Campaigner

Avantages

Campaigner is easy to use, and doesn't require a lot of technical knowledge to get started (although it certainly helps). Their technical support team is fantastic, though, unlike most other SAAS. They actually have people you can talk to - and they are consistently awesome.

We use it mostly for email marketing. The reporting is great, and everything (except for the 'cons' below) is pretty intuitive.

Inconvénients

Campaigner is missing some critical functionalities that are becoming deal-breakers. Fairly simple things like integrations with Wordpress. One of the biggest gaps is the complete inability to easily create attractive sign-up forms for websites or popups. They have some templates - which are just, well, horrible.

Avantages

We use Campaigner exclusively for all support communications with about 300 subscribers to our Internet service at a large marina. We also use it for small business customers that we support with marketing and social media services. Easy to use and we have never had a complete failure.

Inconvénients

The system has all of the features that we need, but the only (minor) issue is occasional "lagging" of website response and occasional apparently incomplete copying of an email campaign - we copy a lot for the purpose of sending the same email to new subscribers as they sign up to our Internet service. Sometimes the "subject line" of an email doesn't want to copy and be recognized as present in the copy.

Avantages

It allows us to track current/updated information for our alumni. And, it has been useful in sending Alumni e-newsletters, and invites to other fundraising events.

Inconvénients

Our inability to auto load our alumni who sign up through our website.

Avantages

Campaigner is intuitive and easy to navigate. Our team primarily uses the platform for transactional emails and it does a good job meeting the demands.

Inconvénients

Enhanced data reporting & exporting options would be an improvement. More robust support documentation would also be beneficial.

Alternatives envisagées 

EmailOctopus et Mailgun

Avantages

No improvements since they purchased this from EZ Publishing

Inconvénients

Its compatibility with Dreamwaever is not very good

Avantages

There is nothing I liked about Campaigner as we were never able to use our account

Inconvénients

Nothing - we never got access to the account

Avantages

It's quick and easy to get started with Campaigner. It's relatively easy to use and the price is good comparable to other programs.

Inconvénients

Campaigner needs to improve the delivery rates and provide clear instructions on how to obtain the best delivery rates without getting tagged as spam. The reports should be improved to show something other than "no data." Either an email gets to the inbox or it doesn't. I need to know which. The contact filtering is a great feature but it constantly resets rather than returning to the last sorted list so it can be time-consuming when reviewing and editing contacts on a large scale. The editor is easy to use but the formatting in the final emails is often messed up and not as it was designed. Repeating the formatting to fix those issues is time-wasting and frustrating since it usually doesn't work.

Avantages

The price is probably why my company chose Campaigner.

Inconvénients

Campaigner is not really set up for agencies to manage multiple client accounts. It has improved a bit over the past couple years but still clunky in that I, as the manager of multiple clients, cannot use my email address as the contact for multiple "sub-accounts." I also cannot set up new sub-accounts; I must request this from support and wait for them to do it. We need to move faster than that at times.

Avantages

Nothing I can think of at this moment. You can see under "cons" what I really think of their product.

Inconvénients

1) They have terrible customer service. Most of their CS reps on the phone are rude, unfriendly and unhelpful. Their standard response is to tell you to look up one of their online training videos. They don't want to take the time to help with anything or answer any questions. This has been going on for two years. I just spent 20 minutes - yes 20 minutes - waiting for their online chat guy to answer a simple question: "I sent an email in earlier today - can you let me know if you'll respond by email or I need to check your message center, and about how long is your average response time." Yep, 20 minutes waiting for their customer service representative to answer that one simple question. I gave up and disconnected after prompting him multiple times.
2) Last year they accidentally unsubscribed almost all of my customer database - 10K names - and didn't tell me. Because of the nature of our emails, we didn't notice for about two months - what a disaster. They said "oh that happens," didn't apologize and did not give any type of credit. They did, however, restore the unsubscribes as they found the exact time they did it.
3) The platform is clunky and the searches and segmenting are difficult to use. They do not have an easy way to do a date range search for bounces, or other things.
4) We get conflicting answers when we call customer service.

In other words - it's a really really terrible platform with terrible people. We've been using ESPs for 14 years. We decided to use Campaigner about two years ago for our customer emailing only, based on someone's recommendation. It was a big mistake. Avoid at all costs.

Avantages

With the new block editor, Campaigner is light years ahead of what it was even a year ago. That said working with the block editor is not full proof. Fonts / spacing/bolding etc, may be different upon deployment that what is shown in the proof. TEST TEST TEST . And test on multiple devices because what you see on YOUR device(s) may not be what others see.

Inconvénients

Customer support is unhelpful for bugs, and they do come up, but not as often as they used to with the introduction of the new block editor. I think the Constant Contact is the competition and offers way better flow and experience, however if you MUST use a tool whose data is stored in Canada, then this product is ok, but not the best.

Avantages

We use it for simple email blasts to our neighborhood association. We don't use it for marketing campaigns, so therefore do not have the need for some of the functionality available with Campaigner. For our needs it works.

Inconvénients

Ease of use. It is not intuitive, and they haven't done any kind of software or GUI redesign since we started using it (6+ years ago).
Making a template should be a lot easier than it is: Creating and editing templates has a lot of old graphic (frames?) technology that makes for a frustrating experience when trying to line up text blocks with headers, footers and images.
Writing an email with attachments should be easier. Having to upload a file/image to the media library, and then importing it into your email is a lot of steps. Instead, allow a person to add a file/image to an email note in the same simple fashion as any other email client works: add a paper clip button and allow us to select the file to add to the note. That seems like it should have been done a long time ago.
Also, if you accidentally remove a person from an email list, you have to call up Campaigner support to get it fixed; you can't manually fix it yourself. Very annoying.

Avantages

I am a self-taught user; the software is something that can be figured out

Inconvénients

When asking specific questions to support, am directed to YouTube tutorials that are 1hr in length. I need quick direct answers. I also have questions on best practices and basics in segmentation etc... little advice or direction is provided.

Avantages

Simple is better, so that makes it easy for non-experienced users to learn.

Inconvénients

The email builder can be buggy sometimes, and I've found dynamic segments to be unreliable.

Avantages

The only redeeming feature of Campaigner is their sales team who are great at selling you a dream: deliverability experts, a dedicated account manager, a superior platform and deliverability. It's all promises up-front.

Inconvénients

All of the features they promised: support, deliverability, platform

Avantages

I like the look of the finished product. It is quite professional looking. And once I got the hang of how to build a newsletter, I really liked it.

Inconvénients

I found it difficult to learn how to best use the product. There tend to be spacing issues (usually too many spaces between articles) that I am unable to adjust and always have to call tech support to fix.

Alternatives envisagées 

Marketo Engage

Pourquoi choisir Campaigner 

It was before my time, but I believe we had no option, we had to evolve to the new version.

Pourquoi passer à Campaigner

Marketo is used by many at our university. I understand it is very user unfriendly with many glitches and problems. We do not have a large support team at the university to help with Marketo, so I hope to keep using Campaigner.

Avantages

Low entry to get started, very easy to use.

Inconvénients

It does everything I need, but I can see where it may not have ALL of the features of some of the more expensive products. But since I don't require them, I don't miss them, or the higher price tag.

Alternatives envisagées 

Constant Contact

Pourquoi passer à Campaigner

Better pricing for the feature set and number of list members.

Avantages

I like that we can set it and forget it. It keeps people in front of what we can offer them. They keep getting our contact information weekly.

Inconvénients

It would be amazing to be able to pick from a multitude of article titles before it went out to clients. Even tweaking the content monthly would be nice.

Avantages

Contact lists are logical. Easy to manage, somewhat.

Inconvénients

Lack of ability (back end API) to connect to our desktop CRM, no SMS ability, ability to send single emails to certain clients not there. A lot of our emails go to customers/clients' Spam/junk email folders. The full email campaign editor does not function like Microsoft word. When you hit <<ENTER>> it gives too many spaces or line breaks. It's not easy to manipulate a full blown email.

Avantages

Campaigner's feel and ease of use played a big role in moving our business email marketing away from the competition.

Inconvénients

The simple design of Campaigner seems to also translate into how the email themselves look like. Most likely, it is the "users" knowledge or lack of, that leaves our design lacking.

That is what I would like to see, "tricks", "tips", short video's teaching the "users" how to step up their game. IE How to make all photo's the same size or quick ways to clean your list and save. They have to be short and sweet and helpful INSTANTLY, uncomplicated.

Avantages

I prefer the full editor approach to creating our newsletter emails. It makes it easy to copy information from our website to the newsletter. The sending out of draft message is easy, as is the eventual scheduling of the newsletter.

Inconvénients

The count of our current mailing list is not displayed in a useful manner. I believe it is reporting the entire size of the list, not just the number of active subscribers. It makes our list appear much larger than it really is.

Avantages

I like how you can easily add the "openers" to any list. It's easy to export and import. I like that you can use the copy and paste feature to import smaller amount of records, so you don't have to create a csv file. I like the information given in the report.

Inconvénients

I wish there were more templates & plainer templates to choose from when creating a campaign. While creating a campaign, I wish it would show you in the ribbon what font you used and size, etc - just like Word. So this is the area that use some updates for my purposes.

Avantages

I love how easy it is to use. You can easily search to see if the contact email is already in your mailing lists. We are able to have multiple lists to serve our needs. I love how you can use the back button to go back to what you were working on.

Inconvénients

I dislike how sometimes you get an error stating that the attachment is too big, when in fact it is not. Often times, if you restart your email blast with the same attachment it will work, it is just a glitch in the system. But other than that, we are very pleased with the software.

Avantages

Have used Campaigner now for years. Switched from another email management program (and have used several). What we like most about Campaigner is that a higher percentage of our emails reach inboxes than with other major programs we've used. Plus, the support is responsive.

Inconvénients

Nothing really. Very happy with the software.

Avantages

Ease of process from start to finish. If you use a template and drag-and-drop, it's easy to set an email up and test it, add contacts, and send.

Inconvénients

Could use some more customization, sometimes I feel limited by the features. I also wish it was easier to take a previous email and duplicate it to make the next one, instead of making a template at the beginning of the design process.

Avantages

for my small business-publication company, Campaigner was very helpful in setting up a mechanism to stay in regular contact with my readership. the product was fairly easy to use; the support people were very helpful.

Inconvénients

never got into the analytics and trend reporting as much as I wanted to. This might have been a failure on my part as much as some shortcoming in how Campaigner analytics are used.