Item: Campaigner
Rating: 4
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We have used Campaigner across our whole organization since 2015. We send a monthly e-newsletter to 70,000+ contacts and a weekly email series to 25,000+ contacts. We also run several autoresponder campaigns when prospects sign up for trials of our software. This is a series of emails based on days from sign up date.

Pros and Cons

Workflows to create a series of emails over a long period of time
List definition to segment contacts by various criteria
Ability to add and utilize custom fields
Ability to download contact list in Excel for cleanup and then re-upload into the system

Technical support experiences have been awful
Lack of communication about releases, feature changes and issues
No ability to spam proof sign up forms with captcha
Workflows stopped working without explanation or notification
Report features are lacking

Return on Investment

Makes it easy for us to stay in contact via outbound email with 70K plus contacts
Heavy upfront investment in creating workflows pays off once they are working
Custom fields and exports to Excel have helped us better understand our customer base

Alternatives Considered

Aweber - used this pre 2015. It did not provide a single opt in option. it allowed us to download our contact list into Excel but we could not re-upload any changes we made to cleanup or add to data.

Campaign monitor - we did not like the user interface as well and as I recall it did not have a similar workflow feature.

Key Insights

Do you think Campaigner delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Campaigner's feature set?

Yes

Did Campaigner live up to sales and marketing promises?

Did implementation of Campaigner go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Campaigner again?

Yes

Usability

Great features but awful tech support experiences over five years of use. Some releases broke our workflows and Campaigner could never explain why. Our initial plan provided a designed client support contact. This individual changed frequently without notice and at one point they decided our plan no longer included a designated contact. Of course this was never communicated to us until we tried to reach out to the person.

If you are tech savy this system might be for you but you'll be on your own.

Support Rating

Over five years I rarely had an interaction I was satisfied with. General tech support staff did not seem to be trained on anything but the basics of the system. They would open tech support tickets, give me a case # and then we would hear nothing. We still have open tickets from years ago.

Software releases were never communicated. New features never announced. For an email marketing company they did not use email to communicate to me well at all. Every email I received was trying to sell me what I had already bought.

Likelihood to Recommend

Workflow feature makes this best suited for those who want to send a series of emails over time based on contact attributes and behavior.
Ability to add custom fields and define segments makes this tool valuable for very targeted email campaigns.

Lack of communication about releases and poor technical support means your users will need to be fairly skilled in critical thinking and more technical than average. Our knowledge of system came from lots of trial and error.

Great features but expect to be on your own - weak tech support

Overall Satisfaction with Campaigner