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So, what ESP do you use? What's your favorite?
I've used ExactTarget for about 5 years, and Eloqua for 1. (I've also dabbled in Strongmail and Mailchimp, but I'd like to forget both of those experiences.)
I guess I'm just curious about what everyone uses/loves/hates. It's been a while since I've used anything besides ET, so I'm curious if it's still the best in the business.
I have used several services and systems, ranging from Mailchimp, Blue Hornet, Constant Contact, MyEmma, Campaign Monitor, to a proprietary system my last job built that was the most insane, asinine thing I've ever seen in my life.
But, to rank them from favorite to least favorite.....
1) Campaign Monitor- by far the most friendly to a designer, IMHO. I love the ability to white label it, turn around, build a template with a library of repeater fields, get a client and let the money come on in.
2) MailChimp - Very friendly UI, great branding, and great resources.
3) MyEmma - Very helpful team and staff, and a pretty good system too.
4) Blue Hornet - at least the last time I used it, it was a bit clunky and strange.
5) Constant Contact - I try to steer clients away from this as strong as possible; it just isn't very good, and yes, it's cheap, but you get what you paid for.
ExactTarget - Probably good, but the current SalesForce integration is so awful that I wouldn't want to use them again. I'm literally not able to A/B test campaigns at the moment, amongst other things. Also unable to have more than 1 tab open, really annoying. It'll change, but steer clear for now until features are released (at which point they'll probably be great).
eCircle/Teradata - Used them for a year, okay, I guess. UI is fairly awful and again, not really able to work in more than 1 tab. Also, a sales person very blatantly told me some porkies, which doesn't bode well.
APSIS - Other than the name which makes me think of an abscess, my experience was pretty positive. Probably one of the best ESP's out there in terms of their template system which is usable for people with zero HTML experience and doesn't insert any junk tags. They also have a bunch of agile features other ESP's don't, like the ability to create customised images which contains the recipients name.
MailChimp - Does the job, if the job is to do some fairly basic email marketing. Probably the best in their niche.
SilverPop - Never again.
Adestra - The best I've used so far. Good API, built in abandoned cart and conversion tracking, the best filter tool I've used (seriously, it's so good any other tool just feels stupid in comparison). Account setup is also really handy when working in an agency setting or across multiple countries where you need to separate accounts, much more-so than CampaignMonitor.
I'm currently looking at Pardot and Marketo, both seem very feature strong, but a bit more niche than most ESP's. I looked at Eloqua but they cost £££££££££££.
Eloqua's pretty worth it - they have a beautiful drag and drop template builder (it's like working in InDesign!), and they have awesome, very user friendly ways to build behavior based campaigns. (Example: I send first email, then everyone's put in a wait step until a certain day. When it gets to that day, I put in a decision step for "Opened the email" or "Didn't open the email" (or purchased, or clicked, or whatever action you want). Then it's easy to select next steps for each option - wait more, send them a different email, whatever. Very cool!
Yep, agree with what you say with regards to it's ease of use with templates and drip campaigns, but it seemed on par with those features against Pardot and Marketo, just at a much higher cost. Marketo's the only one which allows sending of A/B tested emails as part of a drip campaigns, and A/B testing with the winner determined on conversion rate, as opposed to open/click rate.
I'm surprised to see such a positive response with Eloqua – I've found it pretty mediocre myself. Tell me more about what you love about it to try to change my mind – we're on a contract for at least another 12 months.
Is the drag and drop template builder actually useful? I found it was so limited I ended up importing html for every email I send. Are you actually editing running campaigns to add changes in the decision steps after deployment?
I should say that my company has been with them for years and a lot of things are done this way because its the way it has been done, but I do find about one new great thing every 3 months or so.
Help me find some more!
Hey Jacques - I used ET at my former job and was also always a bit frustrated with the SF integration—namely for the reason you gave, which was the lack of A/B testing. However, I saw that they had finally released that functionality recently: http://help.exacttarget.com/en/documentation/exacttarget/resources/release_notes/june_2014_release/#Integrations
My account manager did NOT mention that to me :s
I've used Silverpop, Responsys and had exposure to Adestra.
For me Responsys has an amazing drag and drop programme builder, great for everything from a series of welcome emails through to behavioral triggered emails. The folder structure in Responsys is from the 1990s.
Silverpop is decent, I found it very easy to make Dynamic content rules for campaigns.
Adestra seems a bit behind the other in terms of features. Is very easy to split test subjects.
My favorite - Responsys
I have experinece with Cheetah Mail, What Counts and Responsys. Cheetah mail was a great program 7 years ago, now it's just a shell of it's former self. Stay away if you can. My time with What Counts was not terrible, but Responsys is the superior tool.
We've been using Marketo for over 3 years and are pretty happy with it. They've definitely stepped up their game lately with their newest features (engagement/drip campaigns, easy email A/B/C... testing ..etc) and the redesign. Saying that, there are still some old sections of the app that can be a pain or not super-friendly. For me, I always hand-code my emails - I find the WYSIWYG editors always add such bloat the the HTML so the fancy editors really don't do anything for me. We also used Eloqua for a short time (testing email deliverability) and found it to be pretty comparable - but a bit overwhelming. That was 2 years ago so it might be more user-friendly now.
I use CheetahMail which seems a bit behind the times these days. Looking at upgrading to Experian's CCMP (Cross Channel Marketing Platform) which promise a better UI, intuitive program builder and a robust relational database among other things.
Anyone have experience of using it? I'd love to hear the positive and negatives...
We use Clang. It's an office-like environment with a user-friendly campaign designer to create email lifecycles. Anyone else has experience with or heared of Clang?
We're using Convio Luminate due to its API with Blackbaud and Sunguard's Advance CRM(s). We also use it as an engagement CRM that ties to our data feeds and event/forms module. It's "OK"... but a total higher education platform. Previously I used iModules and Harris Connect... loved iMods, but hated Harris, which was later acquired by iMods.
Other than that, best I ever used was MailChimp. But that's an obvious answer. Sorry you didn't like it! :( I'd like to try out Campaign Monitor or something custom with an open source platform at the base.
Cheers!