Echobox Email vs. Zoho Campaigns

Echobox Email is great for news or article-based sites. It's the only platform we've used that allows editors to simply paste one link to include or override a story. The ability to automate fully or enable periodically is a time and money saver for us during holidays or employee vacations. The platform has been easy to learn and a great improvement over our workaround solutions in Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor. Besides the platform UI and optimizations for articles (which is worth switching for alone), the AI/ML built in to the platform has already started showing improvements to our open and click rates. The personalized send time is a game-changer and the personalized story selection is a promising feature– we look forward to seeing how it plays out over time.

It is well suited in scenarios:

1. Well-defined static list with proper info.
2. Not building email templates from scratch
3. Litmus testing involved
4. Easy to use simple automation journeys involved

Not well-suited scenarios:

1. Complex Customer journeys
2. Dynamic content involved
3. Integration with other products other than the ZOHO suite
4. Testing API limits

Incentivized

• Easy interface for everyone to learn
• Personalized send times have led to increased open rates
• Ability to automate whole campaigns by theme or category
• Responsive support team that has already incorporated feedback

• I use it because it is a "free" program that "comes with" our CRM tool. I don't find this to be a useful tool at all. It is a major pain to use and I don't recommend it to anyone who does "real" email marketing. I've been doing email marketing for 18 years and I have never used a worse program than this one. Seriously - take my advice and use MailChimp. The marketing automation that Zoho claims this feature has, is awful. After using it for almost two years, I dread every time I have to create a new email.

Incentivized

• Stories on Facebook
• More editing options for photos (e.x. layering, pixelating)
• Define also seconds when scheduling

• The social campaigns section we have not used much, probably because it only works with Twitter and Facebook, and we are more active on Google+ and LinkedIn.
• The templates are nice, but I have seen other services with better pre-built templates.
• To segment lists can be a bit hard to configure initially, however exporting lists from our CRM is simple.

Incentivized

It has helped increase traffic via social media, which was something crucial for us. This came without extra working time. On contrary, it saved us time.

Because I am a single user organization and the subscription is free for up to 3 users.

Incentivized

It has all the features we need and is performing better than what we used previously. The support/development team has been very open to feedback and is actively working on new features and improvements. Any shortcomings (which may not exist for long) are very minor compared to the benefits and features specifically built for news/articles.

Echobox Email is specifically built for article-based newsletters and pre-selects content based on your criteria so the editorial team is not starting from scratch. Article-based emails can also be fully automated which was not possible in Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor before. Our web development team no longer needs to build custom solutions to integrate with the ESP and instead can focus on other projects.

Zoho Campaigns is not for beginners to email marketing, but it’s an excellent choice for those who want to send out a lot of emails with few restrictions and great reporting. It’s a no-brainer if you’re already a Zoho user, as Campaigns is included in Zoho One subscriptions and integrates nicely with other Zoho apps.

Incentivized

• Increased open rates 17%
• Higher click totals overall

• Initially it helped me a lot in growing my subscriber list. This is one of the major RoI i got from this tool.
• Its newsletters help us to retain our customer base by providing them regular news on real estate trends.
• It has a great impact on creating brand image of our social media platforms.

Incentivized