Need a complete, unified, and integrated marketing solution? Then let your favorite gang of email marketing experts share some super-useful info on how to use Sailthru to improve your digital marketing efforts.
Many years ago, the majority of marketers believed that personalization was all about that famous “Dear <first name>.” Every program out there these days promises 1:1 personalization among a myriad other futuristic benefits. Unfortunately, not many of them are actually delivering it.
Sad, but true.
So, grab yourself a coffee, get settled in, and let’s unpack this (and explore Sailthru in more detail).
What is Sailthru? - Pros, Cons, and Features
Sailthru is a comprehensive email marketing solution, and it’s the email marketing platform of choice for many of today’s modern marketers.
One recent study reported that around 204 million emails are sent every...single...minute. It sounds impossible, but it’s a fact. What's more, many customers will probably tell you that their inbox is almost unmanageable, which completely makes sense.
The problem lies with so many companies out there sending emails on assumptions, not real data. And, to aggravate recipients even further, they’re not tailoring their messages to be relevant to the reader. Can it get any worse? It can certainly get better, that’s for darn sure.
When it comes to email marketing, Sailthru’s actually trying to make the internet more personally relevant, and it’s doing a bang-up job at it. How? By providing both actionable analytics and the technology to send custom and personalized emails that align with subscribers’ interests and behavior. Sure, many other email service providers out there will claim the same, but few come close to actually combining analytics, personalization, and mass personalization nearly as well as Sailthru.
Pros of using Sailthru for email marketing
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Automated personalization - Sailthru’s email marketing platform lets you personalize every aspect of your campaigns, which brings so many email marketing benefits. It helps improve both your engagement and conversion rate. In addition, it allows you to send SMS and push notifications to boost engagement and to truly develop and implement a larger overall marketing strategy based on whenever a visitor engages with your brand. Sailthru really made huge strides since 2008 when they joined the ESP scene, especially in the publisher space, gaining clients like Adweek, Business Insider, and Refinery29 just to name a few.
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Behavioral data - Sailthru saves and analyzes all of your customer interactions. It then builds a lifetime view of customers’ interests, behaviors, and purchase histories. It’s incredible how well Sailthru compiles and applies this data. The data is gathered through all channels to personalize your campaigns and identify opportunities. Their Smart Data reporting and analytics tool produce long-term and real-time data that can be accessed anytime.
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Reporting and analytics - Sailthru Sightlines is a predictive intelligence tool built directly into the email marketing automation platform. Thanks to the data that is captured over time, this tool can calculate and optimize customer lifetime value.
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User experience - Sailthru’s ability to use ‘includes’, data feeds, and essentially let your devs take control of the program, allows your entire email program to be automated, resulting in one of the easiest platforms from which to navigate, build, and deploy mass personalized emails.
Cons of using Sailthru
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Sailthru pricing - According to Contently, Sailthru was built as an engagement tool, not an acquisition tool. In other words, Sailthru is good if you want to keep your friends, but not great for making new ones (and, for some users, it may be pricey). If lead gen is your game, you may want to look at our list of the best ESPs for 2024.
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Customer service - According to many Sailthru reviews, customer service appears to be quite poor. As one of their users said: ‘’If they improved this side of the business they would have a great product on their hands.’’ So, Sailthru, if you’re reading this, you know what to do. That said, we’ve personally never had a poor experience with their team, although replies can sometimes be on the slower side.
Features
Performance dashboards - This is, in our humble opinion, Sailthru’s most exciting feature. As the name says, it’s a dashboard that collects all data on one dashboard. Using this data, you can compare, contrast, and/or find some better alternatives to push your products and services in the industry.
Campaign reports - This feature allows you to check the performance of your campaigns at a glance. For example, you can run an ad while checking its performance simultaneously. Once you determine what works best for you, you’ll be ready to scale up the advertisement game.
Prediction manager - The geniuses from Sailthru are aware that your business is expanding and that your customers’ interests are ever-changing. Therefore, they are there to help you figure out those interests before the future arrives.
Retention analytics tool - This feature allows you to see how many customers you retain when running a specific campaign. It also provides highly detailed information on what platform was effective in reaching - and retaining - your customers. Really cool stuff, to be honest. We can’t think of a single CEO or CMO who doesn’t wish for something like this. Well, now you can have it!
Smart strategies feature - Once Sailthru collects, analyzes, and presents the data, the Smart Strategies feature provides you with everything you need to increase your conversion rates well into the future.
All about Sailthru's API
With Sailthru’s API, you’ll be able to programmatically interact with an array of features and data sets. For instance, add users, push and update content in real-time, send campaigns, and so on. Some common uses for their API:
Sending individual email messages – This includes automated welcome emails, purchase confirmation emails, and other transactional messages.
Send email campaigns – Schedule delivery to multiple recipients (great for campaigns like weekly or monthly newsletters).
Set user data or list subscriptions – Add or update data for any user. Subscribe users to, or unsubscribe users from, your lists.
Perform data processing tasks – Import subscriber lists, export user data, and perform bulk user data updates.
Sailthru email marketing pricing
Sailthru believes that every company is unique. As a full-service email marketing agency, we couldn’t agree more. For this reason, Sailthru provides their clients with a quote-based pricing system. This means that every user is encouraged to get in touch with them for the right pricing package and services. Not many ESPs work this way and those that do often charge a legitimate arm, leg, and spleen. Sailthru is just as powerful as these heavy hitters, but at a more sane price than, say, Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
With this system, each user receives an individual SMB or enterprise pricing package that corresponds to their unique needs. Contact the Sailthru pricing department for more details, and don’t forget to ask for your customized quote.
Integrations in Sailthru
Facebook - Using Sailthru’s Audience Builder, you’ll be able to send custom-tailored sets of your user base to Facebook. When you target your audience with Facebook Lead Ads, your potential customers can seamlessly register for your business without leaving Facebook. How cool is that?
Instagram - You can use Sailthru’s Audience Builder with Facebook Custom Audiences to reach your known users on Instagram very easily, while acquiring some extra customers on every platform with Lookalike Audience targeting. Noice.
Google AdWords Customer Match Integration - This enables you to leverage the power of Sailthru customer data across the Google AdWords platform. Moreover, through Google Similar Audiences, you’ll be able to grow your customer base across YouTube and Gmail.
Sailthru’s other Partner Integrations are Shopify, Gigya, Google Tag Manager, Google Product Sync, Inkit, Justuno, Kickdynamic, Magento, mParticle, Persado, Digioh, Swell, SMS Integrations, and WordPress. Needless to say, if you need to integrate with another eComm platform, you’re very likely to have that ability right out of the box. If not, again, Sailthru’s platform is incredibly dev-friendly. Plus, their API allows you to connect to nearly anything you can dream of.
Now, we wouldn’t be real email marketing experts if we didn’t mention Klaviyo. It’s no secret that we are huge Klaviyo fans. And, even though it doesn’t have a built-in integration with Sailthru (yet!), you can migrate your data over anyway. Oh, yes! Wait, but how? Check it out here. Boom!
Since we are Klaviyo experts, this is a good opportunity to see how Sailthru compares:
Klaviyo vs Sailthru
Wrapping up
Now that you know all about Sailthru’s email marketing features, pros, cons, and more, it’s time to call in the experts to share some email marketing tips and help you take your ROI to the next level.
