Listrak, headquartered in Pennsylvania, offers a customer data and marketing platform for retailers that features email marketing with social network engagement, abandoned cart rescue, and in-store data / information retrieval. Listrak is retail-specific and helps create an integrated and personalized customer experience across physical stores, ecommerce stores, social networks, or email, helping retail entities of widely varying sizes, small to large, to achieve their marketing goals.
Listrak…
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SMS.to
Score 9.9 out of 10
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SMS.to is a bulk SMS marketing tool, available via an API that enables developers to add bulk SMS features to Viper, or Whatsapp, etc.
It is definitely a contender if you run an e-commerce website. It connects with a host of different e-comm platforms (we use Magento) which makes product recommendations, purchase history/amounts, website behavior, etc. a lot easier to segment on and set trigger campaigns or targeted sends. If you're a B2B company, you probably won't want to use Listrak. The tools they have don't accommodate that segment as well as B2C, as many features would go unused since they simply don't make sense. I'm sure there are instances where Listrak would work just fine, but coming from that area previously, it is definitely a B2C tool.
SMS.to is ideal when you have a large number of users and you need to be charged by SMS delivered not by number of users. Let's put an example other solutions out there wanted us to pay user or contact which is illogican for a product that has more than 100K users because it doesn't matter if you send no message or you send 10 messages they will charge you per contact in the other hand solutions as SMS.to they will charge per SMS delivered which makes really economic the scenario specially if you only send to specific segments of contacts by making use of contact lists. A least appropiate scenario is when you need to send emergency/urgent SMS because for some resaon the SMS in this platform will be sent after 20-30 minutes even an hour I ignore why it happens but that's why we always try to schedule our campaigns and be sure they are generic marketing messages. For emergency/urgent SMS is recommended to use another platform.
It is rare that I have issues or feel like Listrak has an area to improve in. The company is constantly ahead of the market and making additions/improvements on a monthly basis. That being said ... I have one area to suggest improvements: COMPOSER
Composer - Drag & Drop editor: Although their design software with the new 'Composer' is better than your average WYSIWYG editor, their drag & drop editor lacks some basic design tools that stunt your ability to design out-of-the-box email campaigns. I typically write all my email code, so this doesn’t necessarily affect me in a negative manner. But ... if coding emails isn't your strong point, then the lack of design features and limited template selection could be bothersome. (*disclaimer - I do not believe Listrak's drag & drop editor is garbage, but it does fall short when compared to some of its competition.)
The Bronto platform is so similar to Listrak in that it made no sense for us to move unless there were significant cost savings (there weren't). We are so intertwined with Listrak that it would be painful to move for the sake of moving. Klaviyo is very DIY which can be great. We find that we do our best work with hand-holding and account support.
I already pointed out this but basically we decided to go with SMS.to because 2 reasons:
1. It can be paid with paypal (first reason) we have some bad experience with other products because payment gateways may suddenly block your cards and you're unable to pay even if you want to use the service so when we saw that SMS.to has Paypal payment we just decided to go for this option.
2. You pay per message and not per contact this is ideal other platforms will ask you a monthly fee for marketing features that you're not looking plus paying per SMS or per contact we were just looking a straight forward software in order to send SMS campaigns.
Increasing our awareness of effective marketing email campaigns
Reducing the effectiveness of our campaigns due to the complexity of software and inability to cancel our contract despite being LOYAL customers for 2 years.
