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 but, unfortunately, not many of them are actually delivering it.

Sad… but true.

Grab yourself a coffee and we’ll take you on a magical carpet ride to explain…

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Sailthru - The Ultimate Software Review and Pricing post highlights:

What is Sailthru? - Pros, Cons, and Features

Sailthru is a complete, unified, and integrated 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

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • Reporting and analytics - Sailthru Sightlines is a predictive intelligence tool built directly into the marketing automation platform. Thanks to the data that is captured over time, this tool can calculate and optimize customer lifetime value.

  • 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.

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Cons of using Sailthru

  • 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. If lead gen is your game, you may want to look elsewhere, and for some users, it may be pricey.

  • 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.

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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, which is great for a weekly or monthly newsletter.

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 – Imports of subscriber lists, exports of user data, and bulk user data updates.

Sailthru email marketing pricing

Sailthru believes that every company is unique with unique needs that need to be met. We couldn’t agree more. As a result of this, they provide their clients with a quote-priced 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.

Being a quote-priced system, each user receives an individual SMB or enterprise pricing package that corresponds to their unique needs. Contact their company for more details, and don’t forget to ask for your tailored quote.

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Integrations in Sailthru

Facebook - At Sailthru, they have an integration with the Facebook Marketing API. This extends capabilities to Facebook Custom Audiences and Lead Ads. 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 - With Instagram, you’ll have an additional path to reach your potential customers as well as new prospects. With Sailthru’s Audience Builder, you can use their integration with Facebook Custom Audiences and 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 - They have also built an integration with Google’s AdWords Customer Match. This enables you to leverage the power of the Sailthru customer data across the Google AdWords platform. Moreover, you’ll be able to find new customers across YouTube and Gmail who are similar to your highest-value users through Google Similar Audiences.

Their 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!

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 help you take your ROI to the next level.

Today’s most exciting start-ups trust us to be their email marketing agency. Reach out and learn why we're averaging over 1,300% ROI for our clients.

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