Gist is a unified marketing, sales, and support platform. It includes live chat, a help desk, knowledge base, email marketing, marketing automation, opt-in forms, and more.
$29
per month
Zoho Campaigns
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
Zoho Campaigns is an email marketing and social networking campaigning tool for smaller companies that helps create, send, and track effective email campaigns. It features list management and segmentation, A/B Testing, tracking and reporting, automation, and mobile campaign management.
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.
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.
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.
Zoho should start by throwing this tool in the trash and then recreate it from scratch. There are so many flaws I would be here all year trying to list them all. Start by the fact that creating templates is an absolute nightmare. You'll find over and over again that something that should be easily executed can't be done. It is NOT a plug and play program. Everything is trial and error.
The reporting SUCKS bad. It gives you basics, but if you want any real insights... I have to export all my data into my own spreadsheets to compare results from multiple campaigns.
Customer service is B.A.D. You'll spend HOURS upon HOURS with a tech support team that knows less than you. The only time anything gets accomplished is when you work with a programmer. BUT, you'll seriously waste 1-2 hours explaining a problem to someone who is only taking notes. You'll get so frustrated when they try to show you how they think it works and you respond with... "I know how this works because I have used it for a year - the problem is that it stopped working the way it always did before. They will argue with you. You will respond accordingly. They will close tickets without resolution. Speaking of tickets, you'll never get one. They say they will take care of it and a week later you will follow-up and no one will have any idea what is going on. You'll start from scratch and be even more frustrated. You will learn to "fix" it on your own or deal with it, broken.
After two years, I'm still not sure if my emails even make it to an inbox. When asked, you'll be told that you need to write better subject lines. I call bull****. Don't rely on this product to deliver your email. And don't question Zoho, as it will always be your fault.
You can't use this tool to send to ANY group email addresses. You can't even override the system. I have a lot of clients that use info@xxx.com or sales@xxx.com, etc. and I have to send them personal emails since this will not allow them to be sent. They say it is to protect them from getting blacklisted. I call bull**** again.
The templates offered by the system are crap - unless you only send holiday emails. Not a large selection of just generic templates. You'll be pulling your hair out trying to use their builder to create your own. In the end, you'll end up sending emails with nothing "pretty" about them.
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
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.
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.
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.
Zoho Campaigns is not for beginners to email marketing, but it’s an excellent choice for those who want to send out a lot of emails with few restrictions and great reporting. It’s a no-brainer if you’re already a Zoho user, as Campaigns is included in Zoho One subscriptions and integrates nicely with other Zoho apps.
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.
It allows us to communicate with all our customers or lists together or individually, and to track how successful our campaigns are.
Customer Service is a target area of why we use Zoho Campaigns, and it meets our needs greatly.
To date we have not really measured the ROI or impact that Zoho Campaigns has on our marketing efforts but with this product it certainly has the means to do such.
