Email automation software with optimized personalization to drive engagement.
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Litmus from Validity
Score 8.9 out of 10
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Litmus, from Validity, is an email marketing solution used to create error-free emails in less time. It is also used to build email campaigns, personalize and test them thoroughly, monitor deliverability, and analyze email performance.
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Sendblaster
Score 7.0 out of 10
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SendBlaster is the eponymous lean, list management / newsletter-centric email marketing software from the Italian company founded in 2006, basically for creating newsletters in a WYSIWYG editor and sending them out to the multitudes, with tools facilitating this: programmable tags, personalization, link checking, embedded image support, file importing, templates, and help from partner Mailstyler (free) for newsletter optimization and styling.
Bulk mailing is managed for free with Sendblaster…
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 …
We evaluated Litmus against Email on Acid and ultimately opted for Litmus due to its more expansive functionality and workflow. In fairness, Email on Acid offered a good rendering tool, but Litmus went further with engagement analytics, heatmaps and read time insights. …
I selected Litmus because it provides an all-in-one powerful tool to update content, collaborate with teams, and analyse data seamlessly. This saves a big amount of time for the whole team. The insights are more granular allowing us to focus deeper into improvements. The …
Having used both, I definitely prefer Litmus over Email on Acid. It's a little more intuitive in terms of UI, and previews load faster. The integration with Salesforce Marketing Cloud also sets it apart further.
We've tried Email on Acid in the past and Litmus has a much more advanced offering. The user interface is superior and they are constantly innovating and rolling out new features.
This is not applicable to my role as I have used Litmus to test emails since I have started. Because of the ease of use, timeliness, consistent quality, and affordability that Litmus offers, I haven't found the need to look at similar products or organizations. If all of these …
I've used Hubspot marketing Hub previously to build marketing emails. In my current role, I do not use Litmus to build emails, only to QA - so I can cannot compare apples to apples. But I do have some familiarity with Hubspot, and I was never able to easily share an email for …
I found that Litmus was able to give a more in-depth review and feedback on accessibility issues in my campaigns, whereas SendForensics lacked any helpful features for this purpose. Litmus' features have helped us better serve all our clients' customers.
Sendblaster has all the features of these other alternatives, and its more flexible. Its a lot easier to develop custom messages/templates. There are a lot more sending configurations that are possible. There are no subscriptions fees with Sendblaster, unlike MailChimp and …
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.
Proofing your emails is necessary. This is a tool that allows you to see how your email not only renders on multiple devices but how it performs. Some email building platforms will tell you their drag and drop templates are ready to go, however they stop short of analyzing accessibility, checking links, load speed among other things. I've also experienced drag and drop template issues as new email clients are released. Litmus provides peace of mind that you did your due diligence on crafting your email. While Litmus does provide some reporting you will not see every typical analytic an email report offers. However, you can use your Litmus data to enhance your email reports which in turn creates a robust view of email performance.
Sendblaster is really, really very easy to use, especially for non-technical people. Problems arise when someone tries to paste content that was formatted in, say, Microsoft Word or Excel, into Sendblaster, then all hell breaks loose. If you have to use it in WYSIWYG mode, then it is important to use just straight paragraphed content.
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.
The AQ and Approval Process is very seamless. We have a brand team of 20 people, and there are mostly five emails being deployed every day across 3 Hotels and 30 restaurants.
The Preview of the email template on all devices, ranging from mobile phones to laptops and iPads, which we can also check based on ISPs like Gmail, Outlook, and AOL, is a very good feature that we use for each email.
The Analytics tools we use for each email to create a tracking link to insert into our email for a send is a great feature. It helps us to see the email performance based on ISP clients.
For every edits, we receive an email on our inbox, which is very helpful.
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.
The user interface could be more polished. It's very easy to use, but the appearance of the user interface looks a little old fashioned for a desktop software. Of course recipients don't see that interface, so that is not very consequential.
I love using Litmus and find that it has been a huge component of the success of our email campaigns. I can't say enough great things about the platform, and I have seen firsthand how it has saved me time building and sending fully optimized email campaigns. I would absolutely renew again.
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.
Litmus has integrations that make the software an integrated part of my work every day. Being able to test right within my email builder is just brilliant. Daily I also use the web interface to review analytics and spam testing. Overall it is one of the pieces of software I use daily without any complaints or issues.
We have never had a problem with Litmus being unavailable so I would say their availability is fantastic. There might have been one time years ago that the site was down briefly but it also might have been a server issue on my end. Either way, Litmus was back up and running in a very short time
As with all technology, there are inevitably use-cases where you are unable to get to your original goal without some good old-fashioned experimenting. Some situations will (and are) more urgent which complicates an effective integration of a new process or a new team using an existing process but the "issues" are regularly resolved by re-starting the process specific to when Litmus is introduced to a project. If it doesn't come out the way you're anticipating, run it again and verify there is an issue before declaring all is lost
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.
I didn’t really personally participate much in the implementation of Litmus, but from what I observed during the process, it was a smooth process with minimal disruptions. The team was able to get up and running quickly, and the platform’s user-friendly interface made onboarding fairly easy for everyone involved from the start.
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 selected Litmus because it provides an all-in-one powerful tool to update content, collaborate with teams, and analyse data seamlessly. This saves a big amount of time for the whole team. The insights are more granular allowing us to focus deeper into improvements. The preview tools is one of the most important features we heavily rely on, as we can see how emails are previewed across multiple devices. Speed is also a major factor. Being an organisation sending out many emails, we are happy with the speed and efficiency of accessing and organising emails.
Sendblaster has all the features of these other alternatives, and its more flexible. Its a lot easier to develop custom messages/templates. There are a lot more sending configurations that are possible. There are no subscriptions fees with Sendblaster, unlike MailChimp and Constant Contact. I haven't found another solution that has all of the same features.
With our enterprise account, scalability is not an issue. I have not yet seen or heard of significant issues with user access, API connections for integrations etc. This includes down time for "Scheduled Maintenance" as some providers call them, Litmus has the technology backing to support a global team with a 24-hour workday across regions
Litmus has been a huge time-saver for our email designer. We send around 40–50 emails a week in over 10 different markets, so manually testing each one just isn’t realistic. With Litmus, she can skip the testing process and spend more time optimizing our emails for better customer engagement.
We’re just starting to explore Litmus’ personalization features, and they’re already proving valuable. After identifying a gap in our email personalization, the built-in templates are making it easy to start delivering more tailored, customer-focused content.
Continuing education through Litmus has been a valuable resource for our team. The articles take a little time to get through, but the insights are always worth it—they’ve helped us turn ideas into real, actionable steps to improve our email strategy and content.
Customer service was greatly improved because of Sendblaster. We were able to design our communication exactly the way we wanted to improve communication effectiveness.
Sendblaster helped our brand because email recipients have been very impressed by the polished visual appearance of our outgoing messages, consistent branding and use of logo, wordmark, and other identifiers, etc.
We saved a lot of money with Sendblaster. Our organization can send unlimited messages, and the Sendblaster software we paid for places no limit on messages sent. So, since there are no ongoing subscription fees or volume fees after paying for the the software, we saved a lot. Other "software as a service" options would have cost a minimum of $50 per month, and potentially a lot more than that for high-volume email communication.
