Higher Logic Thrive is a private community platform that empowers members, customers, support and product teams to create and manage meaningful, engaging online communities. The solution is designed to keep users coming back. They can find support, best practices, peer-to-peer connections, resources, events, and networking, all in one destination.
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Zoho Campaigns
Score 8.1 out of 10
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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.
Higher Logic works very well for our business purposes. We can very easily create new communities when we need to (and this is often!). Our association isn't as concerned with driving engagement, but the tools Higher Logic provides allows us to take a closer look at the engagement level of our committee members when needed
Higher Logic product managers are probably some of the best in the industry. They know their products and aren't pushy in trying to sell them to you. Don't get me wrong, they do try to sell you a product, but they understand that not everyone who is tasked with learning more is also a decision maker. That doesn't stop them from being professional and thorough in their demonstrations or explanation of fees.
Their technical support is top notch. Not only do they work to resolve issues, they also work with you to help you with non-issues. Our initial redesign was done by an agency that worked with HL directly to set up the new site. When I was tasked with a mini-redesign this year, HL technical support offered me a lot of insight on how to best do this using just my skills and HL.
They offer training on their platforms to ensure your success as an administrator. There is no cost and you can either go to their onsite two days "boot camp" or you can access a plethora of training videos and webinars through their online users' community.
Reporting is copious but you cannot build your own reports so you may have lots of information in several different reports and have to pick and choose across several to combine manually. Exporting functionality is there but there are some reports that are only a screen shot and you cannot export them.
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.
They are a great company that offer great products - primarily their community. As they continue to grow and expand their offerings, I believe they will increase the number of products that offer and in turn grow their client base. We use their community, activity synch, and volunteer manager currently.
The software is not that simple to use when you have to get volunteers involved in the content assembly process. The content management system that is native to Higher Logic could improve to make the task of training volunteers far easier. Given its simplicity, it is hard for the system to rival more developed websites that use advanced CMS software.
Higher Logic's support is sub-par at best. It can be difficult to get in contact with anyone from the support team, and when you do, it seems as if they don't want to talk to you and don't even have the answers to your questions. Within the past few months, we've contacted them twice and both times have been very disappointing. The first time was to let them know there was an inconsistency between the analytics report and the heat map. They basically said that they already knew about the problem but didn't have any set plans to fix it because they were working on other "more important" things. The second time was for a conference call to go over some additional features that we wanted to implement. And the lady we spoke with seemed very disgusted to have to speak with us and then rushed us off the phone because she had another call.
We are just in the early stages of looking into HubSpot Service Hub to determine if it will be a viable replacement for Higher Logic Community. We have other uses for the ServiceHub so there is an appeal to have it be a "one stop shop" for us. The big question however is how it will stack up to Higher Logic for the online communities. Candidly, while Higher Logic may be tough to beat in this area, it is something we will be looking closely at in the next 12 months.
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.
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.
