Complete YesMail Overview: Why You Should NOT Use YesMail
Updated January 27, 2014
Complete YesMail Overview: Why You Should NOT Use YesMail
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Enterprise 7
Overall Satisfaction
- The biggest strength of YesMail is that it's good for churning out large amounts of emails. So if you constantly send out a lot of emails, newsletters, or promotions on a daily or weekly basis then YesMail is a good fit.
- The reporting for YesMail is also above average. You're able to look at all the main metrics such as open rates, click rates, bounces, unsubscribes, etc. They also have a click map so you can optimize your emails based on where people are clicking within the email and what content they're clicking on.
- YesMail also has a fairly good scrubbing process in place so if you have a lot of dead weight on your lists (email addresses that aren't active don't open, click or bounce out a lot) then YesMail will automatically remove these emails. For example if an email address has bounced 10 times in a row then YesMail will remove that email from its system.
- The targeting within YesMail is lackluster at best, you can't do much dynamic targeting when deploying your emails. For instance if you want to set up an email campaign where someone receives an email 24 hours after opening or receiving an email you won't be able to.
- YesMail also doesn't integrate well with other systems, so you won't be able to fully connect your data within YesMail with other tools such as Omniture, Google Analytics or other software you might use such as web forms. Without being able to connect all your data and software you're limited on how you can transfer data into YesMail.
- Another common theme with YesMail is that it constantly breaks down. They will run an update or try fixing something and it will cause havoc within the system. You will find that your emails get disabled or don't deliver correctly.
- YesMail also needs to improve upon how it stores the data attached to your email addresses. If you have other contact information such as address, phone, state, country, etc attached with an email address YesMail won't be able to clean up the data automatically you will have to do this manually. The amount of characters for a given field is very limited. So if someone has a long address or phone number that exceeds the character limit the data won't pass over to YesMail.
- YesMail also isn't built to be a fully automated system so you won't be able to track and follow your audience through different email campaigns. There's no overall life-cycle for an email address like you would have with a system such as Eloqua.
- Overall its had a negative impact on employee efficiency. We spend quite a bit of time troubleshooting with YesMail when this time could be spent in other areas.
- There hasn't been much of a positive impact, overall our ROI with YesMail has been lackluster. It needs to be improved in a lot of ways before a positive ROI can be reached.
We chose YesMail because we already had been using it and it would have been cumbersome to switch.
Evaluation and Selection
- Price
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Existing Relationship with the Vendor
Usability
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | Do not like to use Not well integrated Inconsistent |
- Setting up and deploying an email is as easy as it gets. There's nothing difficult when learning how to use YesMail, it's very straightforward.
- The reporting portal is also very easy to use. You can search for a specific email or groups of emails. You can also easily select which metrics you would like to look at for emails (opens, clicks, soft bounce, hard bounce, amount sent, etc).
- You need to have specific JavaScript within the body of your email's HTML code in order to deploy an email. This JavaScript is very cumbersome and not easy to modify. If there is something wrong with the JavaScript you will have a hard time knowing how to fix it.
- Updating your email addresses and lists takes a lot of manual work and even then all the data might not pass over to YesMail correctly.
- There's also a lot of steps involved in extracting data out of YesMail. It takes at least 15-20 minutes to pull a single file so you will be stuck with long waiting periods.