Likelihood to Recommend Campaign Monitor is undoubtedly one of the best software for managing email marketing campaigns; it is a robust platform and can be adapted to any company. If you are not a developer and don't know any code, it has many pre-made templates to use. I highly recommend Campaign Monitor; it is perfect, does what needs to be done, and is very easy to use.
Read full review Higher Logic works very well for our business purposes. We can very easily create new communities when we need to (and this is often!). Our association isn't as concerned with driving engagement, but the tools Higher Logic provides allows us to take a closer look at the engagement level of our committee members when needed
Read full review Pros Campaign Monitor’s support is great. They have a great help page built out to help answer all your questions, and if you do have a question or issue that needs extra support, their support team responds within a couple hours to help resolve the issue. The email builder is very clean and easy to use. It makes A/B testing, personalization, and dynamic content easy to implement. I appreciate the insights reporting that Campaign Monitor provides. We use that regularly for our quarterly reporting to track list growth, as well as campaign performance from a high level. The automation is very straight forward and has truly transformed our marketing. The learning curve is pretty low, so my entire team knows how to use it to create and edit automated email journeys. Read full review Higher Logic product managers are probably some of the best in the industry. They know their products and aren't pushy in trying to sell them to you. Don't get me wrong, they do try to sell you a product, but they understand that not everyone who is tasked with learning more is also a decision maker. That doesn't stop them from being professional and thorough in their demonstrations or explanation of fees. Their technical support is top notch. Not only do they work to resolve issues, they also work with you to help you with non-issues. Our initial redesign was done by an agency that worked with HL directly to set up the new site. When I was tasked with a mini-redesign this year, HL technical support offered me a lot of insight on how to best do this using just my skills and HL. They offer training on their platforms to ensure your success as an administrator. There is no cost and you can either go to their onsite two days "boot camp" or you can access a plethora of training videos and webinars through their online users' community. Read full review Cons Managing different subscriptions requires some thinking and setup with custom fields/lists/segments. It's not really 'out of the box' to set up. The WYSIWYG editor is pretty locked down, which makes it idiot-proof, but would be great to have a little more control over padding, line height, kerning, etc. Read full review Reporting is copious but you cannot build your own reports so you may have lots of information in several different reports and have to pick and choose across several to combine manually. Exporting functionality is there but there are some reports that are only a screen shot and you cannot export them. Read full review Likelihood to Renew They are a great company that offer great products - primarily their community. As they continue to grow and expand their offerings, I believe they will increase the number of products that offer and in turn grow their client base. We use their community, activity synch, and volunteer manager currently.
Read full review Usability The templates, while useful, are very locked down, This makes it very usable from a novice's standpoint, but also very inflexible from a designer's standpoint. Creating several version of the email campaign and using A/B testing was a powerful and easy-to-use feature, and the system also provides the option of automating the sending of emails once an A/B testing criteria is reached
Read full review The software is not that simple to use when you have to get volunteers involved in the content assembly process. The content management system that is native to Higher Logic could improve to make the task of training volunteers far easier. Given its simplicity, it is hard for the system to rival more developed websites that use advanced CMS software.
Read full review Support Rating Higher Logic's support is sub-par at best. It can be difficult to get in contact with anyone from the support team, and when you do, it seems as if they don't want to talk to you and don't even have the answers to your questions. Within the past few months, we've contacted them twice and both times have been very disappointing. The first time was to let them know there was an inconsistency between the analytics report and the heat map. They basically said that they already knew about the problem but didn't have any set plans to fix it because they were working on other "more important" things. The second time was for a conference call to go over some additional features that we wanted to implement. And the lady we spoke with seemed very disgusted to have to speak with us and then rushed us off the phone because she had another call.
Read full review Alternatives Considered The ability to track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns in real-time is what makes Campaign Monitor interesting to use. All the vital features that we need to run professionally designed email campaigns that look wonderful on any device so that we boost our business are included in this platform.
Read full review We are just in the early stages of looking into
HubSpot Service Hub to determine if it will be a viable replacement for Higher Logic Community. We have other uses for the ServiceHub so there is an appeal to have it be a "one stop shop" for us. The big question however is how it will stack up to Higher Logic for the online communities. Candidly, while Higher Logic may be tough to beat in this area, it is something we will be looking closely at in the next 12 months.
Read full review Return on Investment Because it's easy to use, we can design and send out newsletters easily and quickly, spending little time. It's a great tool for aggregating all of the things our organization is up to and making sure people are aware of them. Sometimes I wonder how many emails are sent to the Spam folder, but there are great tools to see how many opens you get. Read full review Understanding preferences-- Higher Logic helps us tap in to how our members want to hear from us. Data collection-- Since we started using Higher Logic the amount of data we get from our members has increased greatly. Consolidation of tools-- Higher Logic replaced 2 or 3 additional SAAS options being utilized by us. This helped save money! Read full review ScreenShots Higher Logic Thrive Screenshots