Campaigner Conclusion

Campaigner recently updated their email marketing service and now offers a competitive product at an affordable price.  After our review, we rated them highly on Email Creation, Contact Management, Email Deliverability and Customer Service.  Although their campaign reporting is standard, Campaigner’s much improved user-friendliness and competitive pricing make it a great choice as an email marketing service. 

Campaigner: Email Creation

We rated Campaigner a 4 out of 5 stars for Email Creation.  Campaigner offers 529 email templates in 20 categories to help you customize your email newsletter.  The templates are very flexible and include one-column and multiple-column options, as well as the ability to easily edit images, using their new image editing tool, or add images on your selected email template using a drag-and-drop method.  The automatically remove their branding on your emails.  You are allowed 1MB of hosted images to use in your emails, which is much higher than our Market Standard (5 free images).  Campaigner’s WYSIWYG editor lets you easily customize the template and edit your content directly on the preview screen.  However, they are lacking an auto-save function and an auto-responder function, which keep them from a perfect score.  You can remove the Campaigner branding from your emails if you're on the $55 plan or above, but it will cost you a one-time fee of $250.

Campaigner: Contact Management

We rated Campaigner a 4 out of 5 stars for Contact Management.  Campaigner allows you to upload contacts manually, by Cut & Paste or by importing them from Excel, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and Outlook. They also give you a handy guide to help you import from Outlook.  Campaigner makes it easy to remove bounces and unsubscribes, which automatically get filtered out of your contact list, and to create a newsletter sign-up form for your website. The only drawback we could find is that they don’t allow you to segment your emails lists based on “triggers” or responses to your email campaigners.  

Campaigner: Email Deliverability

We rated Campaigner a 5 out of 5 stars for Email Deliverability.  Emails sent using Campaigner had 100% deliverability rate to all major email servers that we tested. When you send a campaign out, your message will automatically be scheduled for delivery at least 20 minutes later. (This is standard among email marketing services.) Campaigner offers no guarantees about the deliverability of your email campaigns, and does not offer a spam checker. They expect you to comply with CAN-SPAM laws and industry best practices when sending email campaigns.

Tip: Since the time zone is automatically listed as Eastern Time, you’ll have to go into your user profile (Account > Settings) to specify your time zone, if different.

Campaigner: Analyzing Reports

We rated Campaigner a 3 out of 5 stars for Analyzing Reports.  Campaigner shows you all of the essential tracking information, such as hard bounces, soft bounces, unsubscribes, subscribes, pending emails, and urls/click-throughs. Although the contacts reports can be viewed numerically and/or graphically, the individual campaign reports can only be viewed as numerical data. You are now able to export your reports directly to a CSV file. Campaigner does not offer A/B (split) testing, nor does it integrate with Google Analytics. But, depending on your email marketing needs, these missing features may not be necessary. (See our Email Marketing Reviews page to read about other email marketing providers who offer these features.)

Campaigner: Customer Support

We rated Campaigner a 4 out of 5 stars for Customer Support.  Campaigner offers phone, email and live chat support (for sales only, not for technical support), which are now available 24/7. We found their customer support to be very helpful and knowledgeable.  A representative contacted us shortly after we signed up for an account, and we were assigned an “email marketing coach” that could walk us through the system.  They also have a very comprehensive FAQ.

Campaigner: Pricing

Campaigner charges a monthly fee based on the number of contacts in your email list.  The monthly premium starts at $10/month for 500 contacts, which is very competitive with other providers.  If you sign up for a free trial, you can test all of Campaigner’s email marketing features and send unlimited emails for 30 days, but you are limited to only 500 contacts.  This is basically the $10/month plan with the first month free.