Affordable Email Marketing With a Rebuilt Editor

Pros & Cons

• • Budget-friendly pricing
  • Well-designed dashboard
  • Convenient integration with Zoho services
  • Unified multi-channel reports
• • Novices may initially find the workflows challenging
  • A few key tools are gated behind the Professional tier
  • Some visually dated templates

Zoho Campaigns Specs

Zoho Campaigns starts free for 2,000 subscribers and runs from $4/month, with a rebuilt drag-and-drop editor that finally fixes its dated templates.

Zoho offers software for almost every business need, from customer relationship management (CRM) to project management. Its dedicated email marketing solution, Zoho Campaigns, is an affordable, user-friendly platform designed to build subscriber lists and craft outreach campaigns. With its modernized architecture, Zoho has fundamentally transformed the platform, addressing long-standing complaints by delivering a greatly overhauled campaign editor. Zoho still shines brightest when paired with Zoho CRM, but its flexible template libraries and deep e-commerce integrations make it a formidable standalone competitor. Although Mailchimp, an Editors’ Choice winner, excels in multichannel marketing, Zoho Campaigns’ low cost will appeal to cash-conscious SMBs across the Middle East.

Plans and Prices: A Low-Cost Way to Email and SMS Market

Zoho Campaigns’ plans begin with a Forever Free plan that allows up to 2,000 subscribers. This free version lets you send 6,000 emails per month and comes with basic email templates and signup forms. Beyond that, Zoho offers a flexible pay-as-you-go model alongside two main subscription tiers: Standard and Professional. With the pay-as-you-go plan, you buy email credits and then apply them to the emails you send, an approach also used by Mailchimp. It’s a convenient plan for smaller organizations looking to experiment with email marketing.

The Standard plan lets you send unlimited emails and offers basic segmentation, advanced email templates, and simple multi-step drag-and-drop autoresponders. Standard starts at $4 (around AED 15 / SAR 15) per month for 500 contacts and caps at $242 (around AED 889 / SAR 908) per month for 100,000 contacts. Professional is the high-end plan that includes all Free and Standard features, plus advanced segmentation, advanced drag-and-drop workflows, pop-up forms, batch sending, time zone sends, and optimal time sends. Professional plans start at $6 (around AED 22 / SAR 23) per month for 500 contacts, and climb to $1,380 (around AED 5,069 / SAR 5,176) per month for 500,000 contacts. You must contact Zoho Campaigns for contact lists larger than 500,000.

(Credit: Zoho/PCMag)

Like Klaviyo, Zoho Campaigns lets you purchase SMS campaigns as add-ons for both Standard and Professional plans. It operates on a credit system, with a handy pricing calculator that breaks down what you can expect to pay. For example, 1,000 SMS sent within the US costs 4,000 credits, which equals $13. Note, however, that SMS campaigns are restricted to the US, Canada, and India — a meaningful limitation for UAE and GCC marketers, who will need a separate SMS provider for local outreach. By comparison, Zoho Campaigns handily beats Mailchimp on email pricing. Zoho Campaigns’ 10,000-contact Professional plan costs less than $100 per month, whereas Mailchimp’s comparable tier costs roughly $135 more.

Dashboard, Templates, and Zoho Products

The Zoho Campaigns dashboard is where you’ll spend most of your time. From there, you can create a new campaign, build a contact list, and perform advanced functions such as A/B tests and surveys. You can also set up autoresponders and create signup forms so subscribers can opt into whatever email goodies your marketing campaign offers. Lastly, it’s where you manage account features, such as integrating your campaign with other Zoho products or inviting colleagues to join your account.

Zoho has a clean, easy-to-understand interface and convenient features that make it simple for new users to get started. For one, you can customize the dashboard to your individual needs. You also get drag-and-drop functionality for importing your marketing designs and more complex elements, like dynamic fields (fields that contain changeable information, such as a username).

The service offers a beefy selection of email templates and a host of autoresponders. While a significant portion of those templates looked dated, the rollout of the updated platform architecture has radically overhauled the email editor. The new drag-and-drop builder and modernized design layouts are a major step forward in visual design, but novice marketers should still expect a slight learning curve when navigating its deeper segments and workflow settings for the first time.

Over the last several years, online webinars have become a popular digital marketing tool. Zoho aims to meet that demand by integrating Campaigns more closely with its video conferencing product, Zoho Meeting. So now, you can conduct webinars in Meeting and promote the recorded webinars through email blasts in Zoho Campaigns. Zoho’s Topic Management feature lets you link topics to your mailing list, enabling you to target customers based on their interests. It also lets you build content marketing newsletters and even create event invitations in just one click.

Setting Up Your Zoho Campaigns Contact List

Getting started with email marketing usually begins with creating a contact list. In Zoho Campaigns, you can add contacts manually or import them from an Excel spreadsheet. If you’re trolling for new contacts, you can also let them sign upperty

Another way to import contacts is to sync with a customer relationship management (CRM) tool or other software you’ve connected to your Campaigns account. Yes, it’s easiest if the other product is Zoho CRM, but the company supports a long list of third-party integrations, including Salesforce, Shopify, and WooCommerce. If you’re marketing to an exclusive audience, you can also block contact additions unless you manually approve them.

I uploaded 50 contacts from a test CSV file and mapped the designated data points from the spreadsheet to the corresponding fields in Zoho Campaigns’ contact records. Zoho Campaigns had no trouble correctly implementing my custom fields (First Name, Last Name, Phone Number, Address, Email Address, and other data points) and importing all the contacts. The process was easy; I didn’t have much trouble picking it up, without hitting the help docs.

Building Your First Campaign

As mentioned, Zoho offers a bevy of email campaign templates and designs, including regular newsletters, A/B tests, survey campaigns, and e-commerce campaigns. To set up an email campaign, you enter your company name, address, and phone number, all of which will appear in the email’s footer to comply with anti-spam policies. Next, you give the campaign a name and subject line, then specify the sender’s name and email address, and the reply-to email address.

(Credit: Zoho/PCMag)

Zoho Campaigns takes extra steps to ensure you’re not tagged as a spammer. Rather than leaving you to guess your compliance standing, the platform prevents campaigns from being blasted until you complete full domain verification using custom SPF and DKIM authentication keys. It also keeps your account healthy by continuously checking your real-time complaint ratios and unsubscribe actions to prevent domain blacklisting.

You have three template varieties to work with: saved templates you’ve previously used, predesigned Templates you can create quickly, and Basic Templates that have not been populated with images or text so you can design an email from scratch. You can also personalize the address with the contacts’ first and last names. Here, you can also add Google Analytics(GA) tracking. You choose the email type (HTML and plain text, or one or the other) and template (import/upload, HTML editor, or import from the cloud) for the email design.

The visual builder and template editor remain easy to use. Help pop-ups conveniently explain what each icon does, so even new users won’t have a hard time navigating the tool. Overall, I found Zoho Campaigns’ email-building functionality to be on par with Mailchimp’s.

Focusing Your Campaign

Email creation categories include Business, Welcome, Thank You, New Year, Seasons, and Birthday. Campaign and email creation have been drastically streamlined in the latest update. While previous versions featured rigid buttons and clumsy text padding that often disrupted layouts, the modernized editor completely addresses these design headaches. Additionally, you can now bookmark and save specific blocks of an email to reuse seamlessly in future campaigns—a nice touch.

Zoho also introduced dynamic content criteria. This allows you to alternate images, text, and unique offers within a single email framework, automatically personalizing the message for clients based on their segment or purchase history. Unfortunately, it’s locked to the Professional tier.

Before you send your email campaign, you can preview it on multiple devices. I found it handy to scroll down to a virtual smartphone screen to check for any problems with how my email displayed.

The software provides helpful feedback about errors in your campaign content before you send it. For example, it warns about errors that may cause the email to be sent to a recipient’s spam folder. I received a warning about a Shop Now button with a link that led nowhere, saving us potential embarrassment. That’s important, since adding a call-to-action link is a key step in building and tracking your email campaign.

Like several competitors, Zoho Campaigns has autoresponders and the ability to create automated workflows around your emails. You can use these workflows to send follow-up emails to your customers at the right time based on their behaviors. For example, if someone receives your initial campaign email and makes a purchase, the system can automatically send them a “thank you” or “welcome to the family” message.

One operational note to keep in mind is that once a campaign begins its delivery queue, the content is locked from real-time changes. This is an industry-standard safety constraint seen across platforms, including Klaviyo or Mailchimp. If you do spot a last-minute error, Zoho Campaigns makes it easy to pause the broadcast, clone the layout, fix the error, and seamlessly target the remaining recipients.

Tracking Campaign Success

Once you’ve sent a campaign, you can track its success in the Email Campaigns or Reports tab. With the former, I could see all my campaigns, including drafts. With the latter, I could see sent campaigns and clear, visual metrics tracking my top five opened campaigns, top five clicked campaigns, and top five clicked URLs. That means your various managers can easily assess performance at a glance. During testing, Zoho tracked this data in near real time, so I actively monitored user engagement immediately after a send to gather insights.

Zoho Campaigns’ reporting is highly appealing because it offers a colorful report summary that clearly shows delivery, bounces, and unique opens. In fact, the analytics suite has received several welcome polishes since I last reviewed it. During testing, the platform provided deeper contact behavior tracking, including geolocation insights, device usage profiles, and visual click heat maps that revealed exactly how users interacted with my email layout. For teams running basic SMS text sequences alongside their emails, the dashboard cleanly displays standard outbound texting volume and success metrics alongside email data, keeping your primary communication channels clear and measurable.

(Credit: Zoho/PCMag)

On either tab, click the newsletter you want to track to see a color-coded bar chart showing opens (green), bounces (red), and unsent (light yellow) emails. Beneath that, you can see social sharing data, and underneath that, a map of where your contacts reside. On the right side, you can post your newsletter on Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter/X. Zoho Campaigns offers a lead-scoring feature to track subscriber and contact statuses.

Marketing Automation

A growing trend among email marketing solutions is the expansion into marketing automation. Zoho Campaigns also offers this and has vastly improved its capabilities to become more competitive. With its new capabilities, you’ll be able to include trigger-based workflows to onboard new contacts, re-engage lost contacts, retain new customers, and inform customers about current deals or offers.

Although it stops short of full omnichannel orchestration, Zoho Campaigns allows marketers to weave SMS touchpoints directly into their automated email flows. However, businesses seeking a complete end-to-end multi-channel strategy that natively integrates global WhatsApp touchpoints, landing pages, and lead scoring will need to upgrade to the more advanced Zoho Marketing Automation platform.

Help Documents and 24/7 Customer Service

Zoho Campaigns is not only a capable email marketing platform but also easy to pick up. Should you need assistance, there are user guides, email deliverability guidelines, FAQs, a blog, forums, feature updates, webinars, e-books, an application programming interface (API) guide, and videos. That’s a lot of helpful content, and it’s all searchable.

You can also submit a support ticket online or call Zoho’s toll-free number 24 hours a day, Monday through Friday (the latter is for paid customers only). Likewise, Mailchimp offers 24/7 live and email chat, but only weekday business-hours phone support for paid subscribers.

For SMBs across the UAE and Saudi Arabia weighing email marketing tools, Zoho Campaigns lands as a low-cost, capable option — particularly for teams already invested in the Zoho ecosystem. The rebuilt editor closes much of the gap with Mailchimp, though the SMS restriction to the US, Canada, and India remains a notable caveat for regional marketers who need local text outreach.

Final Thoughts

Zoho Campaigns Review: Affordable Email Marketing With a Rebuilt Editor

Zoho Campaigns delivers a modernized, fluid email editor, plus seamless integrations with Zoho’s other SMB software and third-party e-commerce, so you can build the toolset you need to meet your email marketing goals.