Campaigner

The couple of customer service reps I talked to (on the phone) along the way were nice. But clearly didn't haven't had any real impact on the actual outcomes of our experience.

Just about everything (except, as mentioned the couple of customer service reps I talked to were nice, if lacking clout).

I need to be clear up front—this is a review of my company's experience with Campaigner AS A COMPANY, not of their email marketing services on a technical or feature level. Our experience of Campaigner comes from their take-over of StreamSend earlier in 2018—we were StreamSend customers, though actually preparing to move to another ESP. • Campaigner gave us JUST 3 WEEKS WARNING that they had taken over StreamSend and would be migrating our account to their own service. Various StreamSend API endpoints that we used would then be deprecated. In other words, we were given 3 weeks notice that various parts of our email systems were about to BREAK if we didn't drop everything else and do something about it. Which meant a rushed migration of many services and systems to a new provider. It was a big deal. CAMPAIGNER SHOULD HAVE GIVEN US SEVERAL MONTHS NOTICE AT LEAST OF DEPRECATION OF EXISTING FUNCTIONALITY. → What's more, they sent a notification email of the upcoming changes ONLY to the account holder, rather than to ALL users with login addresses that would be affected. I asked them about this on the phone later, and was told that that would have meant sending many thousands of emails out(!!). But mass emails are WHAT AN ESP (such as Campaigner) DOES FOR A LIVING, so why should that have been a deterrent to alerting ALL affected users of the upcoming changes!? (It was also confirmed on the phone that we hadn't missed any previous emails; 3 weeks notice was indeed all the warning they gave us.) → What's more, the one email (i.e. to account holder only, rather than all users; there were subsequent emails later in the warning period) giving the meagre 3 weeks notice, landed in our I.T. managers Spam folder! That did not inspire confidence in Campaigner as an ESP! • After our account was migrated to Campaigner, a redirect was put on our old StreamSend log-in page, with instruction on how to log in to our new Campaigner service. (These instructions were not emailed to all users, as was absolutely essential, see below!) Barely 10 days later, the redirect was removed altogether, so the old login page was now simply a broken page, and users who had not logged in in that brief window, had no idea how to login to the new service! THE REDIRECT SHOULD HAVE BEEN LEFT IN PLACE FOR MANY MONTHS! • We were on a monthly prepaid system with the old service provider and this arrangement was taken over by Campaigner. Just before the next new month began (and following 2 weeks of inactivity on our part on our new Campaigner account; i.e we weren't even using the service), I called up to talk about cancelling the account. I was informed that the next month's PRE-PAYMENT, for ~US$600 had just been charged THAT DAY, but that if I cancelled right then, processing a refund should be no problem, as it was quite obviously a reasonable refund request. I was told the refund could take UP TO 10 days, but was likely to be quicker, because it was such a straight forward request. I went ahead and cancelled the account. Almost 3 months later WE HAVE YET TO GET OUR MONEY BACK, in spite of customer service representatives expressing surprise when I've call up and agreeing that the refund situation was extremely reasonable and straight forward. I've sent plenty of reminder emails about the matter. The official line was that larger refund requests (such as ours) could take UP TO 6 weeks. That has long passed, and repeated attempts to get our money back have failed. We are currently in the process of trying to get our bank to dispute the transaction, since Campaigner simply haven't done the right thing by us here. So, how is the Campaigner email marketing service as far as features, reliability of service, etc, etc? I'm sorry, I have no idea, and in no way am implying anything about their technical ESP services here, since we never actually used them. (To reflect this, I have rated 'usability', 'feature set' and 'pricing' at 3/5 stars each. I wasn't allowed to submit this review without giving a score, and giving either 1 or 5 stars would not have been reasonable.) But based on the above experience, we had no regrets at all about having gone with a different ESP when Campaigner took over our old StreamSend account. The migration of our account was—to call a spade a spade—incompetently handled, and Campaigner have still failed to return ~US$600 of our money.