Zoho Campaigns is an email marketing and social networking campaigning tool for smaller companies that helps create, send, and track effective email campaigns. It features list management and segmentation, A/B Testing, tracking and reporting, automation, and mobile campaign management.
The best scenarios would be email marketing campaigns such as eBlasts, Evites and newsletter/notifications. I believe Streamsend would be less appropriate for overall branding campaign and strategy.
Streamsend reports allows us to see who is opening our email blasts and it even pinpoints how many viewers then go onto look at our social media sites and website.
Streamsend allows you to go back and review past email blasts. This prevents me from creating marketing material similar to what I have done in the past.
The site shows you who's email address was undeliverable. This helps me to weed out any old e-mails or individuals who requested to block the blasts.
Zoho should start by throwing this tool in the trash and then recreate it from scratch. There are so many flaws I would be here all year trying to list them all. Start by the fact that creating templates is an absolute nightmare. You'll find over and over again that something that should be easily executed can't be done. It is NOT a plug and play program. Everything is trial and error.
The reporting SUCKS bad. It gives you basics, but if you want any real insights... I have to export all my data into my own spreadsheets to compare results from multiple campaigns.
Customer service is B.A.D. You'll spend HOURS upon HOURS with a tech support team that knows less than you. The only time anything gets accomplished is when you work with a programmer. BUT, you'll seriously waste 1-2 hours explaining a problem to someone who is only taking notes. You'll get so frustrated when they try to show you how they think it works and you respond with... "I know how this works because I have used it for a year - the problem is that it stopped working the way it always did before. They will argue with you. You will respond accordingly. They will close tickets without resolution. Speaking of tickets, you'll never get one. They say they will take care of it and a week later you will follow-up and no one will have any idea what is going on. You'll start from scratch and be even more frustrated. You will learn to "fix" it on your own or deal with it, broken.
After two years, I'm still not sure if my emails even make it to an inbox. When asked, you'll be told that you need to write better subject lines. I call bull****. Don't rely on this product to deliver your email. And don't question Zoho, as it will always be your fault.
You can't use this tool to send to ANY group email addresses. You can't even override the system. I have a lot of clients that use info@xxx.com or sales@xxx.com, etc. and I have to send them personal emails since this will not allow them to be sent. They say it is to protect them from getting blacklisted. I call bull**** again.
The templates offered by the system are crap - unless you only send holiday emails. Not a large selection of just generic templates. You'll be pulling your hair out trying to use their builder to create your own. In the end, you'll end up sending emails with nothing "pretty" about them.
The renewal process is easy and doesn't require much thought. Our accounting team already has Streamsend as an approved vendor. We are happy with Streamsend and how it works. Switching email systems would require training and a learning curve that will be difficult to schedule in a busy department. The quality and reliability of Streamsend is something our team and attorneys trust.
Zoho Campaigns is not for beginners to email marketing, but it’s an excellent choice for those who want to send out a lot of emails with few restrictions and great reporting. It’s a no-brainer if you’re already a Zoho user, as Campaigns is included in Zoho One subscriptions and integrates nicely with other Zoho apps.
I saw an impact on our ROI when using Streamsend for our weekly newsletters, since we used them as a redirect back to our website for new business
The only negative impact I can think of would be the loss of some our registrants through our email database. Some thought that we sent out Eblasts and newsletters to frequently.
It did help with faster lead conversion as we saw higher traffic and visitors to our website through direct click-through from our email campaigns
It allows us to communicate with all our customers or lists together or individually, and to track how successful our campaigns are.
Customer Service is a target area of why we use Zoho Campaigns, and it meets our needs greatly.
To date we have not really measured the ROI or impact that Zoho Campaigns has on our marketing efforts but with this product it certainly has the means to do such.
