LocaliQ vs. Sailthru

LocaliQ is well-suited, in our experience, for B2B marketing and, specifically, hyper-targeted and personalized marketing efforts. The geofencing capability is excellent at helping us deliver messages literally to the doorsteps of our target prospects. The proprietary software they use for this targeting is worth the money, and their reps, specifically Nikki Rowell and Sarah Pena, are fantastic and delightful people to work with. The only scenario that was slightly underwhelming was LinkedIn. Their tools don't deliver any additional value to LinkedIn ad campaigns, so it's not worth paying LocaliQ to run these campaigns; we can run them ourselves, which doesn't require much effort. That is just a small downside. We are extremely pleased with LocaliQ and their whole team.

Incentivized

Sailthru is well suited for any company that is working with a large email subscriber list and needs to send campaigns on a daily basis. It is probably less appropriate for anyone with a small list, or an e-commerce brand. I think there are better ESPs out there for e-commerce brands.

Incentivized

• ThriveHive is a smaller marketing team dedicated to helping small to medium sized businesses perfect their marketing messages. ThriveHive is particularity good at understanding how Google, and other search engines work, and have been instrumental in helping my company to grow and evolve.
• With ThriveHive, you get a dedicated coach who is matched to your type of business. This experience with similar businesses gives your coach a better understanding of your business and the challenges your company faces.
• My coach is very good at responding to my needs within 1 to 2 business days. Email contacts are fluent and as often as I need, to discuss ideas or questions. I can only speak of my relationship with my coach, and I am very pleased.
• I feel that ThriveHive makes every effort to take excellent care of their clients, and makes you feel like you are their most important customer. I definitely believe that this is one of ThriveHives' greatest assets.

Incentivized

• Personalized content based on user behavior and content consumption.
• Campaign workflow is very simple and allows for a large number of campaigns to be set up and managed in a short period of time.
• Sailthru has a great customer service team. Our account support with Sailthru was top-notch and is a testament to the culture there at the company.
• Sailthru focuses on email marketing. With all of the other "cloud" solutions out there trying to be everything to everyone, they lose focus on the importance of sending the email. This is where Sailthru shines.

Incentivized

• The email content editor could use some additional bells and whistles, it cannot handle some more advanced functions, but for the basics it is more than adequate.
• Options for website creation are a bit limited and the turnaround time can be a bit lengthy at times because of the volume they do.
• Tracked phone lines can be a bit pricey, but not exorbitant.

Incentivized

• Lists are easy to create, but difficult to locate (can't sort by most recent created, etc.). They are always listed in alphabetical order.
• In order to improve their speed to market with features, they had a lot of tech debt to work through in the relatively recent past. This generally seems to have been corrected and their parent company appears to really be investing in their success.
• Their automated campaign feature is due for an upgrade. This is on their roadmap and they have been open about its need to provide more robust functionality.

Incentivized

The biggest factor is that even after two months of trying to go through their credit processes and getting the right consideration for the real damages we had with the tool not being able to send campaigns for days, their sales staff is still not willing to work with us on it, making us do the switch away from them right now. We got extremely disappointed by trying to work with them through those issues.

Overall usability pretty good. If we would have gotten better return on our advertising dollar I would have continued with them - their dashboard was very easy to use and the recaps they provided were helpful. They try to put data in bite-sized pieces for the client that are understandable (unlike google's reporting page itself which can be a bit difficult to understand at times). Their team was friendly, semi-responsive, and provided explanations when requested

Incentivized

Their account management / sales staff doesn't seem to be taking the problems you experience very seriously - it took us 3 months and nudge emails to them every 2 weeks to ask for status updates (plus 6 different conversations with different people) to get a (very small credit) for a major issue, which in two months prohibited us from sending campaign emails for 2-3 days at a time.

LocaliQ is more economical that marketing agencies we've used in the past. Our dollar goes farther. We've also used services from phonebook providers that were getting into the online advertising field. At the time, it was just being introduced so the reps knowledge on the topic was quiet limited.

Incentivized

Nothing offers the customization and control for power users like Sailthru. Other options we have used have been simply as backups in case of Sailthru outages during critical moments. We chose Sailthru at the beginning of our growth from sending email natively. We haven't had a need to switch although we have briefly evaluated the cost/benefit of switching to other providers. Unfortunately, the switching cost is usually to high as we are tightly integrated.

Incentivized

As mentioned prior, their ability to utilize and maximize our resources so that we receive the best results on all avenues of marketing and advertising. We see better lead generation, brand recognition and top of mind awareness due to LocaliQ efforts

Incentivized

• Local print advertising enhanced our community presence and strengthened brand loyalty.
• The automation of PPC and display campaigns has saved our marketing team at least 15-20 hours per week of work monitoring campaigns.
• Service fees feel steep for the campaigns we run, especially for a business with constrained budgets.

Incentivized

• Sailthru has helped us build a welcome series that's much more effective than anything we had before.
• It's much easier to analyze transactional campaigns than our previous ESP.
• We're better able to run A/B tests and learn from the results -- all of which improves our email strategy.

Incentivized