eTrigue DemandCenter vs. Twilio SendGrid

I would not recommend DemandCenter for anyone who doesn't know what they're doing or what they want. That sounds like a no-brainer, but it seems like a huge number of organizations want something to fill that "Marketing Automation" gap, not having the marketing infrastructure in place to support it. That is, a technically savvy person to design complex campaign logic and manage data, good web people for designing landing pages and emails, and content writers & managers & marketing specialists for everything else. Investing in a marketing automation tool does not mean you can exclude these resources - it simply means you can DO MORE with those resources. If you don't know what you want, and want to be babysat through the whole process but don't mind the limitations, you can always go with the MA tool that rhymes with "BubSpot".

Twilio SendGrid is well suited for those organizations who need to send mass emails very often to their prospects and customers and thus may be wary of a reliable tool that can do that without affecting domain reputation. It may be less suited for organizations which do not have say more than 10,000 target prospects and thus may rely only on 1:few ABM for sending emails.

Incentivized

• Putting prospects in the system from spreadsheets is easy. Contacts can also be automatically brought into eTrigue from your CRM. (If you have Salesforce.)
• Campaign reports show the actual numbers of prospects at each step of the campaign. The detail behind the number is available just by clicking on it.

• Drag and drop email designer for transactional emails - super nice even though I do code, it's much quicker and easier to implement without code.
• Very simple implementation. Only a few lines of code need to be added in our backend and boom we were up and running in less than a day.
• Listening to customer feedback. They regularly send emails about new features and ask for feedback to improve their software.
• Some of the cheapest and best dedicated IPs.
• Easy integration and setup between marketing and transactional emails. Super helpful to have everything in one place.

Incentivized

• I wish they could be able to customize URLs for landing pages for better SEO and branding.
• Better SEO functionality and ability to customize those options on landing pages would be nice.
• More useful and better detailed analytics would be nice.

Incentivized

• Actually viewing previous emails dispatched. SendGrid does not have this feature - although it provides numbers on emails dispatched within 3 days for the cheapest plan.
• The service asks you to pay more (although a minimal amount) to have visibility on email activity upto 30 days in the past.
• The API doesn't allow an export of a report of email activity over a period of time. It can be quite frustrating at times to be limited in this way.
• Their customer support isn't the best. Certainly some room for improvement there.

Incentivized

We rely on this tool. Going forward as we implement new back end architecture we may be forced to change to an integrated platform with our master data management infrastructure, but we will do so kicking and screaming. While marketing gets to make the choice, we will choose eTrigue.

Having used Marketo, Act-On, and Pardot, eTrigue is MUCH easier to use and easier to train new team members to use.

It has the potential to be really cool. However, it feels as if it was created by developers for developers (and I work with developers, yet even for me the instrument was somewhat not easy to use - just read SendGrid's help manuals...) However, if you are into data and your way of thinking is more mathematical rather than lyrical, you'll enjoy this instrument

Incentivized

Been very happy with their responsiveness and ability to resolve issues

Twilio SendGrid Email API is everything we want it to be, and we have no reason to look for any other solution. Features and pricing match exactly what we need. As developers for SaaS products, Twilio SendGrid Email API provides a great service. I hope that they stay this way and don't inflate the service with too many marketing oriented features, because there are other tools for that and Twilio SendGrid Email API is a API for sending email first and foremost.

Incentivized

You will need to think about which users you want to have each role, and the features allowed in each role. You should watch the training videos before you get live training. It saved us several hours as they had already answered 90% of our questions.

As an agency we have experience with several other marketing automation platforms. We support clients that are not using eTrigue DemandCenter-- we'll work with them to create various campaign assets. This said, if our clients want us to also run their marketing automation campaigns-- implement the campaigns after the assets are created, we only work in eTrigue as this our platform of choice. Our ability to support the robust and fast-paced needs of our clients requires us to use a platform that they can easily implement and that we can easily work in, make ongoing changes in. eTrigue DemandCenter is the platform that delivers.

Incentivized

My company had been using Postmark which was cheap but extremely limited. It was great for transactional email but not marketing. We also used ActiveCampaign for marketing emails but our list size made using that tool too expensive. We thought we were getting the best of both worlds with SendGrid but it has been disappointing.

• We get the upper hand on follow-up with return visitors... not by reverse DNS lookup or pattern match but by direct cookie validation. Inside sales productivity is boosted by 33% easy with eTrigue.
• The alerts and data are lightning fast, giving marketing immediate feedback on campaign data and prospects.

• Switching to Sendgrid has saved us over $3000/year compared to using other platforms.
• Sendgrid has saved us time as the process for creating email campaigns is so easy.
• Because of the time and financial savings, we have been able to spend more time/money on creating more appropriate marketing strategies which, in turn, has generated more revenue.

Incentivized