Critical Impact

Critical Impact is an email and SMS marketing platform from Critical Impact Software, Inc. It sends newsletters, personalized and automated email, transactional mail and SMS text messages, and it covers forms, landing pages, polls and surveys from the same account. The company sells it in two ways: directly to organizations that run their own campaigns, and as a white-label platform for agencies and businesses that want to offer email under their own brand. The homepage pitches it with "Boost Sales. Grow Audiences. Reduce Workloads." and describes the whole toolset as available "at a competitive price model."

What a sender gets

Campaigns start from a template library and a message editor, and templates can be streamlined across every client account. Scheduling is built around a single send page: you choose your send options on one screen, send immediately or schedule for later, and a confirmation screen shows all the send details before the message goes out, which the site pitches as a way to prevent mistakes. Inbox preview lets you test the email across device screens, from phones to tablets to monitors. A/B tests compare two versions of a message to see which performs better, and messages can go out with Google Analytics link tracking enabled.

Segmentation is the area the site spends most time on. The Dynamic List Generator builds a list of subscribers on the spot from your own rules, using purchase history, website activity, email interactions, CRM data and custom fields. The homepage gives concrete examples: send only to subscribers who opened or clicked your last email, send to active subscribers who opened or clicked any message in the past 30 days, or select subscribers by a custom field such as "city" to reach a region with local deals. Dynamic content lets one email show different blocks to different subscribers.

Automation covers an automation builder, drip campaigns, triggered emails and auto-segmentation. Subscriber scoring algorithms "mine your data" to pick out the subscribers with the highest odds of reading your next email, reading more of them, or buying again.

Web visitor tracking and conversion tracking connect email to what people do on your site. The homepage says that after 10 minutes of setup you can segment subscribers by website browse activity, time on site, goal completions and pages viewed, and it highlights revenue per email as a metric for finding the messages that drive the most sales. Real-time tracking and reports round this out, and account data can be exported for client reporting.

Forms, landing pages, polls and surveys have their own product area. The form builder creates signup and data collection forms, and the site explains why a form should live on a landing page linked from the email rather than inside it: embedded form elements can break privacy laws in many jurisdictions.

SMS runs alongside email. The feature list names SMS messages, SMS lead capture and automated SMS, and the homepage suggests text alerts for announcements and special deals. Email and SMS lists are managed in the same interface.

For developers there is an API and transactional email product ("api & transactional emails"), plus FTP for data transfer. The feature list also names a Salesforce integration, a Google Analytics integration, a Facebook integration and ecommerce integrations, and the site has an integrations page for the full set.

White label for agencies and businesses

The white-label offer is the platform's most distinctive feature. The agency page calls it "one of the industry’s only true white label email platforms" and pitches it to agencies that want to give clients a branded email tool without building one. Agencies can either run their clients' campaigns themselves or give each client a custom login to view and edit their own campaigns. While a client is signed in, the agency can see how the client uses the platform and where it could help. Sub accounts are part of the feature list, client reports can be run all at once with a few clicks, and results can be compared between client accounts. There is a separate white-label offer for businesses as well as agencies.

Pricing, reviews and policies

The site publishes no prices. The agency page promotes "Flexible Pricing Plans" and pricing flexibility, and every page steers visitors to book a demo or a live tour of the platform.

The agency page embeds reviews from Capterra, rated "EXCELLENT" and "Based on 13 reviews". The reviewers praise the support team above all: one says "The response to my needing help is immediate and helpful", and another calls customer service "through-the-roof great" and says the system "just works". One reseller says it replaced its prior partner with Critical Impact as a white-labeled solution. The same reviews list real drawbacks: an interface some find dated or not always intuitive, slowness when building lists with complicated rules, mobile responsiveness that could be better, and one user's report that a raw-data export for a deployment was not built in, that some reports needed custom work by the engineering team, that re-sending to non-opens takes a manual dynamic list, and that the bot-click filter still let a handful of bot clicks through.

On legal terms, the footer links an Application Service Agreement, a privacy policy, a data processing page, an anti-spam policy, and two CCPA documents: a CCPA privacy policy and a CCPA policy for clients' subscribers. There is also a report abuse page. The company blog covers compliance topics such as a privacy policy's role under GDPR, CCPA and CASL, written by a senior account executive.

Support and resources

Support is reachable by phone at a toll-free number and by email, and the knowledge base, a library of how-to videos and a resource blog sit under Resources. Account help is linked from the footer. The reviews consistently single out fast, knowledgeable support, including one reviewer who notes that the team was open to developing a missing feature.

Who it suits

Critical Impact fits marketing agencies that want to resell email and SMS under their own brand, with client logins, sub accounts and bulk client reporting built in. It also suits mid-sized organizations, including those with several newsletters and large subscriber lists, that want detailed segmentation, web behavior tracking and a support team they can call. Teams on Salesforce, or those who need an API for transactional mail from their own application, have both covered.

It suits buyers who want to compare prices online less well, since every plan is quoted after a demo. Teams that want a very modern interface, or custom reporting without extra engineering work, should weigh the drawbacks the reviews raise.