Campaigner Review: What Does This Marketing Platform Have to Offer?

Everything You Should Know...

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Businesses of all sizes rely on email marketing to not only reach their existing audience but to widen their reach and attract more customers. 

But with so many different email marketing campaign tools on the market, all promising success and great ROIs, how do you identify which suits you best? 

So, to help weigh up your options, we’re zoning in on one such long-established tool: Campaigner.

We’re covering lots of ground, so letโ€™s get started with this Campaigner review!

Campaigner Review: About Campaigner

campaigner review

In summary, Campaigner provides all the tools you need to build email campaigns using its intuitive visual email builder and simple-to-navigate dashboard. You can choose from hundreds of responsive templates to create attractive emails. On top of that, you can also build SMS campaigns – either standalone ones or incorporate them into your email automation workflows.  

Interestingly, Campaignerโ€™s website states that SMS campaigns have a 98% read rate. In addition, instead of just relying on generic email drip campaigns, Campaigner’s customers see 6x more conversions when using multi-channel automation workflows. 

Campaigner boasts 60+ features, including a wide range of detailed reporting functions, automation workflows, and many more. There are also plenty of third-party integrations. 

Campaigner has been around for over 20 years and is used by more than 120,000 businesses worldwide, including heavy hitters like the Washington Post, Tripadvisor, Adidas, and Xerox. It has offices in Ottawa, Newcastle, Kyiv, New York City, Raleigh, and Los Angeles.

Its website promises 99% uptime, a 95% customer satisfaction rating, and a 98% email delivery rate. 

Campaigner also offers a generous 30-day free trial and pricing plans for businesses of all sizes. You can opt for the email-only package or a more expensive email and SMS pricing plan. There are also plans aimed explicitly at eCommerce businesses that include Shopify and Magento integrations.

During the sign-up process, you just need to enter your name, company name, and email address. Youโ€™re then taken to a page to input your billing details. Once signed up, youโ€™re given a free 30-day trial on your chosen plan and billed after that periodโ€™s expired. After that, youโ€™ll receive an email confirmation of your account. 

Campaigner Review: Campaigner’s Core Features

As we’ve just said, Campaigner comes with over 60 features – too many to run through individually! So instead, weโ€™ll focus on the key ones to give you a broad sense of what Campaigner can do for your business. 

Of course, later in this review, we’ll look at Campaigner’s pricing in more detail. But at this point, itโ€™s worth noting that some of the features we’ve listed below might not be available on the lower-tiered pricing plans. For example, eCommerce integrations are unavailable on the cheapest (Starter) plan. 

So, with that said, letโ€™s take a peek at some of Campaigner’s core features:

Email Marketing Automation

This is split into four main areas: 

  1. Workflows
  2. Recurring campaigns
  3. SMS marketing
  4. Autoresponders

Let’s look at each in turn: 

Workflows: You can build simple or complex automated workflows using the drag-and-drop email builder. You can use this to customize emails and create automated email workflows with multiple triggers associated with different stages of your customer’s journey. For example, you could trigger an email to send when a customer first signs up with you and/or when they purchase something from you. You can also schedule messages to send at the optimum time for customer engagement based on your customer’s actions or inactions. 

Recurring campaigns: This feature somewhat overlaps with ‘workflows.’ In essence, it emphasizes that you can create and schedule ongoing email and SMS campaigns for maximum engagement between you and your customers. 

SMS marketing: You can run standalone SMS marketing campaigns or incorporate them into your email workflows. Like email workflows, you can build SMS campaigns that utilize triggers based on customer behavior. Likewise, you can also use SMS to alert customers about shipping and delivery times, password resets, discounted and special offers, billing reminders, and appointment confirmations. Lastly, customers can also choose to receive just SMS or both SMS and email notifications. They can also opt-in and out at any point. 

Autoresponders: You can automatically send customers messages based on how they interact with your website. For example, a thank you email when a customer signs up for your newsletter or when they make a purchase. You can also set automated and timed daily, weekly, monthly, and annual autoresponders to nudge customers to renew a subscription with you. The same applies when you want to engage with a customer when itโ€™s their birthday or other milestones youโ€™re aware of. 

Personalization

Customizing your customer interactions can work wonders for boosting engagement levels. So with that said, letโ€™s see what Campaigner offers in this arena.

Campaignerโ€™s personalization features are split into the following categories:

  1. Segmentation
  2. Dynamic content
  3. Content blocks
  4. Conditional content
  5. Geolocation

Again, below weโ€™ll explore each in turn: 

Segmentation: You can send targeted, customized messages to customers based on their engagement with past campaigns, demographics, purchases, etc. This enables you to send customers more relevant content, hopefully leading to higher conversion rates. 

Dynamic content: Build stronger relationships with customers by sending them personalized offers based on who they are and what they do. For example, where they live, their age, zip code, location, gender, occupation, and purchase history/behavior. 

Content blocks: You can create a library of reusable content,, that you can save for future use in other campaigns (when relevant). One example is creating branded articles on different topics with the same header/footer and social media toolbar. 

Conditional content: You can switch calls to action, email design, and messages based on conditional checks on your contact data, including past conversions or custom fields. 

Geolocation: You can manually customize content based on where your customers shop, work, and live to tailor content, so itโ€™s relevant to each customer segment. For example, particular cultural holidays, weather conditions, news headlines, etc. Then once youโ€™ve set it, Campaigner handles the rest.

Email Design

Campaignerโ€™s core email design features include:

  1. A drag-and-drop editor
  2. Responsive design
  3. Template management
  4. A media library
  5. A full email editor
  6. An image editor 

Drag and drop editor: You donโ€™t need coding experience to create email campaigns. Pick from one of over 900 fully responsive pre-built templates, and then use the drag-and-drop interface to modify the colors, layouts, images, and so on. At this point, itโ€™s worth noting that there are templates specifically designed for different scenarios. Templates are categorized either by type or industry and include:

  • Events and invitations
  • Letterhead
  • Newsletter
  • Holiday and seasonal
  • Financial services
  • Faith and religion
  • Food and beverage
  • Promotions
  • Real estate

You can preview any template by clicking on it to view a larger image of it before going ahead with your customization. 

Responsive design: All the templates are fully responsive and can be used across multiple devices.

Template management: You can organize your templates into different folders to easily access and customize them again should you need them for another campaign. 

Media library: Here, you can organize your images and PDF files into folders for easy access.

Full email editor: This refers to an HTML email editor you can use to code your campaigns. You can either adapt existing code or import HTML from elsewhere. 

Image editor: This allows you to edit images while creating your emails. For example, changing an imageโ€™s size or dimension. 

Ecommerce

If you run an eCommerce store, you can integrate it with Campaigner to create personalized campaigns based on your customer’s purchase history and interactions on your website. For example, you can send automated abandoned cart emails, reward discounts to repeat customers, etc.

In addition, Campaigner has native integrations with Magento and Shopify. So if you run your store through either of these platforms, you can sync all your store data with Campaigner and start running campaigns. 

Reporting

Thereโ€™s little point in sending email campaigns if you donโ€™t know how well theyโ€™re doing. Thatโ€™s where reports on email campaigns, workflows, geolocations, autoresponders, user agents, and experiments (more about these lower down) come in handy. You can view all these different reports in one place – on your Campaigner dashboard:

Conversion tracking: Access real-time data on how well your campaigns convert into sales. You can also identify repeat customers, including their geolocation and purchase value, and see ROI figures for each campaign.

Email campaign reports: Receive insights into your email open rates, click-throughs, how many emails bounced, the number of emails sent, delivery rates, and unsubscribe percentages. 

Workflow reports: These are detailed reports on every stage of your automated workflows. For instance, you can see how many customers/contacts are at each workflow stage. You can also see how many have converted into a sale. 

Geolocation reports: Check how well your campaigns are performing per location; this includes data on open rates, email delivery, click-throughs, and conversions. 

Autoresponder reports: You can monitor the success of your auto responders by viewing their open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates. 

User-agents: Drill into the click and open rates per email client, browser, and operating system. 

Experiment reports: Weโ€™re about to discuss โ€˜experimentsโ€™ in the following section. But, put simply, experiment reports provide an in-depth analysis of your split-testing experiments, including open rates, conversions, click rates, and so on.

Experiments

As weโ€™ve just hinted, โ€˜experimentโ€™sโ€™ enable you to split-test different parts of your campaign. For the uninitiated, split testing is sometimes referred to as A/B testing. Itโ€™s an effective means of improving your campaigns and website performance through a series of controlled experiments. For example, send one version of your email campaign to half of your list and another to the other half and see which performs best.

For instance, you could compare different email subject headings using split testing to see which achieves the most open rates. You could also see whether an email from a specific person generates better engagement than a generic email address. You can also test different email send times to see which performs best for your business.

In addition, you can test your design and images to see which ones give the best-desired outcomes. Lastly, thereโ€™s multivariate testing. This is more than A/B testing because it allows you to simultaneously test several finer details – for example, which CTA (call to action) works best, which images work best, and so on. It means you can get an understanding of which campaigns work best with different audience segments. 

Campaigner Review: Campaigner Prices

campaigner review

Now you have a better sense of what Campaigner does, letโ€™s find out how much it will cost. 

At first glance, Campaignerโ€™s prices are pretty confusing. There are separate plans for email marketing packages and another set of prices for email marketing and SMS marketing packages. Within each of those, there are different prices for eCommerce store owners who want to run email marketing campaigns or email and SMS marketing campaigns combined. 

Letโ€™s take an overview.

First off, a free 30-day trial gives you access to all of Campaignerโ€™s 60+ features. After that, prices are based on your contact numbers:

Email Marketing Plans

There are four plans:

  1. Starter: from $59/mo for up to 5k contacts and 50MB media image storage
  2. Essential: from $179/mo for up to 25k contacts and 1GB media image storage
  3. Advanced: from $649/mo for up to 100k contacts and 1GB media image storage
  4. Ecommerce: from $79.95/mo and unlimited contacts

In each instance, you get access to the following: 

  • Experiments
  • The drag-and-drop editor
  • The full code editor
  • 900+ templates
  • Geolocation (you can run campaigns based on the geolocation of customers)
  • Social media integration, for example, Facebook and Twitter.
  • Landing pages (simple web pages that Campaigner can host for you)
  • Facebook audience builder (sync contacts and segments with Facebook Business Manager)
  • Recurring campaigns
  • Basic segmentation
  • Conversion tracking

Features enjoyed by all but Starter plan subscribers include:

  • The removal of Campaignerโ€™s branding on all your email marketing content
  • Dynamic content
  • Custom footers
  • You can create exclusion lists that prevent customers from receiving certain emails. For example, some holiday-related campaigns might not be relevant to customers living in different locations. 
  • eCommerce integrations
  • Localization to target customers in their own language

Lastly, features enjoyed by just Advanced plan subscribers include:

  • Automated workflows
  • Sales engineering – technical advice from Campaignerโ€™s engineering team 
  • You can tailor campaigns based on customer behavior
  • API access 
  • You can manually select and add customers to segments

Email Marketing and SMS Marketing Plans

As mentioned above, there are four plans to choose from, and in each case, thereโ€™s a free phone number included and no long code number charge. A long code number is a standard phone number for sending and receiving voice calls and SMS messages.

Starter: from $104/mo for up to 5,000 contacts, you get the same email features as listed above in the Starter email plan, plus:

  • 1,000 SMS sends
  • Recurring SMS campaigns
  • Personalized SMS content
  • Segmentation
  • Geolocation targeting (this works the same way as the email marketing geolocation feature)
  • A free phone number to send SMSs from
  • No charge for long code numbers

Essential from $224/mo for up to 25k contacts. Plus, the same email features as listed above in the Essential email plan, plus all the SMS features listed above.

Advanced from $694/mo for up to 100k contacts. Plus, the same email features listed above in the Advanced email plan and the SMS features listed above.

eCommerce: Confusingly, as well as the eCommerce price plans listed above, for which you receive:

  • Unlimited contacts
  • Magento and Shopify integrations

There are also four eCommerce plans to choose from:

  1. Starter: $69.95/mo billed annually for unlimited contacts, Shopify and Magento integrations, and up to 30k emails
  2. Essential: $89.95/mo billed annually for all the above and up to 45k emails
  3. Advanced: $119.95/mo billed annually for all the above and up to 75k emails
  4. Enterprise: custom pricing. This unlocks unlimited contacts, Shopify and Magento, email volume discounts, and automation workflows.

Campaigner Review: Campaigner Customer Support

campaigner review

The Campaigner support team is available 24/7. You can reach them via a toll-free number (for US and Canadian customers) or a free phone number (for UK customers). Thereโ€™s also a (paid-for) number for international customers. 

Alternatively, you can email the support team at [email protected], or if you have a billing query, [email protected].

Plenty of online self-help resources include videos on various topics, including a getting started tutorial, increasing conversion rates, using the drag-and-drop editor, and the workflow automation builder. 

There are also pre-recorded webinars offering insights into every aspect of email marketing, such as keeping email lists clean and free from disengaged subscribers, designing an email, personalizing your customersโ€™ journey, and much more. 

On top of that, there are handy written guides on marketing strategies for different occasions, including Black Friday and other holidays. You can also read a guide on all Campaignerโ€™s marketing features.

Thereโ€™s also a blog, plus the Campaigner Knowledge Base. This is where to head if you want answers to specific questions. The Knowledge Base is helpfully split into categories of interest. Articles covering a wide array of areas such as managing email campaigns, SMS campaigns, getting started, starting an email campaign, and many other topics. Thereโ€™s also a search bar at the top of the Knowledge Base homepage where you can type in your question or issue.

Campaigner Review: Campaigner Pros and Cons

Weโ€™ve covered lots of ground here, so letโ€™s simplify things with a quick pro-cons list: 

Pros:

  • Thereโ€™s a generous free 30-day trial
  • Thereโ€™s a wide range of customizable and attractive templates
  • Campaigner offers 24/7 customer support and plenty of self-help resources
  • Its dashboard is easy to navigate 
  • The geolocation feature allows you to create location-specific campaigns that are relevant to your customers
  • The drag-and-drop editor is easy to use – you donโ€™t need any coding experience to customize its email templates

Cons:

  • Thereโ€™s no free plan available.
  • You have to spend more to access the full suite of features, which may be prohibitive for smaller enterprises.
  • You need to provide your credit card details to access the free trial and remember to cancel your free trial; otherwise, youโ€™ll be charged.
  • Some reviewers complain about customer service. 
  • As pricing plans are based on the number of contacts you have, you can be caught in a situation where, for example, if you have slightly more than 5,000 contacts, you have to pay a lot more for the next plan up. 

Campaigner Review: Our Verdict

So there you have it, that’s our Campaigner review. Hopefully, our fulsome review gives you all the information you need to decide whether to go ahead with Campaigner or to keep shopping around. Overall, we think itโ€™s an excellent all-in-one email and SMS marketing tool suitable for different-sized businesses. 

The prices seem steep if you want the full suite of features, especially if youโ€™re on a tight budget. However, its easy and intuitive interface makes it a good choice for medium and larger businesses with more cash to splash to manage more extensive contact lists. It’s also a good choice for those with marketing strategies that rely heavily on mass email and SMS campaigns. 

We also like the wide selection of customizable templates to choose from and that you donโ€™t need any coding experience. 

Are you ready to give Campaigner a try? Let us know what you think in the comments box below. 

Rosie Greaves

Rosie Greaves is a professional content strategist who specializes in all things digital marketing, B2B, and lifestyle. She has over three years of experience crafting high-quality content. Check out her website Blog with Rosie for more information.

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