Sailthru vs. StackAdapt

Sailthru is well suited for any company that is working with a large email subscriber list and needs to send campaigns on a daily basis. It is probably less appropriate for anyone with a small list, or an e-commerce brand. I think there are better ESPs out there for e-commerce brands.

Incentivized

Campaigns for Brand Awareness: StackAdapt works effectively in campaigns for brand awareness where expanding brand visibility and reaching a large audience are the main objectives. Advertisers can target particular demographics, hobbies, and behaviors with its sophisticated targeting features, making sure that the correct audience groups receive brand messaging.

Incentivized

• Personalized content based on user behavior and content consumption.
• Campaign workflow is very simple and allows for a large number of campaigns to be set up and managed in a short period of time.
• Sailthru has a great customer service team. Our account support with Sailthru was top-notch and is a testament to the culture there at the company.
• Sailthru focuses on email marketing. With all of the other "cloud" solutions out there trying to be everything to everyone, they lose focus on the importance of sending the email. This is where Sailthru shines.

Incentivized

• Communication: Their reps are incredibly transparent, thorough and detailed. I really, really appreciate that.
• Creativity: Not only are the reps communicative, they actually bring new, fresh ideas to the table. As busy as we are, I can't thank them enough for that.
• Easy-to-use: As detailed as the dashboard is, it's actually pretty easy to use and bring new users up-to-speed on.

Incentivized

• Lists are easy to create, but difficult to locate (can't sort by most recent created, etc.). They are always listed in alphabetical order.
• In order to improve their speed to market with features, they had a lot of tech debt to work through in the relatively recent past. This generally seems to have been corrected and their parent company appears to really be investing in their success.
• Their automated campaign feature is due for an upgrade. This is on their roadmap and they have been open about its need to provide more robust functionality.

Incentivized

• There has been occasional slopping maintenance of the campaigns, and we have to follow up with questions about spending spikes or significant changes in delivery CPMs.
• Account rep knowledge can sometimes be lacking. When we question our reps about performance, we sometimes get confusing or nonsensical answers.
• The reporting UI is definitely clunky and unintuitive.

Incentivized

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 platform is easy to use and understand whether it is being used as self-serve or a managed service. The audience targeting is solid, and array of placements is versatile. With these, the level of engagement for video content is usually great

Incentivized

It is very user friendly and if any team members need further help, we are able to easily access their customer service team for hands on assistance with an actual human being, not a robot. Their team has been incredibly kind, understanding and thorough. It is really a great all in one tool for a business who relies greatly on advertising 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.

Support has been exceptional. Our dedicated team is always available and ready to answer any questions that may arise. We receive updates from them on a regular basis and they go above and beyond providing assistance when needed. The team is absolutely one of the bright spots in our relationship with StackAdapt

Incentivized

Nothing offers the customization and control for power users like Sailthru. Other options we have used have been simply as backups in case of Sailthru outages during critical moments. We chose Sailthru at the beginning of our growth from sending email natively. We haven't had a need to switch although we have briefly evaluated the cost/benefit of switching to other providers. Unfortunately, the switching cost is usually to high as we are tightly integrated.

Incentivized

StackAdapt has an easier self-serve platform than JamLoop, where you can also buy programmatic CTV and display banners. Though they lack audio placements, which is another cross-channel tactic in StackAdapt to reach the same audience with multiple formats. Comparable CPM rates on CTV, and customer support on both is similarly strong.

Incentivized

• 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

• For one of our clients, we've generated over 4.3x ROAS this year, which far exceeded our expectations for a programmatic display ad platform.
• Getting results for our clients with StackAdapt gives us an edge in attracting new clients, which helps us maintain client retention and satisfaction.

Incentivized