Campaigner

Comments: We understand Campainer is not just an email program, but they don't seem very interested in our suggestions along the way. It's disappointing that in all these years, there hasn't been any kind of redesign for ease of use. At what we are being charged monthly; we are likely going to shop around and see if there is something better matched for our needs, and priced more competitively.

Pros: We use it for simple email blasts to our neighborhood association. We don't use it for marketing campaigns, so therefore do not have the need for some of the functionality available with Campaigner. For our needs it works.

Cons: Ease of use. It is not intuitive, and they haven't done any kind of software or GUI redesign since we started using it (6+ years ago).
Making a template should be a lot easier than it is: Creating and editing templates has a lot of old graphic (frames?) technology that makes for a frustrating experience when trying to line up text blocks with headers, footers and images.
Writing an email with attachments should be easier. Having to upload a file/image to the media library, and then importing it into your email is a lot of steps. Instead, allow a person to add a file/image to an email note in the same simple fashion as any other email client works: add a paper clip button and allow us to select the file to add to the note. That seems like it should have been done a long time ago.
Also, if you accidentally remove a person from an email list, you have to call up Campaigner support to get it fixed; you can't manually fix it yourself. Very annoying.

Pros: Nothing I can think of at this moment. You can see under "cons" what I really think of their product.

Cons: 1) They have terrible customer service. Most of their CS reps on the phone are rude, unfriendly and unhelpful. Their standard response is to tell you to look up one of their online training videos. They don't want to take the time to help with anything or answer any questions. This has been going on for two years. I just spent 20 minutes - yes 20 minutes - waiting for their online chat guy to answer a simple question: "I sent an email in earlier today - can you let me know if you'll respond by email or I need to check your message center, and about how long is your average response time." Yep, 20 minutes waiting for their customer service representative to answer that one simple question. I gave up and disconnected after prompting him multiple times.
2) Last year they accidentally unsubscribed almost all of my customer database - 10K names - and didn't tell me. Because of the nature of our emails, we didn't notice for about two months - what a disaster. They said "oh that happens," didn't apologize and did not give any type of credit. They did, however, restore the unsubscribes as they found the exact time they did it.
3) The platform is clunky and the searches and segmenting are difficult to use. They do not have an easy way to do a date range search for bounces, or other things.
4) We get conflicting answers when we call customer service. In other words - it's a really really terrible platform with terrible people. We've been using ESPs for 14 years. We decided to use Campaigner about two years ago for our customer emailing only, based on someone's recommendation. It was a big mistake. Avoid at all costs.

Comments: The experience has been more or less good. The times I have needed to contact customer support, they have been amazingly responsive and helpful.

Pros: I prefer the full editor approach to creating our newsletter emails. It makes it easy to copy information from our website to the newsletter. The sending out of draft message is easy, as is the eventual scheduling of the newsletter.

Cons: The count of our current mailing list is not displayed in a useful manner. I believe it is reporting the entire size of the list, not just the number of active subscribers. It makes our list appear much larger than it really is.

Comments: Any time I've had questions or issues with Campaigner, Customer Support has been able to help. Whether it was a temporary power outage that prevented invites from being delivered to providing the domain/ip to prevent invites from being sent to junk mail. Campaigner makes good to deliver on their promises. I don't dread having to reach out to Customer Support because I know Campaigner will help me every time.

Pros: Being able to pull up old invites and using them as a foundation for new projects makes working on Campaigner very easy. The customization options are not limited and allow me to create unique invites and format them based on project specific needs. The reporting tool is extremely helpful and creating internal reports has never been easier with the stats breakdown (i.e. clicked, opened, delivered, etc.). Overall, a great product and much easier to use than other similar platforms.

Cons: I don't always receive test invites. I might get it once in a while but end up always having to send out an actual invite to myself or team member so that I can view what my recipients will see.

Comments: nothing really

Pros: great tech support! I probably would have gone to another service but your text support is so good - I love the fact that I can talk to a real person, I don't have to wait on hold forever and they are always kind, even when I am not such a tech savvy person, they are still patient and helpful.

Cons: the interface is a bit PC, in that I mean it's not very intuitive, it's not visually pleasing, which I think if you want to show people how to send out well-designed pleasing emails to their customer it should be more graphically interesting. I completely create my own emails and I do not use any of your templates because they are not designed well.