Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review We are solving our small sales team problem. I am the only SDR in the company and Tout helps me manage, send and follow up with many of my leads automatically. Tout is more focused on “success or failure” of emails than Yesware is. They are going in different directions – as you can see that they’ll probably have some features from one another.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Track leads opening emails and clicking links. We could easily see if a lead forwarded an email to a large group of people for instance, because the stats would show it. Connect our email and CRM to log email activities onto Leads and Contacts. Keep users inside of our email system instead of copying and pasting email templates from multiple places. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Reporting is clunky and challenging to use at times. They were recently purchased by Marketo, so I'm hopeful that Marketo will be able to address some of these concerns. The ToutApp interface is not the most intuitive and does not provide a deeper understanding/analysis of the data. The ToutApp integration with Outlook has created intermittent problems in usability/access. Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review Support Rating 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.
Read full review It was tough to reach their support team. On average, it would take over 24 hours to get a response. Agents would ask us to perform repetitive tasks and take lots of screenshots instead of looking at our system and helping us fix issues.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Marketo Sales Connect (ToutApp) was nowhere near as dynamic as the other listed tools that I mentioned. There was not any Sequence or Cadence you could follow. It was missing dynamic fields. A bit cumbersome. The other tools had much prettier interfaces too.
Read full review Return on Investment For companies that focus on goals and analytics, Adestra provides all the necessary tools. Read full review It's enabled more efficiency for our SDR team to track and monitor emails. Increased our ability to better target prospects as we learned more about their behaviors. The automation tools for email, and the ability to get glimpses into how that impacted pipeline development, were worth the cost. Read full review ScreenShots