Iterable is an AI-powered customer communication platform that activates customers across channels in real-time. With intelligent personalization, dynamic content, and a cross-channel suite, Iterable helps brands create seamless, data-driven experiences across email, SMS, push, and in-app notifications.
At OneVision, I was brought on to migrate from ActiveCampaign and it was a huge improvement to go to Iterable. Much of the improvement lay in the back end connectivity to databases, which although not directly in my purview, made it easier to work as a team (product & marketing) inside our company.
The best scenarios would be email marketing campaigns such as eBlasts, Evites and newsletter/notifications. I believe Streamsend would be less appropriate for overall branding campaign and strategy.
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.
Streamsend reports allows us to see who is opening our email blasts and it even pinpoints how many viewers then go onto look at our social media sites and website.
Streamsend allows you to go back and review past email blasts. This prevents me from creating marketing material similar to what I have done in the past.
The site shows you who's email address was undeliverable. This helps me to weed out any old e-mails or individuals who requested to block the blasts.
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.
The renewal process is easy and doesn't require much thought. Our accounting team already has Streamsend as an approved vendor. We are happy with Streamsend and how it works. Switching email systems would require training and a learning curve that will be difficult to schedule in a busy department. The quality and reliability of Streamsend is something our team and attorneys trust.
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.
I admittedly don't remember much of Klaviyo, as I have become so familiar with Iterable. I definitely prefer Iterable, however. There are so many more features in Iterable and it just feels like a more dynamic and comprehensive experience with more granular data than Klaviyo presented us
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.
I saw an impact on our ROI when using Streamsend for our weekly newsletters, since we used them as a redirect back to our website for new business
The only negative impact I can think of would be the loss of some our registrants through our email database. Some thought that we sent out Eblasts and newsletters to frequently.
It did help with faster lead conversion as we saw higher traffic and visitors to our website through direct click-through from our email campaigns
