Support onboarding and reporting lackluster
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We use SendGrid to send around 1.5-2M marketing emails monthly. We use the Marketing tool so that our production team can easily create messages without knowing complex HTML. We have setup an API sync to another database which populates a few custom fields. We also try to use the analytics tool.
Pros
- Drag and drop message building is streamlined
Cons
- Ineffective support. Instead of answering a question or even looking at your account, they ask constant questions until you have to give up and use AI searches outside of SendGrid. Support has no insight into what's happening in your tool so there would be no way for them to answer correctly. You can only have one person who is notified of any support case update. In our case, this is the contract signer and he isn't actively using the tools or submitted support cases. He has to forward the emails which is really strange and inefficient. We were told by our Sales Exec that we are super needy and should consider paying for premium support b/c we have submitted 18 support cases in 7 months.
- Constant technical issues like imports simply not happening
- Onboarding was non-existent
- Query-based segments can only be built/refreshed once daily
- Contact records don't have any history such as bounced, complained, messages sent
- Segments and lists don't have details such as who in that group have bounced, opted out, complained. You never know exactly how many people will receive your message until after you send it. You can't see a snapshot of your target audience group size.
- Creating permissions for teammates is a nightmare. You can't use the subuser functionality if a teammate needs access to more than one subuser account because email addresses must be unique. You can't limit permissions for teammates unless you use SSO.
Likelihood to Recommend
If you're prepared to build out your whole staff UX, audience creation, email production, and analytics on your own using API, this tool may have that flexibility. If you require a sturdy drag and drop production tool, this tool has it but at the expense of a lot of other critical functionality. Out of the box analytics/reporting, is extremely limited. Complex queries, even something like pulling those who haven't engaged in email within a certain time period, is clunky. If you require any support at all, this is not the tool for you. I'm a deliverability consultant and have used many of the top email marketing tools and SendGrid has been extremely difficult for my team. I do not recommend it. Shiny and bright during sales, pretty disappointing thereafter.
