CRM tools in-house which was expensive and time consuming.
Salesforce outsourced that process, and exists on a cloud that anyone can access. The tool is very customizable and can be used for many things, including tracking lifecycle leads and customer journeys throughout a campaign. Using a tool like Salesforce also helps address successes or any issues you’re running into during the campaign so you can make the necessary tweaks.
Cost: The cost of Salesforce starts at $25 per user per month for use by teams of 10, and goes up from there to $300 per user per month.
15. Streak
We like Streak as a CRM and campaign management tool because it’s front and center in your inbox — it actually brings your leads into your email and automatically captures data from emails. You can customize your flow however you want, or you could use one of the app’s “flavors” or templates.
On top of the CRM, you get email tracking, mail merge, reminders, scheduling, and many more features that makes it easy to plan and track the leads that have come through a campaign.
Cost: You can track up to 200 emails per month for free, or pay a premium of $49 or $99 per month for more features and usage.
16. Zoho
Zoho is another great web-based CRM option that is great for lead tracking, pipeline management, and purchase control. This tool automates sales tasks, including leads, prospects and account management, and also easily connects to Google Apps, MailChimp, Microsoft Outlook, and Quick Books.
Cost: Starts at $12 per user per month, and goes up to $35 per users per month.
Analytics Tools
If you’ve gone through the entire process of organizing and executing a campaign, it’s imperative that you utilize campaign management tools in the analytics bucket to measure success. There are thousands of different metrics you can use, so having a tool to help you parse through them all makes everything much easier. Below, find a few of our favorite campaign management tools that fall into the analytics category.
17. Google Analytics
Google Analytics is a basic marketing and analytics tool that is absolutely necessary for businesses who have a digital presence. After you’ve hooked your website up to Google Analytics, you can easily track visitors and parse in a variety of ways, including by if they’re new users, their source, and if they’ve made a purchase.
Custom dashboards are a great way to save views for individual campaigns.
Cost: Free, premium enterprise starting at $150,000
18. Acoustic
Acoustic is a great campaign management tool because it allows you to break down audience and program insights in an accessible and east-to-digest way. With their Acoustic Campaign offering, you can build out campaigns in the tool itself corresponding to a seasonal or quarterly launch. Plus, the in-app analytics make it easy to assess how well you’ve done and alter the program should you need.
Cost: Acoustic doesn’t list their prices publicly.
19. Domo
Domo is a comprehensive analytics and data visualization tool that can quickly provide valuable business insights. With this tool, you can connect data from over 1,000 sources and parse through a variety of apps that can be custom coded.
Think of Domo as Google Analytics on steroids — a fully customizable dashboard with all of your business’ data that can help you make informed campaign adjustments and decisions. Domo is also available for mobile, so you can garner insights on-the-go.
Cost: Pricing starts at $95 per user per month for 5 users.
20. Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a great tool for teams looking to get enhanced insight into how people are interacting with their website. With this tool, you can view heat maps of your website to see where people are clicking and how users are converting over time.
With Crazy Egg, you can test a 30 day trial by simply inputting your website and generating a quick heat map, which can help you understand the basics of how your website is functioning.
Cost: Crazy Egg’s basic version starts at $24 per month.
21. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a website analytics tool that is focused on event tracking, rather than page view tracking, which is what Google Analytics is based on. Events can be a range of things, including purchases, button click, or a video view. Aside from that major difference with Google Analytics, Mixpanel can also process data at an increased speed.
You can also use Mixpanel to build in-app customer messages and push notifications, which can be valuable if you’re mobile-app focused.
Cost: There’s a basic free version, and more advanced versions start at $89 per month.
Social Media Tools
Social media is an extremely important part of all marketing and advertising campaigns in the 21st century, and therefore many critical campaign management tools are social media-related. Apps like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are core parts of target audience’s lives and the perfect place to advertise to a variety of customers. Once you increase your brand’s presence on social, whether that is through advertising or native content on your social handles, using a tool to help makes the process much easier. Here are a few of our favorite social media tools for campaign execution and tracking.
22. Hootsuite
Image via RivalIQ.
Hootsuite is a social media marketing and management dashboard that helps you plan and schedule social posts across networks. It is one of the first tools to allow easy scheduling for social posts, which will save your social media manager tons of time.
This tool also provides clear post performance analytics that help your team dissect successes and failures, and plan for improved reach in the future.
Cost: Pricing starts at $29/month for 10 social profiles and one user, and goes up to $599 for up to 10 users.
23. Later
Later is an ideal tool for visual brands and storytellers, as it lets you plan out your social schedule across a visual board. It also helps you find and publish content from other users via hashtags, @mentions and posts, which is great if you’re trying to sprinkle in content from other creators in your feed. Later is easiest to use for Instagram, but you can also use it across other social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest.
Cost: $7.50 a month for solo users, and $16 a month for this “Plus” subscription.
24. Planoly
Planoly is a great tool for Instagram specifically, as it lets you visualize how a post will look in your feed. The app was created from a designer’s perspective, and is the first app for visual Instagram planning. With Planoly, you can schedule, auto-post and analyze content once it’s gone live.
Cost: Free for 1 user and up to 2 social profiles, paid versions start at $7 per user per month.
25. SproutSocial
Sprout Social Dashboard.
Sprout is another social media tool for content creation, distribution and performance measurement. With Sprout, not only can you draft and schedule posts, but you can also use the live activity updates to map out who on your team is working on specific posts.
Once your post is live, Sprout can help you analyze your performance and compare to other competitors in the same space.
Cost: Pricing starts at $99 per user per month for up to 5 social profiles.
26. Buffer
Buffer is a great social media app that lets you schedule and analyze posts across social media channels. With their scheduling and publishing tools, you can plan, collaborate on, and publish content across Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest all from a single dashboard.
With Buffer’s analytics tool you can view post performance across channels and glean insights on things like impressions, reach, followers, comments, likes and more. This is one of the many reasons it is one of our top campaign management tools.
Cost: Buffer’s Pro plan starts at $15 per month.
These are just a few of our favorite campaign management tools from several different phases and sections of the campaign planning and review processes. If you have any favorites that we didn’t include in this list, please leave them in the comments below!
This article originally appeared in Hive — the world's first democratically built productivity platform. Learn more at Hive.com.
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