Listrak, headquartered in Pennsylvania, offers a customer data and marketing platform for retailers that features email marketing with social network engagement, abandoned cart rescue, and in-store data / information retrieval. Listrak is retail-specific and helps create an integrated and personalized customer experience across physical stores, ecommerce stores, social networks, or email, helping retail entities of widely varying sizes, small to large, to achieve their marketing goals.
Listrak…
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Marigold Engage by Sailthru
Score 8.8 out of 10
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Marigold Engage by Sailthru is an email marketing and marketing automation solution. It supports email management, site personalization, mobile management, and both predictive and retention-focused analytics.
It is definitely a contender if you run an e-commerce website. It connects with a host of different e-comm platforms (we use Magento) which makes product recommendations, purchase history/amounts, website behavior, etc. a lot easier to segment on and set trigger campaigns or targeted sends. If you're a B2B company, you probably won't want to use Listrak. The tools they have don't accommodate that segment as well as B2C, as many features would go unused since they simply don't make sense. I'm sure there are instances where Listrak would work just fine, but coming from that area previously, it is definitely a B2C tool.
Sailthu is perfectly suited, no matter what level of technical skill you have or support from an Engineering team. That said, it includes many advanced features which can only be fully utilized when integrated with custom webhooks and after receiving customer data sent via their APIs. There may be easier solutions out there for less technical users or for people wanting a simpler setup to begin with.
Personalization - one of the most important things you can utilize when emailing people.
Segmentation - Sailthru makes it very easy to build an audience based off their criteria; there are so many different fields to choose from. We use this mostly for geo-targeting and engagement.
Analytics - post-campaign analytics are very easy to look at, customize your view, and download as a csv to share with your team and company.
It is rare that I have issues or feel like Listrak has an area to improve in. The company is constantly ahead of the market and making additions/improvements on a monthly basis. That being said ... I have one area to suggest improvements: COMPOSER
Composer - Drag & Drop editor: Although their design software with the new 'Composer' is better than your average WYSIWYG editor, their drag & drop editor lacks some basic design tools that stunt your ability to design out-of-the-box email campaigns. I typically write all my email code, so this doesn’t necessarily affect me in a negative manner. But ... if coding emails isn't your strong point, then the lack of design features and limited template selection could be bothersome. (*disclaimer - I do not believe Listrak's drag & drop editor is garbage, but it does fall short when compared to some of its competition.)
The biggest factor is that even after two months of trying to go through their credit processes and getting the right consideration for the real damages we had with the tool not being able to send campaigns for days, their sales staff is still not willing to work with us on it, making us do the switch away from them right now. We got extremely disappointed by trying to work with them through those issues.
Their account management / sales staff doesn't seem to be taking the problems you experience very seriously - it took us 3 months and nudge emails to them every 2 weeks to ask for status updates (plus 6 different conversations with different people) to get a (very small credit) for a major issue, which in two months prohibited us from sending campaign emails for 2-3 days at a time.
The Bronto platform is so similar to Listrak in that it made no sense for us to move unless there were significant cost savings (there weren't). We are so intertwined with Listrak that it would be painful to move for the sake of moving. Klaviyo is very DIY which can be great. We find that we do our best work with hand-holding and account support.
Sailthru provided a powerful, easy-to-use platform that was able to adjust to the needs we had at Dotdash. It was able to support the simple campaigns where we would send static creative to all recipients and the complex dynamic campaigns where we were customizing content. The scale and flexibility really made it a great platform for us to use.
Increasing our awareness of effective marketing email campaigns
Reducing the effectiveness of our campaigns due to the complexity of software and inability to cancel our contract despite being LOYAL customers for 2 years.