Echobox Email vs. Sailthru

Reccomended specially for publishers that need to keep high posting volume without giving up quality and engagement.

Sailthru is well suited for any company that is working with a large email subscriber list and needs to send campaigns on a daily basis. It is probably less appropriate for anyone with a small list, or an e-commerce brand. I think there are better ESPs out there for e-commerce brands.

Incentivized

• Easy interface for everyone to learn
• Personalized send times have led to increased open rates
• Ability to automate whole campaigns by theme or category
• Responsive support team that has already incorporated feedback

• Personalized content based on user behavior and content consumption.
• Campaign workflow is very simple and allows for a large number of campaigns to be set up and managed in a short period of time.
• Sailthru has a great customer service team. Our account support with Sailthru was top-notch and is a testament to the culture there at the company.
• Sailthru focuses on email marketing. With all of the other "cloud" solutions out there trying to be everything to everyone, they lose focus on the importance of sending the email. This is where Sailthru shines.

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

• Lists are easy to create, but difficult to locate (can't sort by most recent created, etc.). They are always listed in alphabetical order.
• In order to improve their speed to market with features, they had a lot of tech debt to work through in the relatively recent past. This generally seems to have been corrected and their parent company appears to really be investing in their success.
• Their automated campaign feature is due for an upgrade. This is on their roadmap and they have been open about its need to provide more robust functionality.

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 does most of the work for you so there isn't much for the user to do. More advanced needs might need help from their support.

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 Email is specifically built for article-based newsletters and pre-selects content based on your criteria so the editorial team is not starting from scratch. Article-based emails can also be fully automated which was not possible in Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor before. Our web development team no longer needs to build custom solutions to integrate with the ESP and instead can focus on other projects.

Nothing offers the customization and control for power users like Sailthru. Other options we have used have been simply as backups in case of Sailthru outages during critical moments. We chose Sailthru at the beginning of our growth from sending email natively. We haven't had a need to switch although we have briefly evaluated the cost/benefit of switching to other providers. Unfortunately, the switching cost is usually to high as we are tightly integrated.

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