Mapp Digital vs. Marigold Engage by Sailthru

During our use of MAPP Digital, it is deserving to say that the product helped us to overcome the main challenges we faced in our business at the time. As a preliminary user I have struggled much with hosting manual campaigns on remarketing etc. But with the Mapp digital software hosting marketing campaigns became a complete automated process with supervision. This feature offered by Mapp made a huge decrease in my daily workload and I'm more than grateful for it.

Incentivized

Sailthu is perfectly suited, no matter what level of technical skill you have or support from an Engineering team. That said, it includes many advanced features which can only be fully utilized when integrated with custom webhooks and after receiving customer data sent via their APIs. There may be easier solutions out there for less technical users or for people wanting a simpler setup to begin with.

Incentivized

• BlueHornet's WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface for creating emails is easier to use than many platforms. Users appreciate this. BlueHornet makes it super simple to create a version specific for mobile devices.
• I am a big fan of the custom data segmentation tools built into BlueHornet. They are powerful and easy to use. Many other ESPs, including a number of the top rated ones, do not have such powerful, easy to use segmentation tools. This matters. It helps a user send more relevant emails.
• BlueHornet makes sharing to social networks simple. In this day and age, forwarding to a friend is dead. Sharing to social networks is essential. Having this be easy to do is very important.

• Personalization - one of the most important things you can utilize when emailing people.
• Segmentation - Sailthru makes it very easy to build an audience based off their criteria; there are so many different fields to choose from. We use this mostly for geo-targeting and engagement.
• Analytics - post-campaign analytics are very easy to look at, customize your view, and download as a csv to share with your team and company.

Incentivized

• It would be nice to see the API's functionality introduced into the web client.
• The reporting tools for transactional messages is different than the rest of the system. This promotes difficulty with getting accurate reporting in the web client, outside of an API call.
• The custom fields are different for transactional messages, which introduces times when human error may flub the fields because they aren't contiguous throughout the product.

• Giving more practical examples of technical setups, sometimes the only way to understand it is to see it.
• Can't filter lists by date created or date modified, particularly needed when tracking down a specific list or looking to remove older lists.
• Can't set up automated data dumps to an email address, has to be sent via API.

Incentivized

Although BlueHornet offers helpful testing capabilities, the ESP is a bit outdated. There is a lot of room for aesthetics improvement as they are not appealing. The reporting tool is usually broken, and reporting either no, or wrong metrics. If this ESP were to update their design, as well as fix the reporting tool, I think this platform would be much better.

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.

There were three tabs used to navigate throughout the system called, "publish," "engage," and, "measure." These three tabs made the site very user friendly and all features easy to find

They rolled out new feature requests quite frequently and always kept our team up to speed on what they were changing/adding to the system

Sometimes it was hard to get an initial response but after we started CCing more people, it became a lot better!

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.

They made sure to go through anything and everything that we wanted

I wasn't there when they first got it, but when I got there there were only a few people that knew a little bit about it. There was A LOT that we didn't know. Then BlueHornet came and had some workshops and we learned a lot that we didn't even know existed. They were doing a lot of things wrong before BlueHornet came and showed up more about the tool

We were able to thoroughly evaluate the program for Mapp Digital thanks to the free trial's availability. Comparing the two products' graphical user interfaces, it's evident that Mapp Digital comes out on top. Mapp Digital's excellent customer service was another reason for our decision to work with the company.

Incentivized

Sailthru provided a powerful, easy-to-use platform that was able to adjust to the needs we had at Dotdash. It was able to support the simple campaigns where we would send static creative to all recipients and the complex dynamic campaigns where we were customizing content. The scale and flexibility really made it a great platform for us to use.

Incentivized

• BlueHornet has been a good entry-level platform. We have successfully launched scores of clients with limited email marketing experience onto this platform. Because it is easy to use, we have spent minimal effort needing to help these clients with problems.
• It is easy to migrate clients on or off BlueHornet, depending upon their needs. This is helpful because it allows our clients to be on exactly the right platform. Some platforms make it difficult to migrate off, essentially trapping clients on a platform that no longer meets their needs or business objectives.
• I wish BlueHornet were keeping pace with technology advancements in the industry. The gap between the biggest ESPs and competitors like BlueHornet seems to be growing.

• 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