Yesmail360i vs. Zoho Campaigns

If you are a smaller business I would not recommend YesMail. You really need someone who is analytical and can understand hard to use products to get the most out of this email service provider

Incentivized

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

• The biggest strength of YesMail is that it's good for churning out large amounts of emails. So if you constantly send out a lot of emails, newsletters, or promotions on a daily or weekly basis then YesMail is a good fit.
• The reporting for YesMail is also above average. You're able to look at all the main metrics such as open rates, click rates, bounces, unsubscribes, etc. They also have a click map so you can optimize your emails based on where people are clicking within the email and what content they're clicking on.
• YesMail also has a fairly good scrubbing process in place so if you have a lot of dead weight on your lists (email addresses that aren't active don't open, click or bounce out a lot) then YesMail will automatically remove these emails. For example if an email address has bounced 10 times in a row then YesMail will remove that email from its system.

• 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

• The Market Intelligence tool, while useful, and while it has a Deliverability Intelligence plug-in as well, is still a little rough. It's hard to sort through reports, and the location of different points of information between the "feed" and the list of marketers, is a little cumbersome to sort through.
• The metrics available could use some updating and some clarification. There are quite a few caveats to reporting that aren't clearly stated. Ex. the clicks reported on a "click thru" report are TOTAL clicks, while the clicks reported on a Delivery and Response report are FIRST CLICK ONLY, while also the dashboard reports might show unique clicks and "clicks" (total clicks) but those numbers might also not match with the other two reports because dashboard reports are behind by 2 hours whereas the specific reports are pulling straight from the CRM within the system, and the dashboards are summaries generated every couple of hours from the CRM. All of those details took me a while to figure out, and I had to ask a lot of questions. But my account manager was always easy to get a hold of, and if he didn't know the answers to my questions he was quick about tracking down someone who did.

Incentivized

• 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

I do not have the buying decision to renew/change providers, but do have the ability to provide my feedback to those who do. Yesmail has a lot of kinks that need to be worked out. But, for those that just need to deploy emails, and house subscriptions, this is a decent platform to do so. Companies with more advanced campaign targeting/analysis needs should explore other service providers.

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

Incentivized

Overall it is easy to use but there's several different portals you must log into instead of having everything at your disposal in one place (reporting, emails, extracting data, etc).

Very easy to get a hold of an actual person and quick responses.

YesMail offers almost all of the "bells and whistles" that the other major ESPs offer, but at a much more reasonable price. IBM and SalesForce, for example, offer great platforms...but they outsource the setup and implementation, and they have a lot of add-ons that drive up the price of their tool. YesMail does the implementation and maintenance themselves, and while they do have their own add-ons, their "out of the box" platform is much more inclusive than the competition's.

Incentivized

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 our send rate from 20K/hour to 200K/hour. Previously with our in-house tool it would take days to send a campaign. Now it takes hours.
• Increased efficiency of our email marketing team. Having to work less with the data team now for list pulls.

Incentivized

• 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