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Why I love Iterable (and what it would take to make me love it more)
June 24, 2023

Why I love Iterable (and what it would take to make me love it more)

Jennifer Gibbs | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Iterable

At LeadMark, we specialize in financial publishing and lead generation. We do that through the power of email marketing, specifically via the publication of 7 "main" free newsletters. We mail tens of millions of emails each week, and there aren't many platforms that can handle the volume of emails we send, or the intricate ways we break down the data and share it with our database. Iterable has been able to provide everything that we need to handle our email marketing within a single framework, making it much easier for us to have seamless function and easier training and transition as teams grow and change.
  • It makes designing and deploying great looking emails easy with their drag-and-drop technology and framework.
  • Iterable allows for great customization and time-saving with the use of their handlebar snippets. This has revolutionized how we are able to monetize our editorial audiences using clear logic that helps us get the most for each of our conversion efforts.
  • The various ways that you can run and view reports is incredibly helpful, and easy to customize. This means we can find most of the data we want and need across our various departments with their differing goals without having to piecemeal together crazy solutions or waste time reinventing the wheel.
  • One of my biggest frustrations with Iterable is that, in their continual quest for improvement, they sometimes make rather large and highly impactful changes to the platform without giving users ample notice or details on how to navigate the changes.
  • The heatmaps are wildly inaccurate if you don't toggle to see raw data. This was something no one exactly tells you, and you have to figure it out for yourself. It can be vastly different than the reality. I'm hoping this is something that gets fixed ASAP.
  • Notifications are hard to work with. You can't scroll through them or navigate different pages, so it's feasible you could miss an important notification in accounts that are very active and sending out a lot of blasts and journeys.
  • Makes managing our remote editorial and marketing teams much easier.
  • Makes it easy to compare and contrast our reports in Iterable, our database, versus what our clients are seeing on their end.
  • Improvements in dynamic content have allowed us to dramatically increase our weekly editorial revenue, and not just as a one-off occurrence, but a level of predictability that wasn't available to us before.
  • The support team allows us to get out ahead of potential system wide issues, as well as trouble-shooting specific obstacles our high-volume sending can create. Makes our lives a little easier.
I know that it's been powerful, and that Iterable makes it easier, but that's an aspect that's handled by a different department. So, while I've seen the results first-hand, I can't honestly speak to the use of those tools, but I can attest that they get us results - especially when it comes to SMS and push notifications.
Dynamic lists here can change your life. It gives you the power to be ultra granular if needed, or to cast a wide net that won't be full of waste. We use these features to segment our lists based on frequency of opens, clicks, which offers they've interacted with, how new they are, how long it's been since their last open, and so much more. We even use category ids in our links now to build niche lists that are topical so that we can pair new offers with hot, warmed up audiences. These all work together to help us drastically improve our RPMs across our various channels, while adding in some friendly competition that keeps all of our departments working at top performance. It's been a lot of fun. And you always find new ways you can kick things up a notch.
Prior to working inside of Iterable, I was a massive fan of Keap. However, within this organization, we've "outgrown" the solutions we have inside of Keap. To do what we do inside of Iterable would be impossible and cost-prohibitive within that platform. But I still love Keap and would recommend it to medium and smaller businesses that aren't in a position to afford or use Iterable yet.

Do you think Iterable delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Iterable's feature set?

Yes

Did Iterable live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Iterable go as expected?

I wasn't involved with the implementation phase

Would you buy Iterable again?

Yes

While we sometimes laugh and joke and call Iterable "irritable", the truth is that it's the best system out there for large enterprise needs. We've tested out a slew of other solutions that make a lot of big promises, but fail to deliver. That is why 7 out of 7 of my directly-controlled newsletters operate out of the Iterable platform.

That said, it is the best of the best, and it isn't cheap. Smaller organizations that have small lists or haven't yet mastered monetizing their lists would have a hard time absorbing these costs and staying in the black. It's amazing, but you kind of have to "grow into it."

Iterable Feature Ratings

9.9
WYSIWYG email editor
10
Dynamic content
10
Ability to test dynamic content
9
A/B testing
10
Mobile optimization
10
Email deliverability reporting
10
List management
10
Triggered drip sequences
10
Lead Management ()
Not Rated
Campaign Management ()
Not Rated
Social Media Marketing ()
Not Rated
10.0
Dashboards
10
Standard reports
10
Custom reports
10
10.0
API
10
Role-based workflow & approvals
10
Customizability
10

Iterable Reliability

We've definitely tested scalability, and it's no line - it works. The process is pretty easy. Most of the times it goes off without a hitch. Any time we do encounter issues, our support team is quick to get on the job and very communicative as they work us through a successful launch.
Iterable is there like 99.9% of the time. However, when it goes down, it grinds us to a halt. Most of the time, outages are an hour or less, but if that's at a peak time, it can be a nightmare. That said, when the worst does happen, there are frequent updates and an easy situation tracker that give you an estimate of how much longer you'll have to wait for the issue to be resolved.
There are certain times of the day (generally around 9am EST and 5pm EST) when things slow down, and I generally chalk that up to just the stress of mass usage. Some of the messaging insights can have issues loading if you're rapidly switching from one project in Iterable to another. But, again, those kinds of issues are to be expected. Nothing that frustrates me too much or gets us off track.