Omnisend (formerly Soundest) is an email marketing solution built specifically for eCommerce platforms, from the London based company of the same name.
$0
Spokal
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
Spokal is an inbound marketing platform for small businesses and freelancers. It offers a drag & drop content editor and social media sharing calendar, as well as real-time SEO analysis, keyword research, rank tracking, lead scoring, and lead nurturing.
$49
per month
Pricing
Omnisend
Spokal
Editions & Modules
Free plan
$0
Standard plan
$16
Pro plan
$59
Starter
$49
per month (1 user)
Essentials
$99
per month (3 users)
Team
$169
per month (5 users)
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Omnisend
Spokal
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
$16 Month
No setup fee
Additional Details
Omnisend offers three pricing plans: Free, Standard and Pro.
Using Free plan you'll be able to explore all of Omnisend's features (emails, SMS, push notifications, popups, segmentation, analytics, etc), send up to 500 emails and push notifications, plus 60 SMS per month at no cost.
The standard plan starts at $16 per month, you get everything in Free, unlimited web push notifications, a customer success manager and 24/7 support.
From $59 per month, you can use Pro plan and send unlimited emails and push notifications, get advanced reporting features, a dedicated Customer Success Manager, and priority 24/7 support. You'll also get free SMS credits equal to the price of your plan.
It's kind of an automation workflow, but for example you can set up a popup to appear at a specific time on a specific product page and offer the visitor something. The visitor then signs up and then (after you've set up your automation sequence) that visitor gets a specific welcome page based on the popup they signed up through, and then a specific order confirmation email and everything else flows from that specific popup. That's great because it's allowed us to sort of fine-tune our offerings to get our visitors' emails in the first place and offer, for example, someone browsing a product page for 3 minutes something different than someone staying 20 seconds on the homepage and then leaving.
For current Wordpress users Spokal is outstanding and highly recommended. For clients who don't already have a Wordpress blog it's a bit tricky as I need to first sell the benefits of using Wordpress in order to get them on board, but in all honestly I would recommend Wordpress anyway, it just slows the process down having to design and install Wordpress before we can get started.
Content calendar - the ability to visually see blog posts in draft and scheduled to publish over the coming weeks and months was a key benefit. Tracking this in spreadsheets is too hard. we can even post blogs as topic idea, pre draft, draft and final and schedule in advance so we can visualise the messages we want to communicate. Creation of tweets and Linkedin posts is done for you automatically. Simply drag the blog post to the time slot, day, week or month. This is a lot quicker than Hootsuite
Additional tweets can be composed and also dragged to the calendar, plus the feedly link allows curation of tweet content. This just scales up our creation and curation process.
Easy simple overview dashboard - showing key website stats, new visitors, new twitter followers. New blog posts. Social enagement per blog post, linkedin shares etc. simple lead scoring based on pages visited etc. Simple realtime SEO analysis on the blog post builder
twitter builder. very simple autopilot of increasing your twitter following using key words (it easy has a simple key word tool) to find relevant people to 'like' and hence follow
Dynamic, responsive team. I have asked a few questions about futures and always received a prompt helpful reply. Chris and his team are clearly commited to developing a great product.
Once linked to your wordpress site I really like the fact I can log into a dashboard on the web and on my ipad and manage my content delivery and monitor visititors and interaction. I use and know hubspot and the biggest issue for me is the learning curve. Anyone can learn and use Spokal. It provides and integrates a number of tools I currently use today at a far lower cost. It does need to integrate into a third party email provider but frankly the integration is simple. A lot of effort has gone into the design for non techies
Initial setup wasn't firing right, support issue was handled pretty quickly and easily.
It does not go back and put previous orders/customers into the automation. It will only work with go-forward customers from the time you install the product. (At least that's what the outcome of our support inquiry told us...).
Would like to see more sample templates and campaigns.
I personally would love to see more direct integrations into CRM and more powerful Marketing Automation tools, but the current Zapier integration is a general approach and works in most cases very well.
Spokal delivers everything I need to serve my clients in one place. It's so easy to use and their customer service is always available and responsive, there's no need for me to look elsewhere.
Spokal takes away some of the complexity and noise that Wordpress has. Offering a separate login and dashboard to allow a user to create blog posts, check on backlinks, see ranking keywords, social engagement and tracks visitors/ contacts. Spokal provides a lot of functionality that would typically require the purchase of several products e.g. Hootsuite, SEO Moz, SEO pressor, Hubspot. What I really like is the content calendar. I simply drag and drop of my blog posts into my calendar to post to twitter, linkedin and facebook. This is an easy way to repost evergreen content and build my following on twitter. The twitter builder is constantly looking for relevant profiles and conversations based on my defined criteria. The tool automatically likes the twitter user which drives traffic to my sight and actually helps me find followers and potential influencers. This product is ideal for people new to internet marketing or small business owners who don't want to be overwhelmed by the effort to learn, manage and run several tools or wordpress plugins. I have been with Spokal since the start and I continue to be impressed by the support and raft of new functionality being added.
Support is weird. They ask you to keep everything in one thread, but they can't see your replies if they forward it to tech, and things easily get lost. Also tech support is HORRIBLE, they just seem snobby, and give horrible advice liek to test things on a live version vs staging
I would say Omnisend is fairly similar in UX, usability, pre-built content templates, and customizable features. I chose Omnisend because it seemed simple to start and the price was within budget. The list segmentation and contact import features feel superior to the other competitors.
I haven't really tried other products at this point. I would say I tried to cobble together a bunch of options to make the right inbound marketing "tool suite". Nothing quite worked well enough. Again, Spokal serves as a very cost-effective option. Particularly relative to Hubspot.
ROI has gone up when compared to other email marketing. Our open rates have increased and naturally also our conversion rates. Both in absolute and percentage terms. I don't have hard figures with me, but I'd say we've almost doubled what we've done with other email marketing apps.
It's still early for us, but we can definitively say that we've cut our content creation / curation time down by about 40% while INCREASING the volume of quality relevant content that our audience expects.
