Audience Republic vs. Twilio SendGrid

Audience Republic is good for data acquisition using their gamified competitions, but I think that's about the only point of difference it has from Braze, Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor. While they promise to allow you to easily segment data from ticketing outlets, in my opinion, this is a blatant falsehood. In my experience, excuses come through thick and fast from the customer service team, but nothing has been resolved in the 2.5 years of using them.

Incentivized

Twilio SendGrid is well suited for those organizations who need to send mass emails very often to their prospects and customers and thus may be wary of a reliable tool that can do that without affecting domain reputation. It may be less suited for organizations which do not have say more than 10,000 target prospects and thus may rely only on 1:few ABM for sending emails.

Incentivized

• Segmentation
• EDM template refinements
• Data acquisition

Incentivized

• Managing email lists / audiences is easy with features like groups and segments.
• They provide pre-built email templates that are very easy to modify. It is also super easy to create new email templates with their drag-and-drop email builder.
• Provides clear / easy-to-read analytics of email campaigns.
• I can easily import large email contact lists all at once or add a user manually one-at-a-time, when needed.

Incentivized

• Integration of ticketing agencies
• More flexible templates
• Better customer service
• Not lying about the fees charged to other clients

Incentivized

• Not necessarily their Email API but their email in general - they are currently in beta for automated email sequences but are still bare bones. Much more work is needed before it can be used mainstream and be able to convert everything to SendGrid.
• Helping with warming up our dedicated IP for the best-sending score.
• We seem to hit the promotions folder a decent amount (maybe the IP problem above) and even a lot of their emails hit my spam or promotions folder (whether they be transactional or marketing) which isn't a great sign when trusting an ESP.
• Transactional email sequences would be a huge plus.
• Now that Twilio owns SenGrid, having an integrated platform where you could see all our transactional emails together.
• Better reporting and split reporting between transactional and marketing emails.

Incentivized

It's easy enough to use, even for a beginner, but I think the usability is dampened by the terrible dynamics of the platform and, in my experience, how they create more manual labour and legwork instead of the optimisation they promise.

Incentivized

It has the potential to be really cool. However, it feels as if it was created by developers for developers (and I work with developers, yet even for me the instrument was somewhat not easy to use - just read SendGrid's help manuals...) However, if you are into data and your way of thinking is more mathematical rather than lyrical, you'll enjoy this instrument

Incentivized

Twilio SendGrid Email API is everything we want it to be, and we have no reason to look for any other solution. Features and pricing match exactly what we need. As developers for SaaS products, Twilio SendGrid Email API provides a great service. I hope that they stay this way and don't inflate the service with too many marketing oriented features, because there are other tools for that and Twilio SendGrid Email API is a API for sending email first and foremost.

Incentivized

All of these platforms offer the same level of performance to Audience Republic, but are a lot cheaper. I didn't choose Audience Republic, it was passed down to me from a former employee. I am in the process of moving to Braze as for the exact same service they will save our company $100k a year.

Incentivized

Sendgrid has a lot of features that other providers have and a few more - like the dynamic template builder, which AWS SES doesn't have. We choose the provider based on the scenario of use and the provider we're using. If we're going to be making regular changes to a template, then we'd go with Sendgrid, as the changes will be easier to make and don't necessarily require developer intervention.

Incentivized

• Besides from the gamified competitions to attain data to then market to, literally nothing that I couldn't get from a competitor.
• Audience Republic lie to us about how much their services cost. They were charging us 0.0053c per email send (and they upped this price without telling us one month), and a peer told me they were paying 0.0015c per send. In my opinion, they are not trustworthy.

Incentivized

• As it was cheaper than the transactional service we previously used, it saved costs.
• The API was relatively easy to work with so it helped us ship the service and test it quickly.
• We still use the transactional email service, even though we recognize its limits as it meets our immediate needs.

Incentivized