Campaign Monitor by Marigold vs. Iterable

Campaign Monitor by Marigold is great at both scaling up as you grow (i.e. for a startup or if you're starting fresh on building a subscriber list) and providing more than just basic templates and tooling. We vetted across a lot of different options to account for where we were starting and where we hope to grow into with our opt-in email marketing, and Campaign Monitor stood out.

Incentivized

At OneVision, I was brought on to migrate from ActiveCampaign and it was a huge improvement to go to Iterable. Much of the improvement lay in the back end connectivity to databases, which although not directly in my purview, made it easier to work as a team (product & marketing) inside our company.

• Campaign Monitor’s support is great. They have a great help page built out to help answer all your questions, and if you do have a question or issue that needs extra support, their support team responds within a couple hours to help resolve the issue.
• The email builder is very clean and easy to use. It makes A/B testing, personalization, and dynamic content easy to implement.
• I appreciate the insights reporting that Campaign Monitor provides. We use that regularly for our quarterly reporting to track list growth, as well as campaign performance from a high level.
• The automation is very straight forward and has truly transformed our marketing. The learning curve is pretty low, so my entire team knows how to use it to create and edit automated email journeys.

Incentivized

• Customer Journey creation - the platform easily creates a visual path for the marketing team to curate messaging based around timing, channel, behavior as well as add split testing logic and exit criteria so we target only the audiences we want.
• Customer Success - one of the best teams I've ever had the pleasure of working with. I'm able to move so much quicker because they really create a helpful partnership.
• Audience segmentation, the platform is easy to work with even if you're a first time user, they do a great job of visually showing the logic and the and/or/none type rules.

Incentivized

• I'd prefer a central contact list with tags, rather than multiple lists. I can have one person on 5 lists and that counts as 5 subscribers.
• While the email builder is very good, I'd prefer more customisation options.
• Updates they make are good, but are perhaps a little slow.
• I'd like better mobile compatibility. I get that might not be possible for the email builder (although aiming for that would be great) but for lists, reports etc there's no reason that shouldn't be mobile-compatible or have a mobile app.

Incentivized

• Insights. I think this is the biggest downfall of Iterable, the insights and analytics area is really not good at all. We have almost stopped using it all together in favour of just using Mixpanel (but now we're paying for 2 platforms). Things we can do in Mixpanel that we can't do in Iterable:
• - custom conversion windows
• - more scalable reports
• - comparing multiple events
• - setting up alerts that trigger to slack
• Segmentation - building segments and organizing lists that are already built.
• - relative dates can be confusing but are a critical piece of building lists
• - unable to compare multiple events
• - we have a pretty good naming structure for our lists but with so many daily users, no good way to organize them (with labels or folders) and searching for a list requires you to find the exact word we end up re creating dynamic lists each time
• - static lists don't show you what rules were used to create the list
• - no way to see changes over time
• Improved ways of collaborating. There's no way of knowing if other people are editing a list, template, campaign or journey. easy to overwrite each other's work
• I've been an Iterable user for about 4 years, at 2 different companies. SinceI started using Iterable I think the number of bugs has increased.
• I wish Iterable did a better job testing releases so we're not the ones discovering issues so frequently.
• In app message. We've had issues with this tool/channel starting at implementation. It feels like it never made it's way out of beta, despite us paying for it now.
• The app team offered to do working sessions with us to understand how we use it day to day and never followed up on that. There have been no improvements to the tool and any time we run into another issue with it (although Jena in support is great) it takes forever to diagnose or we are told the issue cannot be replicated. It just feels like we have constant issues with this tool.
• We've actually onboarded to another tool (not ideal for omni channel) for some in app messages because this one has so many downfalls and is so buggy.
• Self serve documentation is great when you have an idea of what you're doing but not entirely sure. It is not easy to understand for people who are newer or less well versed in the platform.

It flexes with us both because of the tiered pricing, and due to the comprehensive tools available. We're able to go from one newsletter to many, and few automations to many very easily while not paying for a Cadillac when what we need is a sturdy crossover.

Incentivized

Extremely easy to use, deeply integrated into our infrastructure

It's a very user friendly tool and a highly intuitive interface. It's really clearly thought out, so from a users perspective it feels very simple. By comparison, we've also used Mailchimp, and when comparing one to the other, the Mailchimp dashboard is far less logical and intuitive.

Incentivized

Iterable very easy to learn and use. It's a great platform for both a new email marketer and a marketer that's been working in email for 20+ years.

Incentivized

There have only been a couple of instances where it's been down and this has typically been middle of the night type situations that were planned downtime so they could work on maintenance. They provide notice well ahead of these instances. I've never noticed a surprise outage.

Incentivized

Iterable is there like 99.9% of the time. However, when it goes down, it grinds us to a halt. Most of the time, outages are an hour or less, but if that's at a peak time, it can be a nightmare. That said, when the worst does happen, there are frequent updates and an easy situation tracker that give you an estimate of how much longer you'll have to wait for the issue to be resolved.

Incentivized

I have noticed no slow page loads within the design interface or reports. It's all quick, even with list uploads which are notorious for being clunky in other systems. It's all been quick and easy for us.

Incentivized

The API is super quick. The UI can be a little sluggish depending on what you're loading, but overall Iterable performs great. Iterable appears to do a good job of making processes async so that one action isn't blocking another.

Incentivized

We haven't had to use support yet.

Incentivized

I've never experienced any issues with Iterable. As I and my colleagues have learnt the system and it's features, response to questions and advice from our account manager is always quick. Kevin knows the product well, and with the few tricky questions has hasn't been able to answer he's been quick to get back to us.

Incentivized

The ability to track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns in real-time is what makes Campaign Monitor interesting to use. All the vital features that we need to run professionally designed email campaigns that look wonderful on any device so that we boost our business are included in this platform.

Incentivized

I admittedly don't remember much of Klaviyo, as I have become so familiar with Iterable. I definitely prefer Iterable, however. There are so many more features in Iterable and it just feels like a more dynamic and comprehensive experience with more granular data than Klaviyo presented us

Incentivized

It is so easy to use, and the things you'd want to have as you scale and get to a more complex email marketing approach are all there. From automations to lots of mobile responsive templates, it's easy to set up what you need and then customize for your brand.

Incentivized

We've definitely tested scalability, and it's no line - it works. The process is pretty easy. Most of the times it goes off without a hitch. Any time we do encounter issues, our support team is quick to get on the job and very communicative as they work us through a successful launch.

Incentivized

I did not use the professional services

Incentivized

• Private-label reports that are visually appealing and easy for clients to understand
• The 'Worldview' map feature is a MAJOR setting point and hit with clients, as they can watch a realtime map of their emails being opened in specific locations across the world, and instantly see when a recipient clicks a link in their email.

Incentivized

• Iterable journeys save us a ton of time and resources and we are able to optimize messaging with simple A/B testing and dynamic content.
• Preview data and snippets are easy to use - managing them is less of a lift, saving us time to focus on creative.