Mailchimp Transactional Email (formerly Mandrill) is designed to allow users to deliver fast, personalized transactional emails using API or SMTP.
$0
per month
Privy
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Privy in Boston is designed to enable online stores to capture more emails and convert first-time visitors into customers using the company's integrated suite of web conversion and email marketing tools.
Any system that requires transactional email message functionality as an external service. The benefits of a well managed and vetted server to maintain reputation as well as being reliability is well worth the effort needed to integrate towards the API specs
Adding Privy to your ecommerce store is a no brainer. You can very quickly increase your on-site email acquisition conversion rate through the Spin To Win wheel and other templates that Privy offers. You can also use it for additional on-site messaging like announcement bars and landing pages
Mandrill is extremely reliable. We switched from using a platform that was very hit-or-miss, but we never had a single deliverability issue with Mandrill's transactional API. Every email was sent reliably and quickly.
Mandrill's reporting and debugging features made it easy to ensure that all our messages were getting delivered to the right place in a timely manner. In fact, Mandrill's tools were so robust that we used it as an end-around way of debugging another failing service we were using.
Mandrill is a very affordable add-on to an existing MailChimp account. Adding an extra layer of reliability was a no-brainer, and made the cost essentially negligible to our organization.
Segments website visitors to your site: It can recognize who has been to your website once or many times. It allows you to present an offer to different user groups, present an offer, and then capture their email address.
Provides flexible opt-in form options: Embedded opt-in forms, pop-ups. bars at the top of your site. You can redirect to a landing page or a thank you window, create a form that takes up the entire screen, provide an offer at the end, or simply thank users for their information.
Easy user experience: Different options for designs, easy drag + drop builder. Easy installation, trackable results.
Support their users: Holy cricket. Their support is so helpful. Privy was one of the first software companies that I've encountered that has really gone above and beyond for my team.
Measurability: Privy understands that digital marketers want to track - They want to be able to split-test their options, track their results - not only views but conversions and $ conversions. Privy gives its users this ability.
The rate-limit system can be troubling. If you are switching providers and already have a large e-mail volume, you're going to want to transition slowly. The per-hour send limits are initially very low, and if you have any deliverability or complaint hiccups, they will plummet quickly. The Mandrill support staff is very helpful in this area - they will not (and claim that they can not) manipulate send limits for any account at any time for any reason.
Billing is combined in with a paid MailChimp subscription, which didn't used to be the case.
Flexible options: The software allows so many different kinds of opt-in form solutions: Full-page, pop-up, bar at the top of the page, embedded, etc.
Easy UX: This software is easy to use for just about anyone on my team. It's easy to implement and work with. Design, form field determination, and integration is all relatively very easy to perform.
Great support: We've had in-person calls with their support team, and they've been answer specific questions and offer relevant strategies. They've been willing to get on the phone with me and my clients to help us solve problems.
Multiple integrations - No matter what CRM you're using, there's likely a way to integrate Privy forms into it.
Easy installation on sites: Just a strip of code.
Visible, measurable results: Tracking and data with visits, conversion events, and conversion $ tracked to the forms.
It did the job for us and we were happy with the delivery rates of the email, analytics and customisation available while integrating it within our platform.
Privy is very easy to use and is intuitive to new users. The templates they provide give you a head start on campaign builds and their customer success team is approachable and knowledgable about the product. You do not have to be a tech wizard to get rolling with Privy, but the results will make you feel that way.
I haven't personally reached out to their support team, but the feedback I've heard from our tech support and engineering teams have been that their response to questions has often been they either are unsure or that Mandrill is what it is. For example, when our customers weren't able to see opens and clicks for all emails sent, and we reached out to their support, the response was it is what it is, and they'll send a notification to our app if they can.
The customer support team from Privy is incredible (shout out to Simone). Every person I have worked with has been knowledgable, helpful, polite, and responsive. They have a live chat feature and all CSRs do a great job.
So we actually work with clients across all of the platforms listed above, but Mandrill has a huge ease of use bonus in its favor, especially when working with clients who are setting up a Cart Recovery style marketing campaign for the first time or are looking for a bit of a fire-and-forget setup. With more sophisticated clients (on the scale of global ecommerce companies), who have a larger subscriber/customer base and in-house design teams, we find that Mandrill usually isn't enough
After having used quite a few email marketing platforms, I can say out of all of them we like Privy the best. Privy's integration with the BigCommerce platform makes it much easier to use than the others we tried in the past and we are happy with the results we have gotten and their excellent customer support which is superior especially to Mailchimp which can only be reached by email.
Positive impact for our clients - Our clients can see exactly how many views each opt-in has seen, how it has converted, and how much revenue has been generated from that opt-in and email sequence that it is linked to. (We have used this tool + paid traffic + email to generate more than $15k for some of our clients. And that's just one part of their marketing systems...That's about 150x ROI).
Positive impact for us - We only want to recommend and use tools that have proven use cases and conversions. This is true here - and it means that we can reliably recommend and use it as a tool to grow revenue for our clients in combination with paid traffic and email marketing. They also support their partners - that means we're more efficient. Time is money - so that's a win here, too.
