Opal is a platform for brands, used to plan, create, and calendar their content - across teams and channels. Opal aims to enable tight alignment and high levels of efficiency. Marketing teams from companies such as Starbucks, Microsoft, and Target use Opal to collaborate, plan, and visualize, while ensuring an always-unified brand voice. Plan every facet of the brand experience, to ensure consistency throughout every moment and across every channel. Create…
$10,000
per year
Persado
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Persado in New York offers their "Message Machine" natural language technology, which leverages a comprehensive marketing language knowledge base of over one million words and phrases, powered by AI and data science. Persado is designed to unlock the power of words to engage consumers like never before, one by one, moment by moment, across every marketing channel, driving improvements in brand engagement and revenue performance.
I honestly cannot recommend this tool enough. Opal is such a valuable tool for brand content creators and there is nothing like it available. If you're serious about content marketing and have a need to find ways to collaborate, plan and provide more visibility among teams, then Opal really is the only way to go. One more thing that's not being mentioned: The tool is simply amazing but it's only as amazing is the team behind the tool. Their customer support and willingness to quickly be in touch when needed is a key feature within itself. Seriously, such a good team of people.
Persado is an excellent tool for a small marketing team seeking to "work smarter, not harder." The tool itself is simple to use and generates instant results, all while learning and reporting at a deeper level than a human on a marketing team could. We have been able to reach the right eyes within our audience at the right time, improving open rates and generating more revenue from our promotional emails.
Content planning: you can look at one asset and see how it is being used across multiple channels by multiple teams.
Content collaboration: it is really easy to see what other people and teams are contributing to an asset, or how they are using it. We can also duplicate content that was created by another team to use as a starting point in our own content collaboration.
High level/big picture overview: Opal allows us to see content that is being created, planned and scheduled very easily; it goes beyond social content (which we can also see in Sprinklr) to show us content created across multiple channels.
They know way more than me on how to create effective subject lines that actually get people to open. We have solid creative and cool emails, but without the hook, it means nothing. Persado is that hook. (Side note, they are also customizable so if your company has specific guidelines/tone, you can set those parameters.)
The analytics are amazing! It's so cool to see the responses to various emotions ebb and flow over time. We have a few that consistently perform well (and some that consistently underperform, which makes sense for them to), and a few others that seem to react to the season somehow. How would I know this on my own? (That's right, I wouldn't.)
Creating these subject lines and exporting them to Listrak (our ESP) is insanely quick and easy. It takes more time for me to set up the split test in our ESP than it does to set up the subject lines in Persado.
Requires someone to really manage the structure in order to keep the tool organized and use it effectively. When this is done right, though, it's worthwhile.
Not so much a con, but area for improvement: an option to have reports generated automatically and sent to me weekly or similar. It would automate my learning and understanding of how the tool is working.
When we write control subject lines that include emojis, I have to go outside of Persado to find the emoji I want to use, copy, and come back to Persado. However there is a button to add emojis to the Persado generated subject lines.
Since Persado integrates with our ESP, Bronto, we'd really like to see more to the connection such as sharing conversion and revenue data.
I've used Percolate and it's said to be a competitor of Opal, but in reality, it's a tool I've struggled with. It's fine for day-to-day scheduling and publishing, but lacks the flexibility and functionality of Opal. Opal really feels like it was built by storytellers where Percolate feels like it was built purely by an engineering team.
Phrasee wasn't an option to select, but we did evaluate them after hearing about them at a digital marketing summit. I liked what they were doing and the emails they were sending, but the pricing structure was outrageous! There was a 0% chance our CFO would approve the budget. To add salt to the wound, they also charged outrageously for a trial period. Ugh - as much as I wanted it, there was no way I could justify the ROI. Enter Persado. I got an email from a sales rep which accompanied a resource. I got excited but hesitated. I then saw they offered a free 14-day trial. Wait - what?? Free?! Yes. Wendy gave me the grand tour and holy cannoli I was immediately impressed with the results of our very first send. And it's only gotten better. Sorry Phrasee, I'm with Persado now.
Opal helps us with visibility and content sharing, so that teams have greater awareness of assets that have already been created, meaning they can leverage them instead of creating net new.
Granted these numbers are driven by a number of other factors as well, our email marketing program has grown by 44% and 35% in the last 2 years respectively. More email opens from Persado subject lines has certainly contributed to this growth.
Open rate improvement of 11% between control subjects and Persado subjects.
Click rate improvement of 27% between control subjects and Persado subjects.
