ClickSend aims to help businesses communicate with their customers and staff in the moments that matter on the channels, they use every day. ClickSend is designed to power billions of messages worldwide and offers a full suite of communications products from SMS and rich messaging to letters and fax all done via online dashboard or API.
$0.01
Per email for at least 25,000 emails
Mailchimp Transactional Email (Mandrill)
Score 7.6 out of 10
N/A
Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill) is designed to allow users to deliver fast, personalized transactional emails using API or SMTP.
ClickSend supports live chats, where instant messaging is done for both formal or informal discussions. Besides, proper management of tasks, from the simplified ones to the complex ones, and every player is well assigned. The option of bar code in this application ensures there is the automation of many tasks and reduces paperwork.
Any system that requires transactional email message functionality as an external service. The benefits of a well managed and vetted server to maintain reputation as well as being reliability is well worth the effort needed to integrate towards the API specs
You can add list of users just by uploading numbers CSV or by uploading detailed CSV.
You can generate quick campaigns just like in email, save templates with URLs, send immediately, or schedule for a certain date and hour. They have analytics, shared, and private numbers. I like that it is super straightforward.
You can make automated campaings that will be sent every time a new user joins a list. This you can do with 3rd-party integrations such as your own app or Zapier since ClickSend already has this integration.
Super cheap and it's what I like most. You pay for SMS in bulk with really competitive prices. Most SMS companies want to charge by the number of users, and when you have 32,000 active users or +130,000 users it just becomes expensive so ClickSend is the SMS solution.
In general, using ClickSend is quick and the learning curve for new users is flat since it's almost the same as an email marketing tool just for SMS and compressed.
Mandrill is extremely reliable. We switched from using a platform that was very hit-or-miss, but we never had a single deliverability issue with Mandrill's transactional API. Every email was sent reliably and quickly.
Mandrill's reporting and debugging features made it easy to ensure that all our messages were getting delivered to the right place in a timely manner. In fact, Mandrill's tools were so robust that we used it as an end-around way of debugging another failing service we were using.
Mandrill is a very affordable add-on to an existing MailChimp account. Adding an extra layer of reliability was a no-brainer, and made the cost essentially negligible to our organization.
The rate-limit system can be troubling. If you are switching providers and already have a large e-mail volume, you're going to want to transition slowly. The per-hour send limits are initially very low, and if you have any deliverability or complaint hiccups, they will plummet quickly. The Mandrill support staff is very helpful in this area - they will not (and claim that they can not) manipulate send limits for any account at any time for any reason.
Billing is combined in with a paid MailChimp subscription, which didn't used to be the case.
In general, support is good. Actually they usually write to you about things like when you upload your first contacts, send your first campaign, or when you forget to put the opt-out option. Of course, they are automated emails but it happens that if you reply to one of them a real support agent will attend to your case. If you have any doubt you can write directly to support by email. I'm not sure if they are using Zendesk or any other kind of program but they usually answer in less than 2 hours. Still, the option of an actual real-time chat is missing.
I haven't personally reached out to their support team, but the feedback I've heard from our tech support and engineering teams have been that their response to questions has often been they either are unsure or that Mandrill is what it is. For example, when our customers weren't able to see opens and clicks for all emails sent, and we reached out to their support, the response was it is what it is, and they'll send a notification to our app if they can.
ClickSend is okay but limited in functionality as compared to HighLevel. HighLevel has more functionality and it is at a reasonable price point everyone. Apart from that support are the same for most platform and it is really great to have something that is easy to start using. Most important decision that someone have to make is what they want in these software.
So we actually work with clients across all of the platforms listed above, but Mandrill has a huge ease of use bonus in its favor, especially when working with clients who are setting up a Cart Recovery style marketing campaign for the first time or are looking for a bit of a fire-and-forget setup. With more sophisticated clients (on the scale of global ecommerce companies), who have a larger subscriber/customer base and in-house design teams, we find that Mandrill usually isn't enough
The ROI is time. More time focused, less time distracted with a mobile device.
Early days, however the customer survey and marketing campaigns will hopefully yield results.
Customer adherence to appointments and/or rescheduling for missed appointments has drastically increased with the use of reminder and follow-up SMS options that normally wouldn't be used as often on a mobile device.
