Campaigner

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 templates were relatively simple and easy to use. You receive an email send delivery notification and are notified if the email is unable to send. Manual lists are easy to upload from Excel files.

Inconvénients

It's difficult to use dynamic content, experiment with A/B testing and manage segments using our complex membership database. Several times, the site was down and the customer service reps could not provide ETAs for resolving the issue. The code has inline styles, limiting the degree of customization. It's difficult to drag and drop elements. Inserting photos is very difficult.

Avantages

If the platform actually worked like it was supposed to and customer support was actually there i could mention 24/7 support and great features but this has not been the case at all

Mailchimp and Mailigen both of which i reviewed are far far better bets

Inconvénients

Customer service is supposedly 24/7 but when i would go to chat with them online they were usually unavailable even during normal business hours. My dedicated account manager would not answer emails and when i had tech issues he would ant to schedule conference calls to give vague assurances even when the issues were specifically tech related and from their end. Also when i first signed up it took weeks to solve the issue which turned out to be related to a program many use (think like IOS) and they do not plan a fix anytime soon. So if you use this very popular sofgtwar you cannot use Campaigner on it for foreseeable future

Avantages

The reporting software is excellent. After analyzing the numbers after time, we have learned when is the best time to send, which formats work best, and it helped us optimize and improve the number of client opens, clicks, responses, and increase ticket sales. It works very well for that. We get more action from clients on a single email release then from all of our social media combined. It works well for us to increase our business.

Inconvénients

1. We don't like nor use ANY of the stock templates supplied, so we write our own code in an external HTML compiler. Their stock HTML compiler is OK, but becomes tedious and lacks features. So we write our emails in an external HTML compiler, and then paste it into Campaigner. Sometimes, after a test email, we need to make changes in the external compiler. Then we repaste it into Campaigner, for reasons unknown sometimes the formatting becomes corrupted, esp when using tables. It tends to add information that we did not supply.
2. We find the 'Save' command - should be simple - very confusing. Sometimes if we worked on an email for hours, and we want to send - there is a message asking if we want to send this version or the prior version that was not saved? We never know how to respond to that. Occasionally we have unknowingly sent out the wrong version.
3. Our old email software had a 'read more' feature, which was very convenient and functional. Campaigner does not supply this function.
4. The image library is very confusing. If we use an image in our email, we would expect it to be saved in the Image Library for future use. But it is not saved. We have learned to upload all of our images to the library in advance, otherwise there are always problems.
3. The uploading of new contacts often has problems occasionally. We go through the process, and nothing happens. Then we connect with customer service, and end up sending them the files via email for uploading.

Avantages

It is a simple-to-use solution that includes the essential feature for running email marketing campaigns and A/B testing. The media library is faultless and allows you to manage your data quickly. The email designs are well-designed and simple to modify. You may also submit your HTML-based email template. We can prioritize our follow-up by seeing who has opened the email and how often they have clicked the email we sent. This is amazing!

Inconvénients

I don't like the dashboard design, especially when navigating the menus and settings. By default, you will be sent back to the main menu and must use the arrow keys to navigate the various menus until you reach an item you want again. Additional information on what has been clicked and by whom would have been more beneficial. Alternatively, a record of each connection and their email behavior might be helpful.

Avantages

The reason I chose to use Campaigner over all of the other email marketing software companies is because it allowed me to have the option to fully design the email by writing code, but also gave me the ability to design the email using templates and other built in design tools.

Inconvénients

One thing that I would change is to make sending reoccurring emails to different lists easier. I find that I wind up copying previous emails just so I can assign a new list of recipients.

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

It is appealing the easy email builder and the choice of email design

Inconvénients

They take your card details and they carry on charging until you don’t change your card details. It’s not possible to cancel the subscription.

Avantages

I like the thought that was put into the little details such as, being able to put in a subject to any email link when linking to an image or text. I appreciate that because our Constant Contact account is very complicated when adding a subject to an email link.

Inconvénients

It's a little complicated to use. I've had multiple issues adding and changing minor things to the blast. Sometimes you add a photo and boom its huge and you have to get in there and minimize it; sometimes you have to minimize the width and not the length. It's not as user friendly as Constant contact. The functionality of constant contact is very straightforward and consistent. For example, if you need to add an image somewhere to your blast, just drag the image icon to the area of choice; if you want to add a button, then just drag the button to where you like. We currently use both CC and campaigner and had thought of switching to campaigner which is why we started testing it out but cannot because we are very busy and need to be able to move through setting things up quickly. That's the thing holding us back from switching.

Avantages

Being able to duplicate a previous SEND so I can update it easily instead of recreating. Report are easily viewed. Being able to set the time for the SEND. The ability to SEND a previous email only to those that didn't open the first time. I like the fact that I can see JUST the opt outs and the bounces - both hard and soft.

Inconvénients

Sometimes I want to have a picture to move to a certain spot in the 'page' but it won't go "dead centre" I would like to be able to edit a SENT product to be able to update a typo or date and then RESEND to those that didn't open. If I create a copy, I loose the means to only send to those that didn't open the original - if there is a way I would be interested to know.

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

I have used campaigner earlier for Email Marketing campaigns. Though it’s easy to use and set up but limited features. Workflow to send automated emails is one of the best features in this tool. You can create segments easily to send more targeted emails.

Inconvénients

Customer service is not that good, sometimes we also found issues during login. It also never worked well in all browsers. Price is also comparatively high If you compare other tools with similar features.

Avantages

I am familar with it and have been using it for years.

Inconvénients

I feel there are times where lists take a while to load, there are also some issues when a campaign gets in queue. This can have a significant impact on the business and we need them to go out on time. We feel if this problem continues we may have to look elsewhere.

Avantages

The interface is intuitive and easy to use, unlike others that I've tried. It has the right features for building campaigns and automation without being an overkill. The reporting is also comprehensive and straightforward.

Inconvénients

I had some trouble with the deliverability of my emails when I started. I contacted support and it seemed to help improve our open and click rates.

Alternatives envisagées 

Klaviyo

Pourquoi passer à Campaigner

Price and ease of use.

Avantages

I love the ease of adding leads
I love how I can save my emails in different categories with different themes, and find them super easy

Inconvénients

THat if there is a problem, the only way I know is when my account is temporarily locked out, instead of giving me a heads up with some stuff that can easily be fixed.

Avantages

This program was already in use when I joined the company and the learning curve was minimal. It has all the standard templates, contacts, and reports that you would need. Every time I have called customer service, they have been helpful.

Inconvénients

Working with the templates can be really finicky. It can be difficult to get it to do what you want at times. It is also not as user friendly as MailChimp, for instance. Their reporting is there but you have to do click more time to get to it and comparing email sends can be annoying the way it's laid out.

Avantages

more convenient than using internal email.

Inconvénients

Biggest issue is trying to re-subscribe members using the subscription forms. Our members tell us they want to receive our newsletters, but sometimes they inadvertently unsubscribe to Campaigner even though they tell us they want to receive our communications. When we send them the re-subscribe form, all users reported being taken to a payment request page. I contact Customer Support and they created a form for me; however, it had the same result. I unsubscribed a staff member to test it and they were redirected to a payment page as well when trying to re-subscribe. In the end Campaigner Support had to re-subscribe people for me. Now I have a mounting list of people who need to be re-subscribed and I cannot do it and the form I given them does not work. We are now looking for an in-house software option to avoid these issues.

Also have issues with the mandatory Campaigner branded footer displaying in the newsletter body overlapping our content when viewed on mobile devices (mainly Apple).

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

Very easy to import and export from our main client database

Inconvénients

experiencing many undelivered email due to one of the Campaigner servers having a "spam" label with several receiving client's servers... it should be taken off line or reassigned a new ip address....

Avantages

Plenty of features such as segmentation, list management, sign up forms, good reporting. Ability to use Campaigner because of Canadian servers complying with privacy legislation in British Columbia

Inconvénients

API integration needs improvement, account management (related to billing) requires even more improvement with prompt attention to inquiries and resolution of issues. Customer service could be more timely and provide better issue resolution experience.

Avantages

Simple to use. Its automation and autoresponder feature are what make it the best among its competitors. Another best feature of this software is its integration with social media.

Inconvénients

Poor customer support. They lack the responsive promptness even to make changes in the subscription plans.

Avantages

Campaigner has grown along with us, always updating itself. In the beginning we only used templates, but then we began learning how to use the editor—and found it to be very intuitive. We have a very high retention rate; we believe it’s due both to our customers’ loyalty but also to Campaigner’s low spam rate and easy user ability.

Inconvénients

In the early days of Campaigner, we’ve been with them awhile, it was a learning curve to become proficient with their built-in editor—mostly due to our lack of know-how.

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

Segmenting is easy. CASL Compliant. Very interesting webinar sessions are often offered. Adding Google Analytics tracking is built-in.

Inconvénients

The system is often very slow. The interface is not friendly. (compare to other engine that are using drag and drop and multiple layouts) The emails are not responsive. Even when we contact the company for a built ''on-measure'' template, the template is hard to use and not responsive.
The A/B testing often make the campaigns crash. This lead to campaigns that weren't sent properly and almost no response with the customer service on the week-ends (even on week days to be honest). Reports could be easier to consult and more detailed too.

Avantages

The one on one customer support is great. It's nice to have support for reporting, strategy and functionality questions.

Inconvénients

The platform itself is not the most user friendly. The toolbar at the top is dated - the icons aren't intuitive - and sometimes there are weird bugs (can't click to unbold text, font colors won't load, text won't align properly, etc.)

Avantages

Things are pretty intuitive. It’s easy to find what you’re looking for.

Inconvénients

It’s super buggy. There are always things going wrong with it. Hope that you don’t get an escalation because your issue will go into a black hole.

Avantages

Easy access to technical support when needed. Easy to send out

Inconvénients

Making sure that ALL people in data base are included in items sent out.

Would like to see some short cuts 8. Getting from one part of daily send out to another.

Size of photos. Would be good to have an edit that. Hard to resize the number of pixels In photo

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

I like that it will automatically send out emails every day to whomever is on my list(s) based on criteria.

Inconvénients

It took me a very long time (months) to learn how the software worked as I am just a small business owner and not a tech person.

Avantages

It's easy to send newsletter to many lists of people and see how many people opened your newsletter.

Inconvénients

In the past, I had lots of issues importing list of contacts into Campaigner. I had to split a list into multiple segments to make it work and ran into lots or errors.
This was really a turn down using Campaigner.

Working with pre-existing templates was also a problem. We had some newsletter created that we couldn't change when there was an update to the program.
To create a new template or newsletter is not very user friendly.

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

Easy to send as many emails as I need and reaching specific customer bases. I use this every day and have little to no problems. The issues I have had are resolved immediately with the help of their great customer service team.

Inconvénients

Occasional uploading issues which have been helped through with great customer service.

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

We have been using Campaigner for about a decade and it has been a reliable and user-friendly software. They have worked to keep the upgrading the functionality over the years.

Inconvénients

The reporting on clicks is very painful and manual. I'd really like to the ability to download a report that shows me who clicked on the campaign and the name of the link they clicked on with all the contact details. At the moment, we spend hours manually doing this.

Avantages

The ability to upload your mailing list was a great timesaver in creating our multiple structure of specific groups. In addition being able to see the analytics and figure out how to structure future mailouts

Inconvénients

It would be nice to be able to totally customize your template on your own, as sometimes you may want to change the layout and it's a hassle to contact the team to get it done.

Alternatives envisagées 

Constant Contact

Pourquoi passer à Campaigner

We are considered about privacy and are aware that the laws between Canada and U.S. differ, so preferred to go with a Canadian company and one that our institution already approves.

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

Campaigner's learning curve on the software isn't difficult and the data showing how many of our emails were opened have been the high points and enabled us to grow.

Inconvénients

Given that we have used other similar software, all with their unique faults, we don't have any that would need improving on Campaigner.

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

AB testing has been a plus for us. It is a good price point. The ease of use is good. Reporting and tracking are easy to use and comprehensive.

Inconvénients

There always seems to be a glitch with the software. Something is always in a state of needing to be addressed. The responsive design of the emails could use an improvement - experience issues where the email sent does not render well in mobile. Image formatting never seems to work properly.

Avantages

- efficient and easy to use Web User Interface
- flexible and customizible fields in addition to the standard fields set
- Restful API integrations with wide ranges of system coverage
- reports of email campaign's results

Inconvénients

- multiple accounts in a organizational level not able to share contacts data set

Avantages

For us, plain text emails are the most effective. So personal; they do not appear to be from a mass mailing. I'm so please that hyperlinks embed seamlessly in plain text.

Inconvénients

it's little glitchy when entering text. - line spacing too big or too small; difference between soft return and hard return. Looks ok in layout but changes when a test email is sent. Then the fiddling starts.

Alternatives envisagées 

Constant Contact

Pourquoi passer à Campaigner

Campaigner was easier to use.

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

Easy to use, good visual tools, reliable.

Inconvénients

Not always easy to determine how many prepaid emails are remaining
Setting up segments is not necessarily intuitive