Campaigner Review

What Is Campaigner?

Campaigner is one of the top email marketing platforms with SMS features. It has a rich feature set that lays emphasis on content personalization and sender reputation protection. It has a bevy of content editors and an advanced workflow builder.

With this brand’s ever-evolving toolset, you can stay engaged with leads throughout their journeys to drive conversion and boost retention.

Headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario, Campaigner has been around since 1999. Over the past two decades, it has powered the email marketing engines of 120,000+ businesses, including Fortune 500 companies.

As a testament to its commitment to customer support, it has been a recipient of multiple Stevie Awards.

Despite this product’s great track record, the 500+ Campaigner reviews across G2 and Capterra are spotty. The platform’s average rating is only 3.6–3.9 stars.

Campaigner Features

Let’s explore what Campaigner has and what it can do:

Landing Pages

This platform has a landing page builder to help you create compelling content that inspires subscription. It enables you to edit any existing text you published on the Web or from a document you import.

If you’re tech-savvy enough, you can use Campaigner’s HTML editor to build your landing pages from scratch using your code. More on this tool later.

Signup Forms

With Campaigner’s pre-designed and totally customizable raw HTML forms, you can obtain permission-based contacts.

These forms lend themselves to custom fields and are embeddable on your web pages and landing pages. When strategically displayed, they can effectively generate leads.

Forward-to-a-Friend Forms

If you believe in the power of word of mouth, then turn your subscribers into brand advocates. These forms make it painless to forward content to their friends and family, essentially recommending you to their circles.

Subscription Self-Management

If you choose email marketing software, you can empower your subscribers to manage their details.

This means they’ll be able to replace their email addresses, update their contact info, change their mailing preferences, and more. Giving them these options may discourage them from unsubscribing when they receive content from you that they dislike.

Segmentation

Campaigner has a powerful email and SMS segmentation tool capable of grouping your contacts in complex ways.

It lets you segment your prospects and paying customers based on activity and demographic data. Advanced segmentation options include purchase behavior and geolocation information.

Through static segment sampling, you can manually add new members based on existing contact lists.

Reputation Defender

If you buy this add-on, you can harness Campaigner’s proprietary email verification tech to keep your contact lists clean. Reputation Defender will routinely check your records and proactively remove the dodgy addresses it finds.

By eliminating the bad apples, this emailing tool can safeguard your sender reputation. The more trustworthy you are, the higher your deliverability and the better your campaigns’ performance will be.

Considering the cost of repairing your brand’s sending credibility, paying extra for this capability may be worth it.

Drag and Drop Editor

With this tool, you can easily edit 900+ pre-built email designs to deliver your message in no time.

Campaigner has more HTML templates than AWeber, which already has a larger library than many email marketing automation vendors.

Apart from coming with different layout options, each mobile-friendly. Campaigner template accepts the addition of branding elements like a logo.

If you prefer to compose something from scratch, you can use this editor as a word processor. It has decent formatting features, allowing you to create unique drafts.

Full Email Editor

If you have coding experience, you can leverage this tool to send more impressive emails. All you need is to copy-paste any template’s HTML version to it and then you can tweak it. You can add an RSS feed, too.

Media Library

Using this email campaign software, you can add digital assets to introduce attention-grabbing visuals into your content. It supports images and PDF files, which you can organize with folders, copy, rename, delete, and more.

Campaigner has an image editor too. Without needing any third-party software, this tool lets you customize your assets while staying in your email creation workflow.

As a host, the company has a content delivery network. It makes it possible to load email media fast, regardless of the recipient’s location.

Articles

In Campaigner, you can craft and save email elements like headers, footers, and social toolbars to your library. This way, they’re available on tap for future use.

These content blocks are reusable across email campaigns and sub-accounts. That’s why they help reduce content editing time and keep it consistently on-brand.

Dynamic Content

If you maximize Campaigner’s segmentation prowess, you’ll be able to group contacts at a granular level.

In turn, you’d be able to precisely profile them according to their preferences and present the content they want to see.

Conditional Content

Using custom fields, you can send correct Campaigner email and SMS versions as a response to subscriber actions.

Context matters. So, it’s important to deliver content with appropriate messages and calls to action, among others, to tally an open rate better than your industry’s average.

Localization

If you have an ethnically diverse clientele, Campaigner can help you display forms and send your messages in different languages. The company offers full international character support, so expect to meaningfully engage with your contacts in their native tongues.

Recurring and Triggered Campaigns

Campaigner’s email and SMS marketing automation workflow builder is big on advanced time conditions. This means you can launch campaigns based on multiple time-based restrictions and granular delays.

Moreover, this tool has a host of triggers and conditions. It gives you free rein over the logic of your workflows. So, you can time your messages based on various actions and achieve maximum delivery, open, and click-through rates.

This dual-channel tool guarantees simultaneous message delivery across both mediums, but you can go with email or SMS only. And you can also switch between the two seamlessly, depending on your custom automation rules, interactions, and events.

Autoresponders

This business email marketing software can help you strike while the iron is hot.

Campaigner’s autoresponders can be action-based, recurring, and personalized. You can take advantage of them to pique the interest of your new subscribers. After joining your mailing list, they’re more likely in the mood to engage.

By integrating this platform with your customer support ticketing systems, you can send autoresponders to offer status changes. This strategy can help reduce support latency, which can delight your contacts.

A/B Testing

This automated email marketing software allows you to run granular content experiments before launching a full-blown campaign. This way, you can identify which combination of email elements would resonate with your subscribers better.

Above all, you can measure the readability and responsiveness of different content variations and email designs.

Plus, you can test multiple sender names, compare countless subject lines, and review the effectiveness of various calls to action.

Also, you can experiment with delivery times. Your content must not arrive in someone’s inbox at a random hour. So, it’s imperative to optimally schedule.

Exclusion Lists

Excluding irrelevant contacts from email campaigns can you deliver the right message to the right pairs of eyeballs. Gender and geography are some of the criteria you can use to build quality exclusion lists.

Suppression Lists

Another way to keep your sender reputation pristine is by not delivering messages to uninterested parties. Tens of billions of emails are spam. And you wouldn’t want your recipients to label your emails as such.

With Campaigner, you can create suppression lists that contain bounced and unsubscribed addresses. It’s one of the email blast programs that can proactively monitor unsubscribes, hard bounces, and spam complaints.

After learning which contacts don’t want to hear from you anymore, it will add them to suppression lists on autopilot.

As a result, your subscriber list can remain clean and your emails will end up in the right inboxes.

Compliance Monitoring

Campaigner keeps tabs on feedback loops (unsubscribes, bounces, and spam complaints) and your email sends safeguard your image to regulators.

It never stops to monitor anything that may tarnish your sender reputation. This way, you can maintain your unceasing compliance with industry standards. It’s paramount as far as email deliverability is concerned.

Social Sharing

This email marketing software can automatically generate online shareable versions of your emails called social campaigns.

Each of them comes with a share bar, encouraging your subscribers to spread your message. 

To promote your social campaigns, you can publish them on Facebook and/or Twitter when their email counterparts get sent. 

In addition, you can post your campaign’s social sharing links on your web pages, blogs, and elsewhere on the internet.

Reports

Campaigner can generate different reports you can glean actionable insights from to track key marketing success indicators.

Perhaps the most important one is conversion reports. These contain real-time data on how many you’ve converted, how much they spent, and how often they make a purchase.

These figures are useful for segmenting top customers, conducting:

• experiments 
• fine-tuning automation workflows 
• enhancing dynamic and conditional content

And more!

Apart from conversion, you can access individual reports on contacts, experiments, email campaigns, workflows, geolocation, and autoresponders.

These docs enable you to see your subscribership growth and the technologies used to read your emails at a glance.

Using this email campaign software company’s click heatmaps, you can get detailed overviews of subscriber interactions.

Two-Factor Authentication (2FA)

To ensure data security when managing your contacts, you can activate Campaigner’s 2FA.

If it isn’t familiar to you, it’s a measure that requires a second identification verification method for account access. When enabled, it would ask for additional info supposedly only authorized users could retrieve to keep unwanted characters at bay.

This platform has more than one 2FA mode. So, you’ll have plenty of latitude in enforcing your security policy on new and existing account users organization-wide.

Sales Engineering

Campaigner has a dedicated team that offers technical advice on how to approach email marketing these days.

Regardless of your experience, you shouldn’t discount the pearls of wisdom the company’s in-house experts can share about conversion. To maximize your sales, it would be wise to take advantage of all the help you could get.

Campaigner API Access

If you have developers on staff, you can create your own integrations for Campaigner using its REST API. The company’s webhooks enable you to create user-defined callbacks.

Should you encounter any trouble, you can count on Campaigner for technical support. Its multidisciplinary team of postmasters, IP reputation specialists, and API integration engineers will be at your disposal.

Ease of Use and Interface

Campaigner is a web-based platform, so you only need an up-to-date browser to use it. 

During the registration for this Campaigner review, I was able to create an account with a masked email address. I took this route for privacy and security reasons.

However, the company somewhat ignored my application at first because I didn’t use a popular email domain. To avoid account activation delays, domains like gmail.com or outlook.com are safer bets.

As far as aesthetics, Campaigner is average-looking. It uses lots of white space to be easy on the eyes and to highlight its tabs and buttons.

That said, the software’s interface could be more convenient to use. It doesn’t adjust to desktop screens, so you’d have to scroll left and right to explore every section.

Moreover, the dashboard’s design has room for improvement. It’s wasting some real estate, forcing me to needlessly scroll up and down to view all data.

Prior to testing, I was bracing for potential navigational hassles. Less than stellar usability has been a common criticism in many Campaigner reviews.

Campaigner Integrations

In theory, you can integrate Campaigner with thousands of third-party web services. On the platform, as follows are the native connectors you’ll find:

• Adobe Analytics
• Google Analytics
• Magento
• Shopify
• SurveyTown

This list is much shorter than that of Benchmark, one of the best email marketing platforms out there. And the availability of Campaigner’s integrations would depend on the plan you subscribed to.

How about the rest of the other third-party apps?

You’d need a Zapier account. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s a freemium automation workflow builder that facilitates the communication between two productivity programs.

In other words, it can help you integrate Campaigner with dozens of web services to automatically run your everyday tasks.

By 2022, Zapier had supported 5,000+ apps. Once you link your accounts, you can immediately use pre-made automation called Zaps. Or, you can build one from scratch.

The most popular Zapier-powered Campaigner integrations involve the following:

• Eventbrite
• Facebook Lead Ads
• Google Forms
• Google Sheets
• Gravity Forms
• Jotform
• LinkedIn Lead Gen Forms
• Ninja Forms
• Salesforce
• SurveyMonkey
• Typeform
• WooCommerce

Campaigner Pricing

Campaigner doesn’t have a complicated pricing model, but it's a bit secretive about some of its plans. So, keep reading because I’ll spill the beans shortly.

First things first, let’s discuss the highlights of its 10 advertised packages.

For Starter, Essential, and Advanced plans, the standard email send limit is five times the package’s maximum contact count. So if you could store up to 5,000 contacts, you’d be able to send up to 25,000 emails.

Unadvertised Plans

This business email marketing software company refuses to advertise all of its plans. 

Nevertheless, I was able to unearth their prices. Campaigner’s three secret plans cost $29, $45, and $95/month. They come with 1,000, 3,500, and 10,000 maximum contact counts, respectively. While all of them are unnamed, I found out that the $29 package is called Light.

So, what about their other features?

From what I gathered, they include everything Starter has except for suppression lists and experiments.

Free Trial and Add-Ons

Unlike MailerLite, another top email marketing software, Campaigner has no free edition. But the good news is that you can test-drive it with abandon for a long period.

Campaigner’s free trial is 30 days. Generally, it requires credit card information upon signup, though.

In terms of extras, you can add Reputation Defender to whatever plan you have. It doesn’t have a flat rate, though. It would set you back 20% of your chosen plan. So the higher you go, the more expensive it becomes.

Regarding SMS send limits, you can increase your plan’s maximum allowable count for an additional cost.

The company offers quote-based creative services too. Arguably, it’s the best email marketing software vendor to outsource some of your processes too. Among the things it can handle are: 

• copywriting 
• graphic design 
• template creation
• subscription tool optimization

By using Campaigner as an extension of your team, you can free up more time to focus on other matters. This is a welcome option if you’re swamped with other stuff or simply lack the technical skills to take care of said tasks.

Billing Options, Discounts, and Fees

By default, you pay for the Campaigner subscriptions monthly. However, you can request to pay a year in advance if you wish.

The problem is that the annual billing doesn’t automatically translate to savings. If you want a discount, you’ll have to agree to a contract. So, there’ll be a fee if you cancel it early.

In general, Campaigner has no setup fee. It may only apply to Enterprise the plan, though. Usually, it requires expert account setup assistance, extended training sessions, and custom integrations.

For payment, this automated email marketing software provider accepts American Express, Visa, and Mastercard credit cards. If you must, it may let you pay by check instead.

Unfortunately, Campaigner has no money-back guarantee. But the company is willing to listen to refund requests. It may return your cash if its finance team approves your appeal.

Verdict

Campaigner is a solid multi-dimensional tool that fuses email and SMS marketing processes. If you take sender reputation protection seriously, it will certainly fit the bill.

Although its current interface needs some polishing, you wouldn’t run out of helpful resources to navigate it more easily.

Figuring out the best plan for your needs and budget feels like a chore, though.

I wasn’t able to talk about my experience with its sales procedure at length in this Campaigner review. But I had to speak with more than two reps to get info about the company’s unadvertised plans.

Another drawback is the platform’s handful of native integrations. I could count them with one hand. Fortunately, Campaigner supports Zapier. So, its interoperability is greater than it seems on paper.

Despite all of the downsides I discovered, I still believe that this software is worth a try. Besides, its lengthy free trial is risk-free. So, don’t pass up the chance to experience it in action.