Good feature set; problems with reliability and customer service
Updated January 21, 2015
Good feature set; problems with reliability and customer service
Score 2 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Other
Overall Satisfaction with Sailthru
We are a SaaS company, using Sailthru for both our transactional emails (password resets, billing error emails, etc.) as well as for our campaigns (newsletters, upgrade nudges, etc).
- Feature Set: being able to split-test transactional emails, using their personalized send times to increase open rates, being able to create nudge paths based on user behavior and demographics very easily, are great.
- Build for marketers to use / not needing developers: marketers and sales people can easily build not just a single campaign, but very elaborate nudge campaigns and follow up emails based on easy-to-understand triggers.
- Reliability / bugginess: it feels more often than not, after logging in, there's a message at the top saying which feature currently doesn't work, which exports or reports are delayed. Uploads and downloads get stuck often, sometimes triggers don't actually work, 'smart' lists build based on specific user variables often don't return the right values or stop working after a while. Finally, we had some big problems in two consecutive months where we were not able (even with the help of their support) to get campaign emails send out for 2-3 days straight.
- Customer support: while well reachable, any support requests (even if mission critical) take hours; even if you call them. And there is no understanding of how much trouble their system issues can cause you - good luck trying to get some consideration for real damages that problems with their systems cause...
- Positive: increased open rates and CTRs. Driven by personalized send time and the possibility to every easily split-test transactional emails constantly.
- Negative: we had two months where we couldn't get campaigns for a number of days and one issue where code in subject lines wasn't resolved correctly - resulting in some 10,000 users getting emails with a subject line that read "{if first name}...."
Better than the pure campaign email marketing apps (MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc.) for the additional transactional email capabilities. With the lack of reliability and service, we will move on to others though (trying Mixpanel's and Intercom.io to see how they work out.
Using Sailthru
Sailthru Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Knowledgeable team Quick Initial Response | Slow Resolution Not kept informed Escalation required Need to explain problems multiple times Support doesn't seem to care |
Yes - Small bugs can be - although I have never experiences it being immediate: even when you call their support (rather than emailing in, because an issue is mission critical), you typically get the response "I have to look into this, I'll call you back" - which will typically take a number of hours, even if you are sitting in front of an email campaign that needs to go out immediately.