Sailthru Reviews & Insights

Score5.8 out of 10

46 Reviews and Ratings

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Sailthru are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

User-Friendly Platform: Many users have found Sailthru to be a user-friendly platform that allows for easy list segmentation and management. Several reviewers mentioned that complex list segmentation is made easy, and they can manage user lists and groups effortlessly.

Intuitive User Interface: The simplicity and intuitiveness of the user interface in Sailthru have been praised by users. They appreciate the ease of navigation and understanding, even for those without advanced coding skills. Users also value the ease of use of the campaign editor and the ability to set up and manage a large number of campaigns quickly.

Effective Personalization Features: Sailthru's personalization features have received high praise from users. Many reviewers mention how Sailthru makes it very easy to build an audience based on specific criteria such as geo-targeting and engagement. Users highly appreciate the ability to personalize content based on user behavior and content consumption, considering it one of the most important aspects of email marketing.

Reviews

21 Reviews

Great platform, empowers non-technical marketers to utilize data and provides robust off the shelf analysis

Rating: 10 out of 10

Incentivized

November 11, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We currently use Sailthru across our business units for email and overlays. Our editorial and marketing staff utilize it to drive personalization and curation. We really value Sailthru's culture to solicit customer feedback and use it to prioritize their roadmap. I also appreciate how the platform lends itself to use by both the technical and non-technical users.

Pros

Personalization of content by interest, category, behavior
Automation of campaigns
Customization of user journeys and ability to retarget based on how the audience is responding to the material
Robust API and data extraction

Cons

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.

Likelihood to Recommend

We are extremely happy with our partnership with Sailthru and I am a big fan. My only reservation in recommending unconditionally would be for the resources available at your company. Although non-technical users can use the platform with ease, to maximize utilization (and justify the cost), strong tech resources are preferable. Ease of use for integrations, APIs, and data management are spoken of highly by our tech teams, but organizations without those resources should plan for their need.

Verified User

Director in Marketing (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

7 years of experience

Sailthru adds smarts to any growing customer-focussed business

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

November 10, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Our marketing team uses Sailthru to manage campaigns and lifecycles for various triggered series of emails. The engineering team integrates features using Sailthu's APIs including triggering lifecycle email series and setting/getting various custom variables for users, removing sensitive information when requested, triggering individual emails and watching their engagement levels/open rates to gauge their interest in the brand or certain offeres. We also use Sailthru's personalized send times to best optimize for when the user is most likely to engage.

Pros

Manage user lists and groups
Understand the engagement of the customer
Manage complicated template logic and email send flow logic over many days
Allow for split testing of different campaign emails or cadences

Cons

When you are working with a lot of customers with changes made to your custom variables/attributes over time, it can be hard to maintain backward compatibility and run analyses on the full data set
Sailthru rarely has outages but the most likely time, historically, was during peak send times - example being Black Friday or Cyber Monday. In the last couple of years however, things have gone smoothly

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Russell Preston

Senior Web Developer in Engineering at Betabrand (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

6 years of experience

View profile

An expensive & complicated ESP

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

November 8, 2021

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Sailthru was being used as our primary ESP and the main communication method with our active customer base. We used Sailthru to support all marketing communications that were sent via email to members. We also tested it as a prospecting channel in attempting to convert leads to customers, with varied success.

Pros

Email Marketing
Dynamic Email Content
Messaging Customers

Cons

Clunky User Interface
Overly Complicated
Expensive

Likelihood to Recommend

While Sailthru has the core competencies and platform to do email marketing, it's overly complicated and has a very poor user interface that most new to intermediate marketers may find challenging to use. Compared to a Klaviyo that is extremely user friendly, easy to use, and very straight forward. Sailthru reps are also not very helpful and debatably have more knowledge than a user would.

Tyrell Cromoshuk

Director of Marketing in Marketing at Menlo Club (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

5 years of experience

Email has never been easier with Sailthru

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

February 27, 2020

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Sailthru for all of our email campaigns. Our email team is the only department that uses Sailthru. We use Sailthru to send our batch and blast sends and all of our automated email programs. It's helped us send dynamic emails to various lists. It's solved the issue of having to manually send all of our emails.

Pros

Sailthru is by far the best product when it comes to scheduling emails. You can send emails based on when a person is most likely to open one.
Very intuitive to set up an email program.
Customer support is ridiculously good. I can always get a hold of a live person and they do a great job solving issues.

Cons

Our data changes rapidly and Sailthru has a hard time keeping up. Prices might be incorrect when sending dynamic emails.
The syntax is confusing to add personalized tokens to emails.
The automation setup is not as flexible as I would like it to be.

Likelihood to Recommend

Sailthru is great to manage all of your email campaigns. They have an easy-to-use visual editor for all of your automated designs. They focus only on emails and do a good job at it. I would not use Sailthru if you are looking for an all-in-one marketing solution such as Marketo, Hubspot, etc. Sailthru is not ideal for small businesses as it is very expensive software.

Verified User

Manager in Marketing (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Sailthru: The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

November 14, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Sailthru is being used by me and me only as the email marketing manager, meant for the entire company's email program. It helps us get our messaging out and send our email campaigns on a daily basis.

Pros

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.

Cons

Retention Analytics - I've found this platform from Sailthru very difficult and confusing to use and feel if it were easier, I would get a ton of use from it.
New Template Editor - it would help if you could somehow save preset settings.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Hayley Squire

Email Marketing Manager in Marketing at Domino Media Group (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

4 years of experience

View profile

I’m sailing smoothly

Rating: 8 out of 10

Incentivized

November 14, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We’ve been using Sailthru for a few years. It’s relatively easy to set up campaigns and to send them to targeted audiences. Setting up an actual newsletter on a daily basis — as I have for a few years — is a breeze. I have run into only a few issues, the biggest being working around Sailthru’s periodic maintenance.

Pros

Setting up campaigns
Targeting specific audiences
Compiling and previewing daily/regular newsletters
Easy to understand preview platform

Cons

Layout could be a little more intuitive

Likelihood to Recommend

Not good as a fully implemented web content management system. Good as a supplementary system to further build an audience. Not good as a fully implemented web content management system. Good as a supplementary system to further build an audience.

Verified User

Employee in Social Media (201-500 employees)

Vetted Review

3 years of experience

Detailed and accurate results

Rating: 9 out of 10

Incentivized

September 25, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Sailthru is being used by our department to generate reports on how well advertisements did in our e-newsletters. It helps us give our clients accurate and detailed reporting so they can make informed decisions about which newsletters and days of the week perform best for them. Our team does a lot of reporting, so Sailthru is very helpful to us.

Pros

Generates accurate reports - A benefit, because many companies and teams need to report information to clients
Gives a lot of detail - this allows us to pick and choose what information we want to supply to each client

Cons

Reporting on text ads would be helpful
Provide impressions and clicks

Likelihood to Recommend

Sailthru is well suited for anyone who needs to provide detailed and accurate reporting to clients or team members. It is less appropriate when you are looking specifically for impressions and clicks, because we usually have to use OpenX to generate that information.

Cassidy Ebert

Client Services Manager in Sales at SourceMedia (501-1000 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

View profile

Honest B2C review of a long time user

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

August 8, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Sailthru is currently our primary marketing automation engine. We use it to orchestrate and deploy the majority of our email campaigns, including promotional, lifecycle, and trigger based programs. Additionally we use Sailthru as a source to store and manage customer segmentation for the majority of our campaigns

Pros

The lifecycle optimizer and campaign setup user interfaces are pretty solid and sufficient to manage
List management is pretty straight forward and easy to set up
Their pre defined engagement levels for users based on email and site activity are also pretty beneficial to use for targeting

Cons

The audience insights tool is okay but takes a long time to determine counts of segments. A lot of other platforms will return segment sizes within seconds whereas in Sailthru it can take up to 2-5 minutes
The platform is still in th early stages of integrating with external databases and lists from outside sources. It is set up to support one off promotional campaigns, but we’ve had issues with automating recurring campaigns leveraging audiences from outside systems
The lifecycle optimizer tool is a little behind in allowing campaigns to be triggered off of relative dates. We’ve had to still run anniversary campaigns manually to this point

Likelihood to Recommend

I think it is most suitable for smaller organizations with little to medium levels of complexity with how they want to manage their campaigns. Additionally it is solid to have as a centralized source for storing and capturing data for smaller orgs.

Verified User

Director in Marketing (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Sailthru's great with tracking newsletters!

Rating: 7 out of 10

Incentivized

May 30, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Sailthru is used within the operations and business team. It allows us to test newsletters and see if there are any errors prior to sending it out to our subscribers. Additionally, it allows us to see how many clicks, opens etc., each email gets -- seeing the growth as time progresses.

Pros

Gives analytics on how many opens a newsletter receives.
Allows your company to input their own personal coding into the platform -- making it more personalized to your own company.
Allows you to go back to a specific date and compare and contrast the progress certain newsletters have made overtime.

Cons

Sometimes there are glitches in sending newsletter tests over. There are some backend issues that sometimes arise - where we have had to contact customer support to trouble shoot the issue.

Likelihood to Recommend

Sailthru does allow you to customize your preferences through coding to have the layout you desire. But there are many glitches that come with Sailthru in testing our newsletters. Things are delayed or do not transfer over well -- leading to the operations team having to test things multiple times when it should only take one try.

Verified User

Account Manager in Product Management (51-200 employees)

Vetted Review

1 year of experience

Great for some, but not all.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Incentivized

April 19, 2018

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We are a digital publishing and advertising firm. We own and operate several websites and collected email addresses on those sites for the purpose of sending newsletters. In the newsletters, we would put advertisements and hopefully drive traffic to our sites to see other advertisements. Another service we offered was targeted email sends for clients based on information collected by Sailthru. Sailthru at the time we implemented said that they wanted to provide support to publishers and we were an ideal new client for them.

Pros

SailThru collects an impressive amount of data on your users allowing you to leverage it for even more targeted sends.
SailThru has a slick UI on the web that is designed pretty good.
SailThru provides great training in person and online.

Cons

SailThru never embraced supporting a publisher but rather focused on merchant-based use.
The reporting SailThru offered always kind of left us wanting a little more.
Support reps were sometimes difficult to get a hold of.

Likelihood to Recommend

SailThru is great for a straight forward implementation of a email provider for merchant based operations. I believe it would do very well for users who are looking to salvage abandoned carts or market to others according to previous behavior. It falls short for publishers who long to for a deeper understanding of their userbase that don't have to make sale conversions. We're looking for specifics on behavior and trends over time and never truly discovered that information.

Mark Armstrong

IT and Multimedia Projects Coordinator in Information Technology at Intermarkets, Inc. (11-50 employees)

Vetted Review

2 years of experience

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