Adestra vs. Robly

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

Robly can become easily exploitable for advertising agency services, which rely mostly on stable dynamics to make sure that marketing campaigns work and provide enough results to see profits. In other words, if Robly is managed from a purely professional methodology, better results can be obtained. Robly can also be used to manage small sales where you can better organize information about a specific customer, such as their contact details and history of interactions through different sales operations by the company, so it is not only possible to focus its use on mass marketing, but also intimate businesses that require some degree of administrative control in relation to new message alert notifications. If used in conjunction with services oriented to the execution of seminar sessions or online classes, it is possible to send mailings to groups, where the content information of each session allows viewing different documents and material of various formats from the e-mail, and thus make the sessions to be held seem more attractive to the public. This strategy is very feasible if you are going to sell a product explaining its use and characteristics.

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

• Ease of use. We switched to Robly from Constant Contact, and find it much more intuitive.
• Reporting. At a glance, we can see how effective our campaigns have been.
• I don't have a lot of experience with HTML, but I'm able to create good looking e-mails using the tools provided by Robly.
• The price is right! Our non-profit saved money by switching from Constant Contact to Robly.

• 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

• The emails do not allow us to add certain tools that would improve our management in the case of data collection, such as the application of interactive surveys within these emails.
• It does not integrate with services such as Survey Gizmo, which would be useful for structuring surveys.
• It also does not integrate with sufficient cloud backup platforms, which forces us to export our customer list data manually, and this can lead to errors.

Incentivized

Because we like the price and value. The annual subscription model allows us to maximize usage without worrying too much about cost, being a small mom and pop outfit.

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

Overall Robly's usability can be considered easy and intuitive. For experienced marketing professionals this program would not be challenging to navigate even on the first uses. There may be a slight learning curve for amateur users but overall it is fairly simple and easy to use and creates professional results.

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

We sometimes got through to a message taking service but they were not able to resolve our issue with a one-call solution necessarily always.

We should have been granted a MOBILE RESPONSIVE email template from the get-go. We were never offered any alternatives.

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

When trying to find an email platform to use with our company, we tried out three major softwares: Robly, Mailchimp, and Constant Contact. The price of Robly is what initially made it stand out to us, but upon using it, we also fell in love with the simplicity of the editing options and the easy navigation and organization of our many lists of contacts. It was a clear choice of which software to go with in the end - Robly ran by a landslide!

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Robly has enabled us to become more efficient in communicating with our audience. Because of the small size of our organization, we have a limited number of hours to dedicate to crafting communication with our audience. The ease of use of Robly means that we can spend less time on the mechanics of creating mass emails and more time on the quality of the communication itself.
• Since we started using Robly, our Opt-outs, Spam and Bounce rates (which were already quite low) have dwindled to practically nothing. Over our last 10 campaigns, we had 6 emails bounce, 1 marked as spam, and 18 opt-outs out of over 30K emails delivered.

Incentivized