Nice Platform : As Long as You Know What to Expect
November 09, 2019
Nice Platform : As Long as You Know What to Expect
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Higher Logic Communications
We use Higher Logic for our email marketing efforts. The communications department actually facilities the sending of these emails, but we send emails on behalf of the entire organization, including all of the other departments. It integrates with our association's membership database and we send a weekly e-newsletter to our distribution list of about 150,000 individuals. We also send about 10 other one-off emails each week to smaller subsets of our full distribution list--such as certain targeted interest groups or event registrants, etc.
- Integration: Higher Logic does a nice job of integrating with our membership database and management software. This allows us to identify specific interest groups and types of members to send them targeted emails that actually pertain to them. The info then goes back into our membership management software so we can keep track in there who has opened and clicked on emails.
- Analytics and Reporting: Higher Logic's analytics and reporting are great for what we need. You can easily see a basic overview of the email performance such as open rate and click rate, but you can also drill down further to see exactly who has opened the email, who has clicked it, what links were clicked the most, etc. There is also a heat map that gives you an idea of where people clicked the most. This is especially useful for our weekly e-newsletter which contains multiple different story items because it allows us to see which types of content performed the best.
- Easy to Set Up: Each email is easy to set up and there are a lot of different formatting options. It gives you the option to just drag and drop items as needed, but then you can also edit the HTML if you'd like. Setting up A/B testing is also very simple, and so is adding in your distribution lists and interest groups.
- Intuitive: The software, in general, is very intuitive and easy to use. Things are where you think they should be and everything is easy to find within the platform.
- Customer Service: Maybe we're just unlucky, but we've had very sub-par customer service when dealing with Higher Logic. They've been hard to get in touch with, difficult to schedule meetings with, and when we finally did have a meeting with a representative, she seemed very disgusted to have to be talking with us--and then rushed us off of the call because she had another call immediately afterward (we understand things like this happen, but it was just even more discouraging after an already poor experience).
- Down Time: The platform seems to be down more often than I'd like it to be. They often have scheduled downtime for system maintenance at off-hours, and this is totally fine. But somewhat often, it seems to be down in the middle of the day when I try to login to create or schedule an email. And it takes a little while (sometimes even several hours) for it to come back up. This is very disappointing when you're trying to get something done (especially when it's time-sensitive) and have to wait around to do it because the system is down.
- Inconsistent Data: When the analytics and data are correct, it's great! But we've noticed this isn't always the case. There are several different places on the platform that report data, and sometimes they don't match up. Or the percentage data and the raw data numbers don't equal each other and are totally different, so clearly, at least one is incorrect, but how do we know which one it is? Additionally, the numbers on the heatmap are sometimes way different than the numbers in the general data report. We brought this to their attention and they said they were aware of the problem but we're working on other more important things at the moment and would maybe get around to fixing it later (this goes back to the previously mentioned poor customer service). As of a few weeks ago, I thought it was indeed finally fixed, but then again last week we noticed it was back to being inconsistent.
- Higher Logic's email marketing platform allows us to consistently stay in touch with our audience and send them high-quality, targeted emails.
- It allows us to see which types of emails and email stories (within our weekly e-newsletter) perform the best. We can use this information to curate better, more engaging content for our readers.
- It's easy to use and intuitive, so it doesn't take up too much time to put together e-blasts and email campaigns, which allows us to save time while still performing our e-marketing efforts.
The only other email marketing platform I've used before is Mailchimp, and that's been quite a few years ago now. I'm not sure how many email recipients you can send to at one time using Mailchimp, but we send our weekly e-newsletter to a list of 150,000+ recipients every week (over a period of several hours) with Higher Logic without any problems. Also, Higher Logic seems a bit more professional and more geared towards larger corporations than Mailchimp. It was also important for us to have a system that would integrate with our membership database and management platform.
Do you think Higher Logic Thrive delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Higher Logic Thrive's feature set?
Yes
Did Higher Logic Thrive live up to sales and marketing promises?
I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process
Did implementation of Higher Logic Thrive go as expected?
I wasn't involved with the implementation phase
Would you buy Higher Logic Thrive again?
Yes