PFL helps businesses deliver authentic moments by
creating impactful direct mail that is data-driven, bringing measurement,
personalization, and predictability from digital to direct mail. PFL offers direct mail that is... Simplified: PFL simplifies direct mail execution by managing the entire process under one roof from strategy and production to delivery and measurement. Engaging: Supports engagement that results in action by paring digital tactics with memorable…
$40,000
per year
Sailthru
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
Sailthru is an email marketing and marketing automation solution. It supports email management, site personalization, mobile management, and both predictive and retention-focused analytics.
The reason it's not a seven or above is purely because of the timing of a solution we had requested originally back in August 2023. It's now February 2024, and we're waiting for a wow-factor pitch deck. Previously, we only received a demo recording and an order form quote. These truthfully aren't helpful enough to convince and sway our senior leaders into spending the $35k+ investment into the PMC.
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.
Personalization: It allows us to create highly personalized direct mail pieces tailored to individual recipients. For instance, we can include the recipient's name, relevant product recommendations, or even custom images that resonate with their preferences.
Multi-Channel Integration: The platform seamlessly integrates with our existing digital marketing tools and CRM systems. It enables us to orchestrate cohesive campaigns that combine email, social media, and direct mail to reach our target audience through multiple touchpoints.
Automated Workflows: PFL offers robust automation capabilities, streamlining the entire direct mail process. We can set triggers, such as website visits or email engagement, to automatically trigger the sending of personalized direct mail pieces, ensuring timely and relevant outreach.
Variable Data Printing: The platform simplifies variable data printing, enabling us to print custom content for each recipient efficiently. This is particularly useful for A/B testing different messaging or designs within a single campaign.
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.
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.
The UI is friendly, clear, and accessible, and I access it directly through the interface (Salesforce) that I perform my function in every day. It is intuitive to navigate, and I am able to find most functionalities I need without the need to consult an admin and/or support teams.
Only thing holding me back from a perfect 10 would be the timelines for involving the technical team on occasion. There have been a few times where the PFL technical support team has been booked up for days or more than a week out which can delay our project timelines. This doesn't happen often, let me be clear. But when it does, it's usually at the worst time for our campaigns.
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.
JourneyMail is one I have evaluated. It did not seem as full featured as PFL Direct Mail Platform, nor did it integrate with the rest of the Salesforce products like PFL Direct Mail Platform (journeymail ONLY integrates to marketing cloud). My customers tend to be cross-cloud and own multiple products and want solutions that can integrate across their stack easily.
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.
It does take a while to launch or re-launch a campaign, which can make it difficult to pivot quickly. However, if you're integrated with Marketo, then PFL is as scalable as your database and marketing strategy! The sky is the limit in terms of creativity. Post launch, the program is hands-off apart from report monitoring and potential optimization tweaks.
