Gist vs. Mailigen

If your marketing model is selling products, services, or SAAS where you are doing inbound marketing and your website will do most of the lead generation and conversion, this is a great product. From live chat, support, event tracking, and automation, you could almost put your entire business on autopilot. If your marketing model is mostly outreach to cold leads and conversion, this software currently does not have any type of sales stages or task generation. I would still use Gist for website inbound but use another software for outreach and cold leads then when they become a lead put them into Gist for marketing automation.

Incentivized

Mailigen is great for designing and scheduling campaigns that do not require expert knowledge in the field. Creating specific lists, segmentation, & scheduling campaigns are very straightforward and user-friendly. Do not use Mailigen for email marketing blasts! If you are unable to provide documented evidence that the user 'Opt-in' to receive your campaigns, then expect the campaign to be flagged or contacted by your Mailigen Account Manager. You must comply with the CAN-SPAM Act ... no ifs, ands, or buts!

Incentivized

• Customer service via a unified inbox so you dont have to separately monitor your twitter, Facebook or IG account for consumer communication there. Gist unified all into one inbox, better than anyone else I've seen in the market. They archive all communications and tie them back to a single user so you get unified customer history / data.
• Marketing segmentation and automation: they track user history and behavior across the site and have super detailed segmenting capability, on par with ActiveCampaign's, but better I'd say. Better UI for the marketing admin person, and more unified data than in AC.
• Live chat and chatbot. Usually it's either one or the other but with Gist you can do both seamlessly.

Incentivized

• Mail deliverability. MailiGen gets the mail delivered. We have our own data centre hosting and servers but struggled to get our bulk mails reliably delivered. Since we switched to MailiGen delivery rates have more than tripled.
• Template editor and tools. There is a rich assortment of tools for preparation of mailers. They are easy to use and we often train customers is a single 2 hour session.
• Mail List security and manageability. Cloud based mail lists are important best practices for some of our corporate customers, who often store mail address lists in Excel. These lists get lost, damaged and stolen. The MailiGen list management tools centralize list storage and provide tools for segmentation, importing and exporting.
• Stats!! The mail campaign stats that MailiGen provides are world class. They are simple to understand and rich in depth. Our customers love the stats.

• Plan limits can be confusing. For example, there is a monthly charge for support and a monthly charge for "growth," plus there's a separate charge depending on how many contacts and seats you have. Perhaps this is normal in the industry, but it can make it a little challenging to understand the bill every month.
• The vast amount of features means development will never be as fast as you'd like it to be (even though they release updates all the time). This may not actually be a valid concern, and it certainly isn't unique to Gist (who doesn't have a wishlist they're waiting on their favorite SaaS to get to?), but I do believe the likelihood of being stuck without your desired feature being developed goes up a lot as the product gets bigger and bigger.
• Email deliverability has been less than perfect in the past, but it has improved drastically in the last year.

• Segment creating could be more functional and may include statistics from previous mails. Time to time I need to use more advanced functions like "send information to people who clicked on link A".
• It does not allow the user to choose mobile/tablet friendly templates. I'd like to decide myself.

Gist is a quite reliable service with a lot of added values. We don't need to pay for different Saas for these important features. If I had an issue the team was super responsive and helpful, that is essential for every business. The email delivery is great, so virtually no email has landed into spam folder

Incentivized

We are satisfied with this cooperation and we don't see why we should change email marketing service provider at this point. Excellent service and rapid new feature development keeps us very satisfied.

It’s pretty simple, but it does a lot so there are more complicated features which depend on an individuals ability for software implementation. I am not an IT expert and I’ve managed to implement everything myself, others that are more tech-minded may find everything easier.

Although it is easy to use for basic users and people with no experience in e-mail marketing, but for more advanced users it still lacks functionality - really advanced filtering - on it's web interface. However everything is possible once you use API.

Fantastic support. Ask a question, get an answer within 24 hours every time. And sometimes within a few minutes. They've always come through for me, helpful and, even when it's an issue on my end, they point me in the right direction.

Incentivized

Although time to time I send a support ticket, but more frequently I use the live support option on their website. I get instant feedback and feel that my problem is addressed immediately.

With most systems it is faily easy. It offers CSV import so transferring contacts should be easy.

Gist combines all our previous products into one application and adds many more features that would require more apps. Gist is excellent and a no-brainer all-in-one application when compared to having to manage multiple applications at higher cost. The support from the whole Gist team has been extremely responsive.

Mailigen falls short to Listrak due to Listrak's far superior contact, conversion, and message analytics. Some features are unavailable or not easily integrated with the Mailigen platform compared to its competition, but features such as model acquisition & shopping cart abandonment are available. The ability to integrate such features into your website may be easier when using a competitors platform, but easy usability comes with a price. Extra perks such Coupon managers & etc. are useful features that allow you to generate Barcodes & QR codes, as well as track various data analytics when implementing this feature. Small items as such are what Mailigen lacks in comparison to its competitors, but their price point kicks the rest out of the water if you can live without some of the bells and whistles.

Incentivized

• They are perfect for me as a someone who needs a lot of bang for the buck. The chat messenger device on my website alone has brought me new prospects that I did not have to spend money recruiting.
• I am able to save hours of time with the automated emails that are GDPR compliant.
• I don't have to pay for a designer to have excellent looking emails either.

• Better delivery of mail campaigns giving better ROI numbers
• Better stats so that we can assess what works and what does not.