Adestra vs. Litmus from Validity

Small businesses with even smaller marketing budgets and no email marketing experience would be better off selecting a lower-end email marketing provider. However, Adestra will provide a growing company with every email marketing tool along the way.

Incentivized

I’ve been really impressed with Litmus, especially the personalization features. Being able to easily plug in tools like sentiment trackers right into our emails has helped us gather valuable third-party data without a lot of extra work. I also really appreciate the ongoing learning resources—they offer tons of free webinars and articles that are actually useful. I recently read one on email deliverability that broke down specific data and gave me clear, actionable steps to improve how our emails are hitting inboxes. It’s more than just a testing tool—it’s become a go-to resource in our email marketing toolkit.

Incentivized

• Adestra's "dynamic" list allows users to consolidate multiple lists in combination with data filters and exclusion lists. This implements segmentation and is a powerful marketing tool.
• Adestra's MessageFocus API integration provides developer-tools for list, campaign or transactional automated requirements.
• Campaigns can be sorted into project folders. This allows marketers to group campaigns together for management or reporting requirements. Moving or copying campaigns from one project to another is a simple process.
• Data downloads via Reporting is available at every level, from overview to individual KPI.
• Creating "core" tables helps marketers develop lists with similar attributes. Whether a list has many fields or simply the one required email address field, a "core" table helps to quickly map data labels from spreadsheet to online database. Creating data labels on the fly is a simple process, as well. The "core" table also groups similar contacts into one core database.
• Any list can be quickly "emptied" for to manage refreshed data. The contacts within the "emptied" list would still be members of the "core" table and so the process does not negatively impact reporting.
• Unsubscribes can be managed in one list (as a default) or individual lists. Creating individual unsubscribe lists -- dependent on business requirements -- would allow for a preference center, whereby recipients could be given a choice as to which campaigns they receive.
• The Form tool creates signup forms, simple surveys and landing pages. These can be hosted via Adestra or otherwise on the web. The tool provides for branding and proprietary cascading stylesheets, with a number of actions available through a drag-and-drop interface.

Incentivized

• The AQ and Approval Process is very seamless. We have a brand team of 20 people, and there are mostly five emails being deployed every day across 3 Hotels and 30 restaurants.
• The Preview of the email template on all devices, ranging from mobile phones to laptops and iPads, which we can also check based on ISPs like Gmail, Outlook, and AOL, is a very good feature that we use for each email.
• The Analytics tools we use for each email to create a tracking link to insert into our email for a send is a great feature. It helps us to see the email performance based on ISP clients.
• For every edits, we receive an email on our inbox, which is very helpful.

Incentivized

• As of this writing, there are at least 3 different editors available (a drag-and-drop, a WYSIWYG and HTML). However, only a small template library is available if requested through support. Those expecting to find ready-built templates for re-branding would find them through the third-party EDM Designer drag-and-drop editor.

Incentivized

• When creating a tracking code, I would like to see a button that says "Create New" without having to return to the main page.
• When creating a tracking code, I would like to have no expiration option.
• There is a little bit more personalization for the personalization content (being able to access the code HTML and not only the snippet).

Incentivized

I love using Litmus and find that it has been a huge component of the success of our email campaigns. I can't say enough great things about the platform, and I have seen firsthand how it has saved me time building and sending fully optimized email campaigns. I would absolutely renew again.

I have been self-trained on different ESPs for over 10 years, so my experience isn't comparable to most users. However, I've trained people on various email marketing platforms, and with some training, clients have a positive user-experience with Adestra.

Incentivized

Litmus has integrations that make the software an integrated part of my work every day. Being able to test right within my email builder is just brilliant. Daily I also use the web interface to review analytics and spam testing. Overall it is one of the pieces of software I use daily without any complaints or issues.

Incentivized

We have never had a problem with Litmus being unavailable so I would say their availability is fantastic. There might have been one time years ago that the site was down briefly but it also might have been a server issue on my end. Either way, Litmus was back up and running in a very short time

Incentivized

As with all technology, there are inevitably use-cases where you are unable to get to your original goal without some good old-fashioned experimenting. Some situations will (and are) more urgent which complicates an effective integration of a new process or a new team using an existing process but the "issues" are regularly resolved by re-starting the process specific to when Litmus is introduced to a project. If it doesn't come out the way you're anticipating, run it again and verify there is an issue before declaring all is lost

Incentivized

I have had campaign related issues solved very quickly. When there are technical issues, that involve more than one departmental, it may involve a longer turn-around and management.

Incentivized

I am always so so impressed with the litmus support team. They are not only prompt but attentive and offer very personalised responses and support

Incentivized

I had internal training for how to use, not lead by litmus. Unsure if there was any external training which took place before my time

Incentivized

It has all the required information.

Incentivized

I didn’t really personally participate much in the implementation of Litmus, but from what I observed during the process, it was a smooth process with minimal disruptions. The team was able to get up and running quickly, and the platform’s user-friendly interface made onboarding fairly easy for everyone involved from the start.

Incentivized

For medium and large sized businesses, Adestra competes well with dotMailer. While many of the functions are available through either provider, creating campaigns, managing lists and reviewing metrics are somewhat different. As of this writing, dotMailer's drag-and-drop editor dominates that platform and performs well for low-end users with little-to-no HTML experience. Even high-end users will appreciate how quickly campaigns can be built via the drag-and-drop editor. While Adestra utilizes the EDM Designer drag-and-drop, the third-party functionality is not completely cohesive and lack of a template library gives dotMailer a bit of an advantage.

Incentivized

I selected Litmus because it provides an all-in-one powerful tool to update content, collaborate with teams, and analyse data seamlessly. This saves a big amount of time for the whole team. The insights are more granular allowing us to focus deeper into improvements. The preview tools is one of the most important features we heavily rely on, as we can see how emails are previewed across multiple devices. Speed is also a major factor. Being an organisation sending out many emails, we are happy with the speed and efficiency of accessing and organising emails.

Incentivized

With our enterprise account, scalability is not an issue. I have not yet seen or heard of significant issues with user access, API connections for integrations etc. This includes down time for "Scheduled Maintenance" as some providers call them, Litmus has the technology backing to support a global team with a 24-hour workday across regions

Incentivized

• For companies that focus on goals and analytics, Adestra provides all the necessary tools.

Incentivized

• Litmus saves our team so much time by making the QA and email review process so much easier, streamlined, and efficient.
• We often send out campaigns out to thousands of members, and Litmus gives us the assurance and peace of mind that everything is working as it should before it gets sent out.
• Decreases the number of email review cycles we go through.

Incentivized