Campaigner is a full-featured email marketing solution that offers a competitive price, a wide range of automation options, a good number of third-party integrations, and 24/7 live chat support.
It also stands out due to a nicely refined and intuitive interface that includes a wide selection of templates.
That combination make it very attractive to small and midsized businesses (SMBs) and also garners Campaigner an Editors’ Choice nod in the email marketing segment.
Campaigner's strength is that its customizable workflows offer users many ways to manage marketing efforts exactly as suit their needs.
Branding is similarly easy with excellent template customization.
You'll still want to evaluate it carefully, however, because while it's certainly easier to use than some of the competition, its wealth of features necessarily make it more complex than, for example, Mailchimp (our other Editors' Choice recipient), which is more clearly aimed at smaller businesses newer to digital marketing.
Campaigner can also be finicky when performing more advanced functions, like altering templates.
(Editors' Note: Campaigner is owned by j2 Global, the parent company of Daxdi's publisher, Ziff Davis.)
Campaigner Plans and Pricing
Affordable entry pricing has been one of Campaigner's biggest draws, specially among smaller businesses looking to engage in email marketing.
For smaller outfits with a database of up to 1,000 contacts, Campaigner's initial plan at $19.95 per month is a good entry point.
Businesses managing up to 5,000 contacts will look to spend $40.95 per month for the Starter plan, which is the next pricing option.
At $40.95 per month, Campaigner handles up to 5,000 contacts and is still cheaper than Zoho Campaigns, which charges $45 per month for 2,501-5,000 subscribers.
It may be challenging for SMBs to decide which of these solutions to go for depending on their range of contacts alone.
Companies also need to consider their future needs and which plans scale more organically and make sense pricewise.
At first, Campaigner's pricing structure appears confusing because there's one block of prices ranging from $19.95 to $449.95, followed by a separate eCommerce plan starting at $65.95 a month custom offering with integration for Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento.
The range of plans is certainly a little overwhelming and might trip up potential customers, especially for businesses that have contact lists that fall in between what the tiers prescribe.
The basic tier starts at $19.95 for 1,000 contacts, the Starter tier is now $40.95 for 5,000 contacts, Essential is $119.95 for up to 25,000 contacts, and Advanced starts at $449.95 for up to 100k contacts as well as additional features and functionality, including Purchase Behavior analytics and Automation Workflows.
Unlimited Email Messages Per Month
Campaigner lets you send an unlimited number of email messages per month.
Campaigner's own marketing materials highlight the company's policy that you can cancel at any time.
There are no discounted annual plans, but you're also not locked into a contract, which is convenient.
With the email workflows that Campaigner provides, you can communicate with your subscribers based on specified auto-responders that you set up using a convenient drag-and-drop system.
These auto-responders can be sent when certain triggers (or actions) occur, like a form submission or profile change.
You can use them to reach out to highly engaged customers or those customers who have recently made a buying decision.
Marketers can best use auto-responders to create welcome emails.
For instance, when you sign up for a newsletter, that would trigger a welcome email—perhaps with a 10% discount.
The same goes for situations when a customer abandons a shopping cart or cancels an order.
In that case, a proactive auto-responder can quickly offer up deals or other options that could save a sale or, more importantly, retain a customer.
Campaigner uses all this information so once a contact is accessed, marketers will see all the relevant data, including sales amounts, product names and SKUs, as well as abandoned cart information.
You'll find many other features, too, like the ability to embed real-time display ads in newsletters, target your subscribers based on their location, or find out where your subscribers live based on geolocation.
Registration to Campaigner is straightforward.
Once you verify your email address, you set a password and then provide the usual personal information and a credit card number.
We weren't thrilled at having to provide credit card information just to access a trial.
Many competitors don't require this, and forcing potential customers to do it may make some look elsewhere.
It even gets a little worse if you decide to cancel at the end of your trial.
Instead of offering you a web-based method for opting out, Campaigner forces you to call and cancel.
That's both time consuming and a little annoying.
We hope Campaigner abandons that strategy in the future.
Still, it allows you to invite additional users to your account at no extra cost if multiple people will be creating campaigns.
Once signed on, Campaigner's reps will send you emails inviting you to webinars, shared resources, and onboarding videos so getting started with the software is less daunting.
Potential users quickly feel a sense of community as Campaigner users, something that few other solutions manage to foster so quickly.
Campaigner's User Interface
Campaigner offers a well designed and easy to navigate user interface that is anchored on a horizontal menu bar.
You'll see a hamburger menu, or a three line indicator, that's found on the left hand side and brings up quick shortcuts to various useful functions.
This includes Start New Campaign, Import Contacts, Create a List, Create a Segment, Add a Custom Field, Start an A/B Split Test, Create an Autoresponder, and Create a New Sign Up Form.
A key feature of the dashboard is that it presents a clear picture of current campaigns as well as your contact growth summary, including not only new contacts, but those that have unsubscribed or are bouncing.
Data is presented so you can act on it quickly and dive into campaigns or refining your contact lists.
The top navigation is where you can access the Dashboard, Email Campaigns, Library, Contacts, Lists, Autoresponders, Experiments, Forms, Workflows, and Reports.
The dynamic nature of the Campaigner web interface makes it easy to dive right in to various marketing activities.
We found the website to be responsive and quick with very little loading time between sections.
Focusing on email marketing, we gravitated towards the Email Campaigns section.
This showed ongoing campaigns as well as the links to create a New Email Campaign, Choose Recipients, Schedule and Send, Edit, Resend, Copy, Delete, and Categorize.
Most marketers and content creators will be spending a lot of time in this section; the good news is that all the necessary controls and options are well within reach. New email campaign opens up the template section where you can select from various themes, edit the HTML code, edit the plain text, and edit email details as necessary.
At first glance, the 43 templates available to me seemed wide-ranging and suitable to a nicely varied number of marketing activities.
That said, if you're going to be more particular about design in order to satisfy brand requirements, for example, you'd do well to survey the designs that Campaigner has to offer and make sure you see something that'll support what you're looking to do.
The reason for this is that, depending on your level of expertise, it will be limiting to work within the confines of the available themes.
Outside of changing the text and adding your own images, there’s very little wiggle room for tweaking and customizing templates which means after a while they will tend to look stale.
While it’s true that you can always create your own template using HTML, most users sign up for solutions like Campaigner because they want to avoid having to design and code their own marketing and email materials.
This isn't much of an issue for SMB’s just getting started in the email marketing game because the generally wide selection of templates should be more than enough to get most up and running.
But it might be a bigger issue for more active businesses or marketers who might have already have their own template designs. The new drag-and-drop editor is efficient and easy to use, so making templates is fairly quick unless you're doing something that requires HTML code.
Once you've set up a new template, they can be previewed for desktop or mobile screen resolutions and orientations.
Campaigner's dashboard is more appealing and easier to use than a number of the interfaces we saw in competing solutions, such as GetResponse.
The dashboard includes a section called Contact Growth Summary, which provides a view of your contacts' interactions with your campaigns for the last three months.
This snapshot tallies the amount of hard bounces and soft bounces as well as who is subscribed or unsubscribed.
If a contact is not doing well, then companies can look into whether the contact lists are being segmented properly.
In our case, we noticed that we unsubscribed a contact that didn't show up under the Contacts Growth Summary, and we subscribed more than one contact, but only a number 1 showed up under Subscribed.
Campaigner includes most of the important features email marketers are seeking, including A/B split testing, automation workflows, auto-responders, responsive design, social sharing, and suppression lists.
Advanced targeting features now include email segmentation, engagement scoring, geolocation, and purchase behavior.
The tool also now has integrations with Adobe Analytics, Facebook Audience Manager, Google Analytics , Salesforce, Twitter, and the above-mentioned WooCommerce, and Magento.
Technical users can avail themselves of the Webhooks provision as an option.
Campaigner has also taken the necessary steps to become compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) which is standard across the industry, though it's a good idea to run its capabilities by your Data Officer before purchasing.
Email Subscriber Lists
Campaigner offers various ways to add contacts into the system.
The most common and conventional way is copying and pasting information directly into the app, which ensures you cover all the necessary contact entry details in order to work seamlessly with Campaigner.
You can also upload files in various formats (CSV, VCF, XLS, or XLSX), or import your Gmail or Yahoo contacts.
After your contacts have been loaded into the system, you'll receive a message in your Campaigner inbox.
For our test of Campaigner we imported our database of contacts into the tool, the fields lined up nicely.
We were able to drag and drop the Excel file onto the Import Contacts page.
All of the contacts were labeled subscribed by default.
There's a drop-down menu in which you can specify a status like soft bounce or unsubscribed.
But when we tried to change the status for contacts, it didn't work.
Meanwhile, we tried unsubscribing some contacts another way.
We clicked the box next to the contact and hit Unsubscribe from the top menu under "Manage Contacts." This action cannot be undone.
This seems a bit too permanent.
We tried to add the address anew and got the error message "Cannot add contact.
Email address is not unique."
Campaigner automatically creates user segments based on when they were added to your account or when their profile was last updated.
You can create additional segments based on email actions, form submissions, and any custom fields you have created.
Auto-responders can also help you build a subscriber list.
There are templates available (including the "win-back" template) that are designed to draw back inactive contacts who haven't opened an email or clicked in a while in order to win them back.
We imported another mailing list into Campaigner from Excel.
At first the Preview and Configure section didn't have the fields mapped correctly.
We added a space in Excel under First Name, Last Name and then Email Address, and then we were able to have the fields mapped correctly.
We added another mailing list so we can specify the five people to whom we want the test email sent.
We kept adding to the new mailing list under Contacts and importing a second Excel spreadsheet.
The process was difficult at first because the contacts kept getting added to the existing mailing list rather than showing up in a new list.
So when we went under Lists, and then we were able to add a new mailing list.
Setting Up a Campaign
Campaigner is similarly a powerful newsletter creation tool with various options.
The first is Newsletter: Smart Email Builder, which offers lots of templates and layouts to get you started, and Full Email Editor, which accepts HTML code.
The flexibility to upload raw HTML is a plus for email marketing platforms, like Campaigner.
It's an option to bypass the email editor within Campaigner.
You can build the code with your HTML editor or Notepad.
This feature is for advanced users who like to build their own code or who have templates they'd like to import.
Users are able to input HTML from another email marketing platform if they're switching an existing template over.
To upload your own HTML code, you go to the dashboard, click "Upload an HTML File" under "Other Options and Shortcuts," and then Browse for your HTML file.
Next you click Upload.
Another method is to input your HTML code into the Plain Text Email editor.
Newsletters default to showing your full contact information in the footer, but you can change that.
You can also create autoreply messages and conduct A/B or A/B/C tests, changing not just the design of the newsletter but also the From address and subject line.
In our tests we were able to change the subject line of an email blast to see which one would gain the most eyeballs.
Once you're satisfied with your newsletter, you can send it right away or schedule it for deployment later.
We tried the scheduling option, and it worked just fine.
You can also choose to send it on a recurring schedule: daily, weekly, monthly, or annually.
Unfortunately, we couldn't find an option to send campaigns at a specific local time based on a recipient's location, like you can do with GetResponse.
We created a sample newsletter...
