Gist vs. ReachMail

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

The free Reachmail account (which I have used for several small organizations) is a good tool where there are limited or zero email marketing dollars, a contact audience of up to 5,000 subscribers, and a max of 15,000 monthly emails. The pricing levels are really reasonable for volume requirements, including custom plans for infrequent mailings. If there are constraints (time and/or design experience) that require a large choice of ready-made contemporary templates without graphic or font modifications, then this probably isn't a good email marketing tool.

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

• I have a $10 account, but customer support treat me like a princess. They even added a feature to one page to remedy a problem I was having with that page. They care about their customers.
• ReachMail Features (or at least, these are the ones I know they have): WYSIWYG Email Editor, Template Management, Mobile Optimized Emails, Dynamic Content, Subscribe/Unsubscribe, Mailing List Management, Drip Campaigns, Auto-Responders, Image Library, A/B Testing, Customer Surveys, CAN SPAM Compliance, Reporting/Analytics.
• These folks know what they’re doing. I can’t speak highly enough about ReachMail.

Incentivized

• 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.

• There are no batch report downloads. When I have multiple variations and waves in a campaign, I have to download reports individually. I'd like for a way to download one report of all sends during a certain time period, or given another set of parameters.
• It would save a lot of time if we had the ability to upload multiple images or assets at once.
• There's only a two-level "tree" of organization of lists and suppression lists. It would be great if we had the abililty to nest lists into better categories, rather than having to scroll through one giant list of suppressions or deployment lists. Something like a 2015 folder, then inside that a Business Unit folder, then inside that, a Campaign folder, etc. This would make things much easier to find.

Incentivized

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

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.

Their team is knowledgable and willing to help offer insight and support to build out the right campaigns to fit our business needs and goals

Incentivized

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

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.

In my opinion, ReachMail is a good competitor to Mailchimp, probably has more features though and analytics to help organize information. There are also a lot more third party integrations that have helped us compared to other apps that we've tried before, but ReachMail has been the most useful, for me personally and my team

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.

• None. I signed up for a pay account so only had to spend a dollar for the first month. Even that was a waste as I simply can't send emails out with their forced unsubscribe header. If it was the typical CAN-SPAM footer it would be fine, but it just looks awful.

Incentivized