Iterable is a growth marketing and user engagement platform. It is designed for B2C markets and supports all types of marketing campaigns (blast, lifecycle, transactional) across all messaging channels (email, web, mobile push notifications, SMS).
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Spokal
Score 9.0 out of 10
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Spokal is an inbound marketing platform for small businesses and freelancers. It offers a drag & drop content editor and social media sharing calendar, as well as real-time SEO analysis, keyword research, rank tracking, lead scoring, and lead nurturing.
Iterable is great for email marketers that are not advanced/technical in emails. They made it very simple to create emails and run campaigns. Everything about Iterable is very easy - from creating emails with drag and drop functionality, segmenting and creating send lists, and even setting up a journey. The only downside with Iterable is that it's mainly meant for larger companies. There are better platforms if you're using email in a very simple way.
For current Wordpress users Spokal is outstanding and highly recommended. For clients who don't already have a Wordpress blog it's a bit tricky as I need to first sell the benefits of using Wordpress in order to get them on board, but in all honestly I would recommend Wordpress anyway, it just slows the process down having to design and install Wordpress before we can get started.
It makes designing and deploying great looking emails easy with their drag-and-drop technology and framework.
Iterable allows for great customization and time-saving with the use of their handlebar snippets. This has revolutionized how we are able to monetize our editorial audiences using clear logic that helps us get the most for each of our conversion efforts.
The various ways that you can run and view reports is incredibly helpful, and easy to customize. This means we can find most of the data we want and need across our various departments with their differing goals without having to piecemeal together crazy solutions or waste time reinventing the wheel.
Content calendar - the ability to visually see blog posts in draft and scheduled to publish over the coming weeks and months was a key benefit. Tracking this in spreadsheets is too hard. we can even post blogs as topic idea, pre draft, draft and final and schedule in advance so we can visualise the messages we want to communicate. Creation of tweets and Linkedin posts is done for you automatically. Simply drag the blog post to the time slot, day, week or month. This is a lot quicker than Hootsuite
Additional tweets can be composed and also dragged to the calendar, plus the feedly link allows curation of tweet content. This just scales up our creation and curation process.
Easy simple overview dashboard - showing key website stats, new visitors, new twitter followers. New blog posts. Social enagement per blog post, linkedin shares etc. simple lead scoring based on pages visited etc. Simple realtime SEO analysis on the blog post builder
twitter builder. very simple autopilot of increasing your twitter following using key words (it easy has a simple key word tool) to find relevant people to 'like' and hence follow
Dynamic, responsive team. I have asked a few questions about futures and always received a prompt helpful reply. Chris and his team are clearly commited to developing a great product.
Once linked to your wordpress site I really like the fact I can log into a dashboard on the web and on my ipad and manage my content delivery and monitor visititors and interaction. I use and know hubspot and the biggest issue for me is the learning curve. Anyone can learn and use Spokal. It provides and integrates a number of tools I currently use today at a far lower cost. It does need to integrate into a third party email provider but frankly the integration is simple. A lot of effort has gone into the design for non techies
Some of Iterable's user interface in Journey is a little confusing. This is a personal preference.
Their image uploading is very basic - but they are working on releasing a new version soon.
It's difficult to look up a specific contact by only being able to search their email. I wish I could search by name without having to use segmentation
I personally would love to see more direct integrations into CRM and more powerful Marketing Automation tools, but the current Zapier integration is a general approach and works in most cases very well.
Spokal delivers everything I need to serve my clients in one place. It's so easy to use and their customer service is always available and responsive, there's no need for me to look elsewhere.
Spokal takes away some of the complexity and noise that Wordpress has. Offering a separate login and dashboard to allow a user to create blog posts, check on backlinks, see ranking keywords, social engagement and tracks visitors/ contacts. Spokal provides a lot of functionality that would typically require the purchase of several products e.g. Hootsuite, SEO Moz, SEO pressor, Hubspot. What I really like is the content calendar. I simply drag and drop of my blog posts into my calendar to post to twitter, linkedin and facebook. This is an easy way to repost evergreen content and build my following on twitter. The twitter builder is constantly looking for relevant profiles and conversations based on my defined criteria. The tool automatically likes the twitter user which drives traffic to my sight and actually helps me find followers and potential influencers. This product is ideal for people new to internet marketing or small business owners who don't want to be overwhelmed by the effort to learn, manage and run several tools or wordpress plugins. I have been with Spokal since the start and I continue to be impressed by the support and raft of new functionality being added.
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.
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.
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.
The visualization tools in iterable for creating journeys are so much easier to use and adjust than in Marketo, Mailgun, or Mailjet. We have better performance metrics tracking in particular than in Mailjet or Marketo. It is also easier to see where we have made mistakes in emails and to adjust the code visually than in any of the other platforms
I haven't really tried other products at this point. I would say I tried to cobble together a bunch of options to make the right inbound marketing "tool suite". Nothing quite worked well enough. Again, Spokal serves as a very cost-effective option. Particularly relative to Hubspot.
We've never run into any issues with volume. Iterable is always able to handle everything we throw at it. We utilize webhooks and emails. Both perform very well. Webhooks actually perform too quickly and downstream systems need to be able to handle the volume throughput that Iterable can send.
This is a hard thing to qualify with the short amount of time we have had on the platform and with the changes that have occurred since onboarding. iOS 15 was released, so we are learning new ways of measuring the ROI.
The ease of integration with other tools has helped us begin to break into more personalized emails for our customers. We have really only scratched the surface and have so much farther to go!
It's still early for us, but we can definitively say that we've cut our content creation / curation time down by about 40% while INCREASING the volume of quality relevant content that our audience expects.
