Campaigner believes wholeheartedly that nowadays you have to be there where your customers are. So, aside from email automation, it also offers SMS automation marketing. It doesn’t follow the classic linear AIDA funnel, put thinks in user journeys.
In 1999, Campaigner was founded by Zohar Loshitzer and Hemi Zucker. That makes it one of the original email marketing services. In the meantime, it has garnered over 120’000 clients including household brand names such as Adidas. It has its headquarters in Ottawa, Canada, and offices in the UK and USA.
Pros and cons of Campaigner
Campaigner offers all the features, you’d expect of an email marketing service such as email templates or customer relationship management (CRM) so that you can create and send personalised one-to-one email communications (and SMS).
Following the standard, Campaigner also provides its service cloud-based and on a monthly subscription basis.
Pros
- Powerful segmentation feature
- Visual editor for creating automation workflow (only available in the plan “Advanced”)
- Many templates to help you get started
- Easy to learn and to use
- Signup forms and landing pages help you build your list
- A/B testing to find out which variations work best
- 24/7 email and phone support (reduced due to the pandemic)
Cons
- Slow at times
- Complicated pricing structure that limits how much you can send and also what features you’ve access to
- Requires your credit card details for the free trial
Who is Campaigner for?
If you’re looking to make your marketing life easier, you’re most likely thinking of automating repetitive tasks. That’s where Campaigner can do the heavy lifting for you. Although you’d need deeper pockets.
Particularly, if you’re running an online store, you’d be happy to see that it has integrations with the most widely used shopping carts such as Magento or Shopify. You can then tailor your marketing activities based on your customers’ history.
Campaigner user interface
The signup process has an unexpected step in which Campaigner checks to see if your email address is correct as well as reviews your application. You’re going to be asked some questions so that it can better understand your needs.
When your account is created, you’re taken to the dashboard. The interface is well designed and easy to navigate. It’s uncluttered with clearly labelled elements and centres around the horizontal menu. Nothing is hidden behind countless submenu so that you can do your task without first clicking on the various menu items.
Campaigns
When you create an email campaign, you have the option to use
If you just click on the “New Email Campaign” button without hitting the arrow pointing down, you’re taken to the drag-and-drop editor.
The default option is the drag-and-drop editor in which you’ll find a large choice of templates and layouts. If you’re used to other website or email builders, you’ll know the drill.
The full email editor also has a range of templates to choose from and it allows you to design your email in a What You See Is What You Get editor as well as in HTML. With this, you can go beyond the design limitations of the default editor.
Once you’re done designing your email, you can preview and test it. You can choose to save it as part of a workflow or schedule and send it independently.
Sign up forms and landing pages
Knowing that a customer journey is non-linear, Campaigner also gives you the tools to build landing pages and signup forms. A landing page is a simple website that it hosts for you and that you use to collect contacts similar to a signup form. You can create multilingual forms.
List management, segmentation, and personalisation
Contact management is divided into 2 tabs. In the tab Contacts, you find all your contacts. You can filter the list with the presets or with the advanced search. This brings you into the tab Lists which is for segmentation.
This is where Campaigner shines: You can set rules and it dynamically compiles the segments based on specific criteria or your marketing goals. This is particularly intriguing for ecommerce stores: You can segment customers based on their past orders from your online store, using data such as how much they spent or which products they purchased.
Automation
Automation consists of the tabs Autoresponders and Workflows. As you’d expect, autoresponders don’t have conditional steps and are used when you want to send emails on a specific date and on a recurring basis or when a specific action triggers.
In the tab Workflows, you can create automated workflows with conditional steps and delays easily with the visual editor. With it, you can cover a broad spectrum of situations. You need to subscribe to the advanced plan to get it though.
Campaigner integrations
The integration with Shopify and Magento helps you improve the conversions of your online store, as you can segment your customers based on their previous behaviour. It also integrates with
- Adobe Analytics
- Surveytown
- Google Analytics
If this is not what you want, you can use its API to build your custom integration.
Campaigner reporting
See how your different campaigns are faring under the tab Reports. You’ll see the open and click rate as with the number of replies and unsubscribes. If you hit the “Refresh” button, you get to see real-time results. You’ll also find how your experiments are doing. Which leads to
A/B testing
In the tab Experiments, you can set up variations to test your subject lines or email designs. A/B testing or sending out variations of your campaign helps you find out what your audience finds the most attractive and engaging.
Support
This is another area where Campaigner shines. It offers 24/7 email and phone support for all plans. Note though that it has reduced the times due to the pandemic.
If you’re working on a campaign, you’ll find the help button in the upper right-hand corner. This will open a searchable help page with a glossary. Of course, there are also tutorials and videos that you can browse in your own time.
Pricing
The pricing structure is based on how many contacts you have as well as what you’re going to be using both for sending emails and SMS. For online stores, Campaigner has another pricing structure.
Is Campaigner right for you?
Some editors may look a bit outdated or not appear as attractive as you might be used to, but they get the job done and are not distracting in any way. This makes Campaigner easy to learn and easy to use. If you don’t need automation workflows with conditional steps, its basic feature set combined with support via phone and email is a well-rounded package.
It’s a solid offering for SMBs with a larger contact list. It’s particularly interesting for online stores.
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Original post here: Campaigner review
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