Adestra vs. Mapp Digital

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

During our use of MAPP Digital, it is deserving to say that the product helped us to overcome the main challenges we faced in our business at the time. As a preliminary user I have struggled much with hosting manual campaigns on remarketing etc. But with the Mapp digital software hosting marketing campaigns became a complete automated process with supervision. This feature offered by Mapp made a huge decrease in my daily workload and I'm more than grateful for it.

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

• BlueHornet's WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface for creating emails is easier to use than many platforms. Users appreciate this. BlueHornet makes it super simple to create a version specific for mobile devices.
• I am a big fan of the custom data segmentation tools built into BlueHornet. They are powerful and easy to use. Many other ESPs, including a number of the top rated ones, do not have such powerful, easy to use segmentation tools. This matters. It helps a user send more relevant emails.
• BlueHornet makes sharing to social networks simple. In this day and age, forwarding to a friend is dead. Sharing to social networks is essential. Having this be easy to do is very important.

• 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

• It would be nice to see the API's functionality introduced into the web client.
• The reporting tools for transactional messages is different than the rest of the system. This promotes difficulty with getting accurate reporting in the web client, outside of an API call.
• The custom fields are different for transactional messages, which introduces times when human error may flub the fields because they aren't contiguous throughout the product.

Although BlueHornet offers helpful testing capabilities, the ESP is a bit outdated. There is a lot of room for aesthetics improvement as they are not appealing. The reporting tool is usually broken, and reporting either no, or wrong metrics. If this ESP were to update their design, as well as fix the reporting tool, I think this platform would be much better.

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

There were three tabs used to navigate throughout the system called, "publish," "engage," and, "measure." These three tabs made the site very user friendly and all features easy to find

They rolled out new feature requests quite frequently and always kept our team up to speed on what they were changing/adding to the system

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

Sometimes it was hard to get an initial response but after we started CCing more people, it became a lot better!

They made sure to go through anything and everything that we wanted

I wasn't there when they first got it, but when I got there there were only a few people that knew a little bit about it. There was A LOT that we didn't know. Then BlueHornet came and had some workshops and we learned a lot that we didn't even know existed. They were doing a lot of things wrong before BlueHornet came and showed up more about the tool

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

We were able to thoroughly evaluate the program for Mapp Digital thanks to the free trial's availability. Comparing the two products' graphical user interfaces, it's evident that Mapp Digital comes out on top. Mapp Digital's excellent customer service was another reason for our decision to work with the company.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• BlueHornet has been a good entry-level platform. We have successfully launched scores of clients with limited email marketing experience onto this platform. Because it is easy to use, we have spent minimal effort needing to help these clients with problems.
• It is easy to migrate clients on or off BlueHornet, depending upon their needs. This is helpful because it allows our clients to be on exactly the right platform. Some platforms make it difficult to migrate off, essentially trapping clients on a platform that no longer meets their needs or business objectives.
• I wish BlueHornet were keeping pace with technology advancements in the industry. The gap between the biggest ESPs and competitors like BlueHornet seems to be growing.