Campaigner Review: Is It Really Worth the Money in 2024?

Campaigner at a Glance

Good, but I Can See Room for Improvement

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Campaigner charges almost as much as the top EMS out there – but, it doesn’t really deliver on its promises. It does offer some pretty powerful tools (like analytics and automation workflows) – but other important features are not quite what I was hoping for.

First up, it took me more than 5 days to access my Campaigner account after I’d signed up for the trial. So, not the best start.

Despite that, my first impression of the platform’s features was actually very positive. I liked the templates, and the email builder felt intuitive. Creating lists, segmenting audiences, and personalizing my messages was pretty easy – even if the interface felt a bit outdated.

The analytics suite is also quite powerful, allowing you to generate detailed reports based on a number of statistics.

But the pricing model is really confusing, which won’t suit beginner marketers and marketers with smaller lists..

Good Overall, but Some Important Tools Are Missing

Campaign’s email templates and editor are actually pretty good. With the exception of the occasional bug/freeze here and there, I don’t have too much to complain about. However, the lack of landing page templates and the ridiculously priced automation workflows left a bitter taste in my mouth, dragging the final score down.

Email Campaigns, Templates & Personalization

There’s a beautiful template behind every well-designed email. Yes, starting from scratch is always an option – but not if your design skills are as terrible as mine.

When signing up, Campaigner promised me 900+ responsive templates, but I only counted 43 unique “themes”– as they’re called. Each theme has 12 layouts (like newsletter, ecommerce, promo, blog) to choose from…but that still only brings the total to 516. That means Campaigner owes me 384+ templates.

Joking aside, Campaigner’s themes and layouts come in all shapes and colors, offering plenty of customization options for even the pickiest of marketers (not me, of course).

The design team has put a lot of work into creating these, and it shows! I love how I can pick a theme that I like and do different things with it by playing with the layouts and shifting elements around.

The editor itself is incredibly robust, with all the tools needed to craft the perfect email. You can insert text, images, buttons, and HTML blocks wherever you like, and you can personalize your message with merge tags.

Dynamic content (in other words, content that changes based on who’s viewing your email) is available on the Essential plan. The downside to this is that the platform feels a bit heavy, and I spent quite a bit of time staring at a white screen. Crashes and freezes weren’t too rare, either.

On the plus side, the A/B testing tool is also quite capable, allowing users to test variations of their subject lines, preheaders, and even email design.

Mailing Lists and Segmentation

You can easily import contacts by copying and pasting email addresses directly into a given text area. If you already have well-formatted files, you’d be happy to know that Campaigner supports all major data field formats, including CSV, XLS, XLSX, VCF, TXT, and TSV.

If you’re on an ecommerce plan (which costs extra), you can also import subscriber data from popular ecommerce platforms, such as Magento and Shopify… But in my view, locking integrations behind a paywall is a big no-no. Especially when Campaigner already charges almost three times more than its competitors for its cheapest plan.

Segmentation on Campaigner is quite advanced, but the UI could use an update. It’s possible, for example, to create a dynamic segment that includes all the contacts who interacted (opened/clicked) with my campaigns in the past 30 days but didn’t convert. That’s obviously powerful stuff, but Campaigner’s interface doesn’t feel great to use – the small text and tiny buttons were giving me a headache.

Campaigner keeps track of your unsubscribed contacts with a global suppression list that you can easily export with a few clicks. Unfortunately, there was no clean-up option – so I made my own. What can I say – I like my lists nice and shiny.

First, I created a dynamic segment that included all contacts who didn’t open or click any of my emails in the past 6 months. I could then easily view all inactive contacts and unsubscribe them manually with the click of a button (ok, maybe two).

Landing Pages

The landing page editor is available with all plans, but it’s ancient – a relic of a bygone internet era. It’s a classic editor that requires HTML knowledge and plenty of manual work to get anything done.

There are, of course, no templates to choose from, and all landing pages need to be designed from scratch – unless you already have some HTML code handy.

Needless to say, I didn’t spend much time exploring Campaigner’s landing page feature. I never learned how to code with HTML, and I don’t think I will now. Why would I when I can choose from ActiveCampaign’s 40+ templates1 to create a beautiful landing page in less than 10 minutes?

Campaigner seriously needs to up its game by adding templates and introducing a drag-and-drop landing page builder.

Automation

Campaigner markets itself as a “seriously powerful marketing automation” platform, but it has locked automation workflows behind the Advanced plan, which costs $[-]. Yup, you heard that right.

Sure, simple autoresponders are available to mere mortals like me, and you can use them to set up basic welcome sequences, drip campaigns, and retention emails. But the juicy visual automation builder that can supposedly split campaigns based on contact behavior, automatically update lists and segments, and do all kinds of amazing stuff? Nope, I guess I’m too poor for that.

It’s unfortunate, but I can’t really let Campaigner get away with this one. Are they seriously suggesting you need to pay hundreds of dollars to access their best feature? ActiveCampaign, which currently holds the #1 spot in our EMS list, offers hundreds of advanced automation recipes with its cheapest plan.

Campaigner Will Do What It Can to Deliver Your Emails

Crafting the perfect email might consume hours of your time, yet, ultimately, ensuring its delivery holds the utmost significance. Marketers adore dispatching numerous emails and devising various deliverability rates. However, let me share a confidential insight with you: these numbers never provide dependable reliability.

Why? Let’s assume I use Campaigner to send 10,000 emails, out of which 9,200 reach my subscribers’ inboxes – a deliverability rate of 92%. But wait. What did my email look like, what were its contents, and how was it formatted? When did my subscribers receive it? There are way too many variables to account for.

Deliverability tests are rarely replicable, resulting in anecdotal evidence. Here at Website Planet, we instead look for features that can potentially boost your deliverability rate. The presence (or absence) of such features on Campaigner determined the final deliverability score you see at the end of this section.

First, I checked to see if Campaigner offers DKIM authentication. Long story short, DKIM is how email service providers (ISPs) can tell whether an email is really coming from you – a digital signature of sorts. Although Campaigner does have DKIM, the knowledge base offers little information on how to set it up. If you’ve never had to deal with security records before, the setup process is bound to give you a headache.

Next, I delved deeper into Campaigner’s anti-spam policy. You see, platforms that don’t tolerate spam in any form tend to enjoy better deliverability rates. Sending IPs are shared, and a few bad eggs can negatively affect the performance of honest marketers as well. Campaigner adheres to anti-spam laws and won’t hesitate to freeze accounts if suspicious activity is detected.

Unfortunately, Campaigner didn’t bat an eyelid when I imported several spam contacts – which brought the final deliverability score down.

Campaigner allows you to include affiliate links in your emails – provided those offers are relevant to your industry and offer real value. Multi-level marketing schemes and unauthorized advertising are strictly forbidden – which is great for deliverability. Obviously, that’s not something the average user will have to worry about.

Finally, I checked to see whether you can set up a dedicated (or private) IP address with Campaigner. A private IP allows you to use your own domain to deliver emails, protecting your sending reputation as a result. Unfortunately, Campaigner only offers private IPs with its custom Enterprise plan – which most of us simply can’t afford, but that’s not unusual with other EMS’.

Plenty of Reports, Outdated Interface

When you send a campaign, Campaigner automatically creates an advanced report that updates itself every few minutes. Although it’s easy to read, the interface does feel a bit outdated. The dashboard comes with all the basic data an email marketer needs, such as opens, clicks, and bounces. It also calculates your average click-to-open rate (CTO) and click-through rate (CTR).

But there’s actually a lot more Campaigner can do. For example, there’s a click heatmap that will highlight the areas most frequently clicked – which can help you optimize your copy and design better buttons.

You can also quickly view the total number of social shares, and under “user agent data,” there’s more information about your contacts’ operating systems, browsers, and email clients.

That’s powerful stuff, but it should be noted that there are platforms that provide you with even more advanced information. One thing that’s noticeably absent is an activity report based on location. Most top competitors (AWeber, Activecampaign) can generate activity reports based on geolocation data.

There’s also a lack of comparative tools, such as the ones available on Mailchimp.

Overall, Campaigner offers a robust – yet visually outdated – analytics suite.

Hit or Miss and Not Really Available 24/7

You never know what to expect from support as a free/trial user, and Campaigner left me with mixed feelings. You can ask questions via phone, live chat, and email, but chances are you won’t hear back from the support team as quickly as you’d like. The Campaigner knowledge base features hundreds of articles on various topics.

When I first created my account, I had trouble logging in. For some reason, I was never sent an activation link, so I had no password and no way of accessing the platform. I sent an email that read:

“I signed up for a new account a few days ago, and I’m still waiting for it to get approved. Is this normal?”

A representative replied a few hours later, telling me I had to agree with the terms and conditions to get my account approved:

They pasted a non-clickable (!) link to Campaigner’s terms and conditions but offered no actual advice on how to fix the problem. I sent another email expressing my frustration, receiving an equally unhelpful reply some hours later.

I decided to contact someone via live chat instead, but the feature was unavailable – it was past midnight (GMT+0). I waited until the next morning when I finally managed to get hold of someone that could help:

A few questions later (and more than 5 days after my trial had already begun), I finally managed to log in and start testing the platform. What an adventure!

I then checked out phone support – which fortunately was a lot better. You see, I wanted to test the landing page feature, which was disabled by default on trial accounts. I phoned Campaigner’s sales team and asked if they could activate it temporarily for testing purposes. They were very polite, and less than 5 minutes later, the “landing page” button popped up on my dashboard.

Good phone support is a big plus, but Campaigner needs to allocate resources to improving its email and live chat support, too.

Campaigner’s Pricing Structure Doesn’t Make a Lot of Sense

Campaigner offers three email plans, as well as custom plans for enterprises with enormous contact lists. There’s no free plan, but you can test most of the platform’s features with the 30-day free trial.

Campaigner’s pricing options are outrageously inflexible. Most email marketing services come with sliders you can play with until you find a deal that covers your needs – both feature- and contact-wise. On the other hand, Campaigner’s prices (and contact limits) are set in stone.

What’s the takeaway? The plans are fairly priced, but only if you’re close to the cutoff point. The Starter plan includes up to 5,000 contacts and offers some solid email marketing tools. But why should I pay the full price ($59.00/month) if I only have 500 or 1,000 contacts? it doesn’t seem fair.

The same principle applies to the Essential plan, which removes branding and throws dynamic content into the mix. Sure, $179.00/month is a good price if I have 25,000 subscribers, but what if I only have, let’s say, 8,000 contacts in my list? Why does it cost the same?

The Advanced plan is set at $649.00/month, unlocking API access and introducing the much-discussed automation workflows. Again, if I’m taking advantage of the maximum number of contacts (100,000), that doesn’t seem like a bad deal. But If I end with any number below 50,000 (and above 25,000), I’ll be massively overpaying.

Campaigner’s pricing system makes zero sense and is in need of an overhaul.