Opal vs. SAS 360 Plan vs. Yesmail360i

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.

Incentivized

For all outbound messaging, YesMail is perfect. For Social Media management, or for customer service management, where customers or subscribers need a place to "talk back" to your organization, YesMail might not be the best platform.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Create and manage a detailed plan for a marketing campaign: when you create detailed project plans and then task and role levels, SAS Marketing Operations Management (SAS MOM) makes it easier to coordinate between projects with very little, if any, issues.
• Share, reuse and leverage existing marketing assets: Like some marketing tools, SAS MOM allows you to create and reuse assets across various channels.
• Manage project collaboration and execution: You are allowed to set up a workflow that helps move processes along without having to manage each step of the project.

Incentivized

• Large Enterprise email campaigns for Fortune 500 clients.
• Account managers are very easy to work with and contact. I usually can get a response within a few hours to solve an issue.
• Software is very easy to use and ramp up time was short.

• No publishing capabilities, for the most part.
• No analytics tie-ins.
• Rather pricey.
• 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.

Incentivized

• It would be good to have a Storyboard feature to summarize and tie together some of the dashboard metrics.
• Missing feature: Hubspot CRM integration.

Incentivized

• The ramp up time for new users is pretty poor. Since it is not an intuitive interface non tech savvy users have a hard time getting the most out of it
• A lot of common functionality has to be built in... Which costs extra
• Support isn't the best, they do respond but not at the speed I would like.

Incentivized

I do not have the buying decision to renew/change providers, but do have the ability to provide my feedback to those who do. Yesmail has a lot of kinks that need to be worked out. But, for those that just need to deploy emails, and house subscriptions, this is a decent platform to do so. Companies with more advanced campaign targeting/analysis needs should explore other service providers.

Overall it is easy to use but there's several different portals you must log into instead of having everything at your disposal in one place (reporting, emails, extracting data, etc).

Very easy to get a hold of an actual person and quick responses.

You get for what you paid for. Opal has more features

Incentivized

We currently use MailChimp for automation campaigns. While there are limitations with MailChimp segmentation, it was much faster to get set up. We still use Yesmail for the bulk of our sending, and could probably do all the same things we do with MailChimp but it would just take a bit longer to get it set up

Incentivized

• Opal allows for more discipline in marketing as teams are better aligned on messaging and big moments.
• Opal cuts down on communication breakdowns and mistakes, which in the end leads to more happy customers.
• I think Opal provides the team with more confidence as everyone is on the same page. With everything in one place rather than communications being lost in emails, etc., everyone is more efficient and can work knowing that there is one source of truth.

Incentivized

• We spend quite a bit of time troubleshooting, so it has had a negative impact on employee efficiency. When there is an issue we have to give them step by step examples of what went wrong so they can re-create it. 8 times out of 10, they can't recreate the issue.