ActiveDEMAND vs. SMTP Email Relay Solutions

Just research the company, look at their resources and see if they really understand the marketing effort

SMTP Email Relay Solutions is a great service if you are in a field where sending out bulk information, such as monthly statements to clients, invoices, or any back-to-back emails that would normally get flagged for "spam" is required.

• Customer Service - this company EXCELS at customer service, always answering our questions and being helpful.
• Innovative Ideas - they stay on top of the trends in marketing, offer ways for us to incorporate these items into our efforts.
• Friendly staff - the staff at ActiveDEMAND are great to work with and are responsive to our needs.

• It allows us to send email through the secure email gateway.
• We are able to track and scan all email communications
• It provides a way for legacy and current applications to send out notification and mass email communications.

Incentivized

• Reporting - Though the reporting is extensive and very very good... I sometimes miss a simplified view of email opens/clicks/link clicks etc.
• Don't get me wrong, you can get to this data in ActiveDEMAND relatively easily, the default views through the campaign dashboard are just quite detailed (which some people would probably prefer) and I just don't think that we need that level of reporting on first glance. That being said, I do love the option to drill down and uncover the complex detailed data when i do want it (ActiveDEMAND is very good at this).
• One element of reporting that I would also like would be an event registrant report showing all registered people (this part exists) and their responses on the registration form they completed to register for the event. (These things would be dietary restrictions, industry, customized responses to other event related questions).
• I also wish the reports autorefreshed more frequently.
• ICS Files - Right now there are work arounds for loading an ICS file (Calendar meeting invite file) that can be accessed in campaign assets. I just wish this was more native to the tool.
• Archive Filing - Now, first of all, it is so amazing that ActiveDEMAND even has an archiving feature... I LOVE this. One small downside, however, is that the archiving cannot be organized using a folder structure or anything. I would like to be able to group my live events together, then group my webinars together etc.

• As with any technology on a server, we sometimes see issues with downtime related to network changes or firewall updates.
• It can be a challenge to work with some of our older applications when the TLS feature is used.
• I wish there was a more direct way to reliably use SMTP for mass email sends without the fear of being blacklisted.

Incentivized

I have yet to encounter any hiccups with their services. I send a large volume of emails monthly and have yet to experience any delay in my work.

ActiveDEMAND is much more robust than most of the above products. It does more and provides more detailed analytics. It is also very user friendly. The user interface is nice and it is very easy to navigate the tool. The brand identity and replicated content are two areas where ActiveDEMAND really shines compared to competitors.

Office 365 does use secure non-standard ports for SMTP connectivity causing a problem with older programs. SMTP Email Delivery from Exchange solves this problem by giving the network admin full control over ports and specific program connections. While we do use both Office 365 and the SMTP Email Delivery we find that a mix is needed in order to meet all expectations for our end users. The majority of our SMTP communications, for users, go through Office 365 while the majority of our applications and servers do go through the SMTP Email Delivery service.

Incentivized

• Simplified email marketing and event management
• Better tracking of leads
• Better intelligence about which initiatives are working well and where future opportunities lie
• Less reliant on IT department/third party to execute our online marketing

• It's the easiest way to send mail out. No worries about complex configurations.
• It can be finicky when used in a hybrid Office 365 environment to get the proper pathways secured and working.
• I wish there were a better way to send out mass emails, on-site, without our domain or server IP being blacklisted.

Incentivized