Marigold Engage by Sailthru vs. Skai

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.

Incentivized

Kenshoo Search may not be appropriate if you don't spend much on search engine marketing. It also may not be appropriate if you don't care about tracking conversions and are only concerned with increasing awareness. Or, if you care about tracking conversions but don't expect to capture many, Kenshoo Search may not be necessary.

• 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.

Incentivized

• Customized reporting. There are many features that users can't report out on in power editor. Kenshoo makes it incredibly easy to get everything you need for a raw data dump.
• Automation. Whether it's automated rules, portfolios or refreshing CRM uploads, Kenshoo helps cut some of the manual tasks out of the process making me more efficient.
• Staying up to date with Facebook product updates. I can appreciate that Kenshoo does an exceptional job and ensuring new capabilities in Facebook are ready for use in the Kenshoo platform as well.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Syncing - I have had many issues where syncs would time out, or not show that changes were posted to Facebook.
• Library - if there was a library for targeting settings that could be saved and easily accessed and input into new campaigns, that would be very helpful.
• Updates - seemingly basic tools that a social management platform should have often taken a long time to be released.

Incentivized

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.

It's great to have a product like Kenshoo Social. It has a lot of data and is a great tool to use. Honestly, I think we would have looked somewhere else if we didn't have some much data and time invested into the platform. We had used it across search and social, so we invested a lot of time to get it running smoothly. It is very expensive and we think we could have gone elsewhere to get the same results over time. Once they have your data and the system is running smoothly, it's very difficult to go elsewhere

Incentivized

Set-up like other marketing platforms. If you know Google Ads, you know Kenshoo

Incentivized

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.

Very responsive and bring fast answers for problems

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

While DoubleClick does not fully budget pace accounts I think it overall provides more accurate changes than Kenshoo. When our company selected Kenshoo we were told it would be able to manage hundreds of small accounts with small budgets. It is more designed for accounts that would be spending minimally thousands of dollars a month. We had extreme issues with Kenshoo budget pacing and increasing our bids. Overall it did not meet our needs, and we will be switching vendors at end of contract

Incentivized

• Sailthru has helped us build a welcome series that's much more effective than anything we had before.
• It's much easier to analyze transactional campaigns than our previous ESP.
• We're better able to run A/B tests and learn from the results -- all of which improves our email strategy.

Incentivized

• ROI is harder to track due to reporting/column & time frame default tech in my humble opinion but generally better results when compared to other products
• Since the interface is difficult to navigate and paid search is a reactive medium, can produce barriers to change.

Incentivized