Email automation software with optimized personalization to drive engagement.
N/A
Autoklose
Score 8.5 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Autoklose headquartered in Toronto provides an SEP solution, presenting a combined package of sales email automation and tracking, contact and email campaign management with sequence templates and optimization, sales intelligence with contact verification, follow-up tracking, and integration with commonly used CRMs (e.g. Salesforce), marketing suites (e.g. Hubspot), and email marketing tools (Mailchimp) to coordinate activites between them.
Small businesses with even smaller marketing budgets and no email marketing experience would be better off selecting a lower-end email marketing provider. However, Adestra will provide a growing company with every email marketing tool along the way.
If someone only runs a campaign using email and telephone communication, Autoklose is perfect, and I highly recommend it. If someone uses a more diverse set of tools and wants a more complex type of sequence, Autoklose does not allow their users to program communication tools that some other tools and software allow.
Adestra's "dynamic" list allows users to consolidate multiple lists in combination with data filters and exclusion lists. This implements segmentation and is a powerful marketing tool.
Adestra's MessageFocus API integration provides developer-tools for list, campaign or transactional automated requirements.
Campaigns can be sorted into project folders. This allows marketers to group campaigns together for management or reporting requirements. Moving or copying campaigns from one project to another is a simple process.
Data downloads via Reporting is available at every level, from overview to individual KPI.
Creating "core" tables helps marketers develop lists with similar attributes. Whether a list has many fields or simply the one required email address field, a "core" table helps to quickly map data labels from spreadsheet to online database. Creating data labels on the fly is a simple process, as well. The "core" table also groups similar contacts into one core database.
Any list can be quickly "emptied" for to manage refreshed data. The contacts within the "emptied" list would still be members of the "core" table and so the process does not negatively impact reporting.
Unsubscribes can be managed in one list (as a default) or individual lists. Creating individual unsubscribe lists -- dependent on business requirements -- would allow for a preference center, whereby recipients could be given a choice as to which campaigns they receive.
The Form tool creates signup forms, simple surveys and landing pages. These can be hosted via Adestra or otherwise on the web. The tool provides for branding and proprietary cascading stylesheets, with a number of actions available through a drag-and-drop interface.
As of this writing, there are at least 3 different editors available (a drag-and-drop, a WYSIWYG and HTML). However, only a small template library is available if requested through support. Those expecting to find ready-built templates for re-branding would find them through the third-party EDM Designer drag-and-drop editor.
AutoKlose uses your own email, (e.g. Microsoft Outlook), so it runs the risk of exceeding the Microsoft Message Rate Limit, which can be problematic for your Outlook account.
Additional throttling limits for the SMTP Authentication protocol are:
30 messages per minute
Recipient rate limit of 10,000 recipients per day.
Exceeding these limits will cause the following issues:
Exceeding the per minute limit causes email delivery delays, any excess in message submission will be throttled and successively carried over to the following minutes.
Exceeding the per day limit causes the following error message:
I have been self-trained on different ESPs for over 10 years, so my experience isn't comparable to most users. However, I've trained people on various email marketing platforms, and with some training, clients have a positive user-experience with Adestra.
Whether it's setting up integrations, creating email campaigns, managing conversations with prospects, Autoklose is a well-designed tool that provides clarity along the way for users to find their bearings, and understand what to do. The help documentation is excellent, the support is great, but the tool is built in a way that simply makes sense when you're using it.
I have had campaign related issues solved very quickly. When there are technical issues, that involve more than one departmental, it may involve a longer turn-around and management.
Our Autoklose rep is amazing! Jelena has always gotten back to us within 24 hours, despite living on a different continent. She is completely proficient with the tool and is usually able to answer our questions with a brief email or short virtual meeting.
For medium and large sized businesses, Adestra competes well with dotMailer. While many of the functions are available through either provider, creating campaigns, managing lists and reviewing metrics are somewhat different. As of this writing, dotMailer's drag-and-drop editor dominates that platform and performs well for low-end users with little-to-no HTML experience. Even high-end users will appreciate how quickly campaigns can be built via the drag-and-drop editor. While Adestra utilizes the EDM Designer drag-and-drop, the third-party functionality is not completely cohesive and lack of a template library gives dotMailer a bit of an advantage.
I think that I have already said it, Autoklose has much better support and is really quick to set up and use compared with any of the other systems that I have used over the years.
I feel the increased prospect engagement and business opportunities created supported the cost. In my industry 1 customer can support positive ROI.
I saw an overall increase in mass emailing effectiveness and we were able to automate majority of our campaigns which increased productivity for marketing & sales.
