Marigold Engage by Sailthru is an email marketing and marketing automation solution. It supports email management, site personalization, mobile management, and both predictive and retention-focused analytics.
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PAR Punchh
Score 7.4 out of 10
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PAR Punchh is a loyalty and offers solution that focuses on providing restaurants with the tools and services to create branded and consistent in-store and digital customer experiences.
Sailthru is well suited for any company that is working with a large email subscriber list and needs to send campaigns on a daily basis. It is probably less appropriate for anyone with a small list, or an e-commerce brand. I think there are better ESPs out there for e-commerce brands.
The use of Punchh is best left to organizations that have a real need for loyalty tracking and consumer insights gained from loyalty programs. I would say that it would not make much sense to invest in this platform if you are business with less than 20 stores, it is too robust and too hard to learn.
Personalized content based on user behavior and content consumption.
Campaign workflow is very simple and allows for a large number of campaigns to be set up and managed in a short period of time.
Sailthru has a great customer service team. Our account support with Sailthru was top-notch and is a testament to the culture there at the company.
Sailthru focuses on email marketing. With all of the other "cloud" solutions out there trying to be everything to everyone, they lose focus on the importance of sending the email. This is where Sailthru shines.
Reward-based App material. Punchh is great platform for reward tracking and fulfillment. I have not found one that does a better job at customer loyalty.
Lists are easy to create, but difficult to locate (can't sort by most recent created, etc.). They are always listed in alphabetical order.
In order to improve their speed to market with features, they had a lot of tech debt to work through in the relatively recent past. This generally seems to have been corrected and their parent company appears to really be investing in their success.
Their automated campaign feature is due for an upgrade. This is on their roadmap and they have been open about its need to provide more robust functionality.
Look carefully into the integrations, find out exactly what is possible. We launched when we had Monkey Media as our online ordering tool, although it was integrated, we ended up having to move to Olo just because it was such a stronger integration.
I would re-think having Facebook as an option to allow registration and signup to our app. This was recommended by Punchh, but we ended up getting so many out of date email addresses in our system that were associated with the Facebook account.
One thing we wanted to launch with was a gift card integration, but due to Punchh not being PCI compliant, and due to other technological limitations, that's not something we've been able to bring into our loyalty app, which would be nice to have.
The biggest factor is that even after two months of trying to go through their credit processes and getting the right consideration for the real damages we had with the tool not being able to send campaigns for days, their sales staff is still not willing to work with us on it, making us do the switch away from them right now. We got extremely disappointed by trying to work with them through those issues.
Their account management / sales staff doesn't seem to be taking the problems you experience very seriously - it took us 3 months and nudge emails to them every 2 weeks to ask for status updates (plus 6 different conversations with different people) to get a (very small credit) for a major issue, which in two months prohibited us from sending campaign emails for 2-3 days at a time.
The customer success people are not as invested as it seems they should be in their clients' business, at least not for the amount of money the platform costs. I am always looking for best practices to be provided or at least discussed with my AM, and she doesn't ever seem to care about what others are doing in my industry.
Nothing offers the customization and control for power users like Sailthru. Other options we have used have been simply as backups in case of Sailthru outages during critical moments. We chose Sailthru at the beginning of our growth from sending email natively. We haven't had a need to switch although we have briefly evaluated the cost/benefit of switching to other providers. Unfortunately, the switching cost is usually to high as we are tightly integrated.
We were looking for a partner who would help us get a loyalty program and a mobile app launched quickly, Punchh delivered our app on-time, the cost was very competitive and Punchh was being used by similarly sized brands in the restaurant industry. The integrations were in place and Punchh offered the Product functionality and performance we were looking for.
