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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StackAdapt
Score 9.0 out of 10
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StackAdapt, headquartered in Toronto offers their native advertising specialized DSP, supporting programmatic advertising with audience discovery, B2B targeting, and engagement analytics among other features.
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.
StackAdapt is well-suited in situations where you need to drive awareness to a niche audience that cannot be easily targeted on the GDN. For our agency it is useful for our Canadian clients only, as HST is added to the advertising costs. We cannot pass this on to our international clients and therefore do not use the platform for any clients outside of Canada.
Communication: Their reps are incredibly transparent, thorough and detailed. I really, really appreciate that.
Creativity: Not only are the reps communicative, they actually bring new, fresh ideas to the table. As busy as we are, I can't thank them enough for that.
Easy-to-use: As detailed as the dashboard is, it's actually pretty easy to use and bring new users up-to-speed on.
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.)
There is no way to QA your own ads. They QA for you and based on the level of their customer support, you can trust their QA, but the lack of self-assessment can cause problems for your company/agency.
To know where your ads were actually deployed, when, and for how long would be amazing. They certainly know because they can track all sorts of analytics.
The platform is easy to use and understand whether it is being used as self-serve or a managed service. The audience targeting is solid, and array of placements is versatile. With these, the level of engagement for video content is usually great
Simple, streamlined interface. I would rate it higher if there was a proper agency portal (like an MCC "My Client Center") that allows you to control multiple client accounts from a unified login.
Support has been exceptional. Our dedicated team is always available and ready to answer any questions that may arise. We receive updates from them on a regular basis and they go above and beyond providing assistance when needed. The team is absolutely one of the bright spots in our relationship with StackAdapt
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.
In terms of Native advertising, StackAdapt blows Outbrain and Taboola out of the water. The ability to drive impressions is similar between all three, but we have seen a large improvement in the quality of these impressions from StackAdapt. Clicks, engagement, and sales are all up on StackAdapt when compared to the other platforms we have used in the past.
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.
Excellent traffic from our ads. Traffic exceeded our forecast.
Excellent management of our budget. We did not spend near as much as we budgeted for the response we received through our test.
The lead conversion was not expected to be high due to the type of content we deployed, but we received zero conversions, well below anticipated when compared to other ads for the same content.
