Iterable vs. SeoSamba Marketing Operating System

Iterable is a highly robust platform for omnichannel management with advanced personalisation capabilities, and it is among the best in the industry. It does it without being technically overcomplicated, thereby surpassing older industry standards that require developer-level knowledge for advanced personalisation or targeting setups. One thing where Iterable shines is the CSM programs they assign to clients that truly nurture them to reach the full potential of the platform and achieve business goals. There are a few shortcomings here and there, but I haven't seen any platform without them, and overall, the enablement that Iterable allows far surpasses other alternatives.

Incentivized

I highly recommend SambaSaaS to businesses managing multiple websites and social media accounts. I also recommend it for entrepreneurs who need to manage international branches and international clients

Incentivized

• Customer Journey creation - the platform easily creates a visual path for the marketing team to curate messaging based around timing, channel, behavior as well as add split testing logic and exit criteria so we target only the audiences we want.
• Customer Success - one of the best teams I've ever had the pleasure of working with. I'm able to move so much quicker because they really create a helpful partnership.
• Audience segmentation, the platform is easy to work with even if you're a first time user, they do a great job of visually showing the logic and the and/or/none type rules.

Incentivized

• Automates multisite SEO, so we can stay focused on great content that attracts the right audience for our two entirely different strategic business units.
• Eliminates the surprises we used to get with other plugins when Wordpress makes unannounced changes that crash other plugins.
• Agile, easy to use, and saves hours of time and creative resources
• Automates metric capture: site analytics, keyword/phrase capture, search engine page results etc...in an online dashboard (and it's free).

Incentivized

• Insights. I think this is the biggest downfall of Iterable, the insights and analytics area is really not good at all. We have almost stopped using it all together in favour of just using Mixpanel (but now we're paying for 2 platforms). Things we can do in Mixpanel that we can't do in Iterable:
• - custom conversion windows
• - more scalable reports
• - comparing multiple events
• - setting up alerts that trigger to slack
• Segmentation - building segments and organizing lists that are already built.
• - relative dates can be confusing but are a critical piece of building lists
• - unable to compare multiple events
• - we have a pretty good naming structure for our lists but with so many daily users, no good way to organize them (with labels or folders) and searching for a list requires you to find the exact word we end up re creating dynamic lists each time
• - static lists don't show you what rules were used to create the list
• - no way to see changes over time
• Improved ways of collaborating. There's no way of knowing if other people are editing a list, template, campaign or journey. easy to overwrite each other's work
• I've been an Iterable user for about 4 years, at 2 different companies. SinceI started using Iterable I think the number of bugs has increased.
• I wish Iterable did a better job testing releases so we're not the ones discovering issues so frequently.
• In app message. We've had issues with this tool/channel starting at implementation. It feels like it never made it's way out of beta, despite us paying for it now.
• The app team offered to do working sessions with us to understand how we use it day to day and never followed up on that. There have been no improvements to the tool and any time we run into another issue with it (although Jena in support is great) it takes forever to diagnose or we are told the issue cannot be replicated. It just feels like we have constant issues with this tool.
• We've actually onboarded to another tool (not ideal for omni channel) for some in app messages because this one has so many downfalls and is so buggy.
• Self serve documentation is great when you have an idea of what you're doing but not entirely sure. It is not easy to understand for people who are newer or less well versed in the platform.

• It has a lot of features. So, it's kind of difficult to get started and to learn every feature in the software. However, once you get used to SambaSaaS, it's fairly easy to navigate.

Incentivized

Extremely easy to use, deeply integrated into our infrastructure

Iterable very easy to learn and use. It's a great platform for both a new email marketer and a marketer that's been working in email for 20+ years.

Incentivized

Iterable is there like 99.9% of the time. However, when it goes down, it grinds us to a halt. Most of the time, outages are an hour or less, but if that's at a peak time, it can be a nightmare. That said, when the worst does happen, there are frequent updates and an easy situation tracker that give you an estimate of how much longer you'll have to wait for the issue to be resolved.

Incentivized

The API is super quick. The UI can be a little sluggish depending on what you're loading, but overall Iterable performs great. Iterable appears to do a good job of making processes async so that one action isn't blocking another.

Incentivized

I've never experienced any issues with Iterable. As I and my colleagues have learnt the system and it's features, response to questions and advice from our account manager is always quick. Kevin knows the product well, and with the few tricky questions has hasn't been able to answer he's been quick to get back to us.

Incentivized

As mentioned previously, I was hired to do a migration from ActiveCampaign, and I stayed for 2 years as a power user of Itearble. Since leaving OneVision Resources, I have continued to volunteer my time in a regional user group, which I would not do if the platform, product, and company were not so strong and so marketer-forward.

Prior to SeoSamba we were making manual changes. Then we started researching several possible other plugins but the reviews all said the same - that if WP made significant enough changes those plugins would become ineffective. SeoSamba's ability to automate optimization and keep up with/stay ahead of those changes was the deciding factor for us.

Incentivized

We've definitely tested scalability, and it's no line - it works. The process is pretty easy. Most of the times it goes off without a hitch. Any time we do encounter issues, our support team is quick to get on the job and very communicative as they work us through a successful launch.

Incentivized

• I do not have hard numbers, as I am not in the department that deals with those kinds of quantifications of impact. However, I do believe the use of Iterable has been a positive thing for us in providing more comprehensive data that is useful when dealing with customer tickets.

Incentivized

• It helped me automate my email marketing campaigns, so that I could generate more leads for my business.

Incentivized