For our recent vendor move, I tried several ESPs, one of which is CampaignerPro. They offered low prices, an easy to use interface and interesting trigger email tool CampaignerPro is among the low cost providers that make up the so called “Tier 1” group.

There are a few common limitations that most of the companies that fall into this category have such as not allowing role based addresses. Typically Tier 1 providers do not have as robust a database system for list management and segmentation as higher level tier providers. Many also have some limits to the number of fields provided or field types. There may be hurdles to moving your program to the new system with list imports or list structure.

Compared to other Tier 1 providers, CampaignerPro does offer a fairly robust database, but its import tool was buggy and threw out many of my existing subscribers that were valid addresses which actively clicked or opened with the past 6 months. It also flags imports with an address they have determined to be a spam trap, but does not identify them for you. Figuring the address out by chunking out the list and re-importing can be tedious, but it will force you to fix one of the main contributors to poor deliverability – repeatedly mailing to spam trap and honey pot addresses. Hitting spam traps is one of the factors that hurt your reputation with ISPs, along others such as high complaint rate due to poor permission practices. Alternatively, if you had a relatively new email program that would be building the readership with CampaignerPro these restrictions would help you to build and maintain a very clean list.

One feature of CampaignerPro’s product that really shined was their trigger messaging system. It works by creating flow charts that show email triggers based on subscriber actions. You may also put in logic to create branches of trigger events. For example if your subscriber opens the first message they get a follow up in 3 days with several linked preference based choices. Each of the links would then trigger the next email in the series after the appropriate amount of time has passed to control frequency. Using it, one can easily visually layout their campaigns around their subscribers to create a more engaging email program.

Overall CampaignerPro was not a bad product, but the difficult transition made a poor first impression. In contrast once the transition was complete the tool has effective.

Visit CampaignerPro at http://www.campaigner.com/