It has been a while since the last review in our ongoing Email Service Provider Round-up. The fifth ESP in our Review was Campaigner Pro. Habeas, a leader in “Super” white listing services, selects Campaigner Pro as their Email Service Provider.

User Interface

When you first log-in Campaigner Pro’s landing page doesn’t have much going for it other then one large report giving you the overall statistics of subscribers, hard and soft bounces, unsubscribe. It all doesn’t seem very actionable. With other ESP’s they give you recent activity based on campaigns. Campaigner’s report just didn’t seem to be very actionable. It isn’t compared to the last days activities or recent campaigns so I can’t see it helping as an ESP health meter. Campaigner Pro is different from other ESPs in that they focus on having one large pool of email addresses and count on you using segmentation of attribute fields to create your email campaigns.

When creating an email campaign, CampaignerPro has a clean WYSIWYG editor as well as an easy to use tool for creating dynamic content for segmented groups. Another nice feature is their auto-generate a text version from html to ease the process of creating a plain Text version of the email. It is a simple tool that was missing in most of the other ESPs I evaluated.

The deliverability stats is one of the nicer additions in the suite. It is a display of all of the current ISPs that campaigns had been sent to and their bounce rates, spam complaints etc. to each of the ISP. It would measure your real-time relationship with each ISP. It didn’t give you anything actionable because CamapignerPro would be actively correcting any issues that had developed, but it would be nice to know when actions needed to take place.

Another interesting addition to the suite is their workflow UI. Using the 150 available custom attributes you can create elaborate workflows that could be driven in real-time as opposed to API driven workflows. You can even combine them to have an event that is triggered by an update from the API or the website and build out complicated workflows entirely within the drag and drop user interface.

Support for SPF, Sender ID and Domain Keys in built-in. Feedback loops with major ISPs allow for proactive deliverability and reputation monitoring

The Bad: CampaignerPro did not have a spam score for evaluating your message before sending it out. They claim that ISP’s don’t score emails when determining whether an email is spam, that it is completely based on the ISP. I found that hard to believe because even email software like Outlook makes judgments on the quality of the email and whether it should go to the bulk/ junkmail folder or the inbox.

The user Interface changes on a few occasions and appeared to have some kind of iframe problem. Some of the pages had a left side column with the original navigation squeezed into the main content section.

Deliverability

Campaigner Pro , authentication tools and has ongoing ISP scores. Part of my review was to send the same email campaign using each ESP that was in the round-up to determine what the baseline deliverability rates for each ESP.

Results of the Campaigner Pro test email campaign:

• Number of emails sent: 25,000
• delivered: 16,962
• Hard Bounces: 2,051
• Soft Bounces:5,764
• Unique Opens: 2,085 (12% open rate)

A 12% open rate was average of the open rates we achieved with the other ESPs.

Final Thoughts:

Campaign Pro is a sufficient ESP. They were was missing some of the features that I felt were important such as a simple Spam check to evaluate an email before it is sent. They rely on third party options such as a ReturnPath account to cover those missing feature.

Automatic list hygine, removing known SPAM traps and known bad addresses.

CampaignerPro’s user interface was not as smooth or consistent as it should have been, bad frames and changing UI made me feel like the solution wasn’t well planned.

Also, their sales person mentioned that they were featured in the most recent Jupiter report but when asked to reproduce the document the story changed. “It was a previous report.” When asked to produce THAT previous report, he had to eventually retract that offer as well and asked if I would like customer testimonials!