Adestra vs. Brevo vs. WhatCounts

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.

Incentivized

I wanted to pull a publication from MailChimp and park it elsewhere. Brevo was a bit of a pain to set up, but after I invested the onboarding time, it's been a cost-effective way to produce this newsletter. I would encourage someone to build in the time with both templates and editor. After that, using Brevo is as easy as using other services.

Incentivized

How big is your email list? For the money WhatCounts allows us to manage a large list and gives us great tools. If you have a small list this product might be more than you need. How many emails do you want to send? WhatCounts charges by the email and of course you get a better price per email the more emails you send. If you will not be sending many emails or are sending to a small list WhatCounts might not be the right tool for you.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Sendinblue allows you to send emails that do not arrive in spam
• Sendinblue, through its security measures and filters, helps keep contact databases well organized and up to date
• Sendinblue offers an easy-to-use newsletter creation tool and, in case of lack of inspiration, many templates

Incentivized

• We receive super customer service from a dedicated account representative.
• The list management tools are easy to use and give us granular insight into what users are opening and where they are clicking.
• The analytics give us a variety of ways to look at the types of devices being used to view our content and the ways our users interact with content. For example we can see that most opens are on mobile but if a reader wants to spend time clicking into more in depth content they move over to a desktop computer.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• not easy to move/duplicate sections. much easier to just drag and drop. still working this out.
• don't like the logo or text included with the newsletter sign up form. have now upgraded, but think this should not be included for lower pricing plans
• not getting issues completely answered by support team. currently have an issue with email sign up not working on mobile. have been told it is not working, but not given any suggestions on how to fix this.
• have had unusual issue come up with a link. On 2 separate occasions, with 2 separate newsletters that went out, and 2 different images/articles/links, the link was wrong. Even though we checked it, previewed it and sent test email before we sent out these newsletters and these links were correct. It is the section at the bottom of our current newsletter. On both these occasions, when the customer has forwarded the email they received to us, the link was was to an old link - and it was the same old link on both occasions. We have asked for this to be looked into and are waiting on reply. We are going to try to delete this section this week and re-create. It is not a good look for us.
• We have another issue with how our newsletter is previewing in Outlook. The images and the text are not lining up - not on every section, but on 2 sections out of the 5 sections. Also, the Read Full Article text in the button is not showing properly. Again, not a professional look for us which we are not happy with.

Incentivized

• Some of the list management tools were hard to find at first but now I use them every month. If I could change one thing I would allow the account details filter window to show all the available slots with no scrolling and I would add a feature to set / reset all selections on the dropdowns.

Incentivized

SendinBlue is providing an excellent value to my business by simplifying and speeding up the way that we interact with our customers

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It's okay, it's easy to use, has good features, and good automation options, but it lacks better delivery support. Many messages end up in spam, even though I have a dedicated IP address that I pay for separately, and I think it needs more design options to make emails stand out, especially in terms of typography. That's why I'm not giving it a 10. It also lacks integration with other tools. EStá bien, es fácil de usar, tiene buenas funcionalidades, tiene buenas opciones de automatización, le falta mayor apoyo en cuanto a entrega, muchos de los mensajes se vana spam, aun cuando tengo una IP dedicada que pago por aparte y creo que faltan opciones de diseño para que los correos puedan ser diferentes, sobre todo en tipografía. Por eso no le doy 10. Falta integración con otras herramientas.

I have never had any planned outages in the time I have been using the software and have had no issues with accessing it.

Everything loads very quickly, it saves as you go along so you're unlikely to loose work if your computer fails. Reports are there immediately too so you're able to act quickly on customer engagement.

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.

Incentivized

These people helped me identify errors when setting up DKIM and were more than helpful in trying to diagnose low open rates with a few campaigns identifying where improvement can be made and how to more effectively manage contact lists. The support is excellent.

Incentivized

We have a great representative. She schedules regular calls with our team and helps us learn new ways to use the tool. We get great personal support. I know she has many other clients but I always feel like she has time for me and genuinely enjoys working with our team.

Incentivized

If you follow all the steps of the setup process they give you, any one can set this up in about 1 - 2 hours.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Well, these other tools do the same thing, they contribute to email campaigns; however, we tried them and stopped using them because they are not at all simple, and we believe that Brevo is the simplest, most intuitive, and most effective tool that exists for this type of strategy, so we decided to stick with it. Bueno estas otras herramientas hacen lo mismo, aportan a las campañas de mailing sin embargo las probamos y dejamos de usarlas ya que no son para nada sencillas y creemos que brevo es lo mas sencillo, intuitovo y efectivo que existe para este tipo de estrategias por ello decidimos quedarnos

We selected WhatCounts because it had the ability to help us manage our large list and gave us tools to help tailor our messages. In addition, WhatCounts had the ability to allow us to have an enterprise license but we could still have individual department accounts.

Incentivized

They have multiple options for upgrading bigger senders or if you need more emails sent in a month.

• For companies that focus on goals and analytics, Adestra provides all the necessary tools.

Incentivized

• Saved us over 80% of what we used to pay aWeber for the exact same services
• Maintained similar effectiveness in email blast/newsletter open rates (slightly less than aWeber but within margins)
• Saves us an incredible amount of time in content creation using Brevo content editor

• We use WhatCounts as a communication tool to our external groups mainly families and alumni. In our case our main objective is to get these groups timely information. While some of our emails do have a call to action for example signing up for Family Weekend or a Reunion Weekend we don't use the tool to generate leads in the way many organizations use html email.

Incentivized