Echobox Email vs. Marigold Engage by Sailthru

Echobox Email is great for news or article-based sites. It's the only platform we've used that allows editors to simply paste one link to include or override a story. The ability to automate fully or enable periodically is a time and money saver for us during holidays or employee vacations. The platform has been easy to learn and a great improvement over our workaround solutions in Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor. Besides the platform UI and optimizations for articles (which is worth switching for alone), the AI/ML built in to the platform has already started showing improvements to our open and click rates. The personalized send time is a game-changer and the personalized story selection is a promising feature– we look forward to seeing how it plays out over time.

Sailthu is perfectly suited, no matter what level of technical skill you have or support from an Engineering team. That said, it includes many advanced features which can only be fully utilized when integrated with custom webhooks and after receiving customer data sent via their APIs. There may be easier solutions out there for less technical users or for people wanting a simpler setup to begin with.

Incentivized

• Increases traffic
• Saves time
• Scheduling
• Nice, Modern Design of Newsletters

• Personalization - one of the most important things you can utilize when emailing people.
• Segmentation - Sailthru makes it very easy to build an audience based off their criteria; there are so many different fields to choose from. We use this mostly for geo-targeting and engagement.
• Analytics - post-campaign analytics are very easy to look at, customize your view, and download as a csv to share with your team and company.

Incentivized

• Reporting area has bare minimum and could use some UI improvements
• Timezone quirks can come up when editorial team is fully remote
• Google Analytics integration would be nice to have so that popularity of articles could be incorporated in algorithm
• Integrations with common form plugins would be great

• Giving more practical examples of technical setups, sometimes the only way to understand it is to see it.
• Can't filter lists by date created or date modified, particularly needed when tracking down a specific list or looking to remove older lists.
• Can't set up automated data dumps to an email address, has to be sent via API.

Incentivized

It has helped increase traffic via social media, which was something crucial for us. This came without extra working time. On contrary, it saved us time.

The biggest factor is that even after two months of trying to go through their credit processes and getting the right consideration for the real damages we had with the tool not being able to send campaigns for days, their sales staff is still not willing to work with us on it, making us do the switch away from them right now. We got extremely disappointed by trying to work with them through those issues.

It has all the features we need and is performing better than what we used previously. The support/development team has been very open to feedback and is actively working on new features and improvements. Any shortcomings (which may not exist for long) are very minor compared to the benefits and features specifically built for news/articles.

Their account management / sales staff doesn't seem to be taking the problems you experience very seriously - it took us 3 months and nudge emails to them every 2 weeks to ask for status updates (plus 6 different conversations with different people) to get a (very small credit) for a major issue, which in two months prohibited us from sending campaign emails for 2-3 days at a time.

Echobox is super "user friendly", has a great support when you face a problem, no matter how simple or complicated the answer is, you have available statistics about the results of your use, as well as suggestions for further improvement. The Newsletters service is new to us, but we spend zero time to prepare and send! We also have option about titles, logos and banners, which adds services for our clients.

Sailthru provided a powerful, easy-to-use platform that was able to adjust to the needs we had at Dotdash. It was able to support the simple campaigns where we would send static creative to all recipients and the complex dynamic campaigns where we were customizing content. The scale and flexibility really made it a great platform for us to use.

Incentivized

• Increased open rates 17%
• Higher click totals overall

• Sailthru has helped us build a welcome series that's much more effective than anything we had before.
• It's much easier to analyze transactional campaigns than our previous ESP.
• We're better able to run A/B tests and learn from the results -- all of which improves our email strategy.

Incentivized