Inbox25: A Sweet Marketing Automation Option for Sugar CRM
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
We started using Inbox25 for stand-alone email campaigns. The integration with our Sugar CRM system was our primary decision for selecting it along with the lower costs compared to other marketing automation platforms. It worked well for us to send out email campaigns for the first four years. We recently expanded to utilize more advanced capabilities including full marketing automation for drip campaigns. While it was a lot more work to setup, it is now running and producing results. We use Inbox25 for email campaigns to all audiences - suspects, prospects, and customers across four lines of business including our calibration lab, ERP software business, and Anytime Collect product line which is all very different business units with unique needs from a marketing perspective.
Pros
- Inbox25 integrates very well with Sugar CRM where you do not have to manually export lists for email marketing and the results of campaigns update data back to the CRM including bounces (invalid emails), opt-outs, and lead scores when recipients click through on calls to action.
- The automation engine takes some time to learn but is extremely flexible. We use it to build list segments that we could never build inside our CRM. We also use it for drip marketing automation.
- The company is small enough that they take a personal approach to each implementation. We've spent a lot of one-on-one time with an Inbox25 consultant to understand the system and to troubleshoot things that we set up incorrectly as we were learning how the application works.
Cons
- Inbox25 is in a growth phase and has transformed their product pretty fast. With that comes an increased need to continually learn how to leverage new features.
- Tutorials and product documentation exist but it is relatively minimal. They overcome this with personalized, one-on-one training that is recorded for future review using a project management platform.
- Inbox25 has expanded beyond Sugar CRM to include Salesforce.com integration. I'm not sure if they plan to add integrations to other applications but they are positioned well for growth.
Likelihood to Recommend
I think Inbox25 is a great fit for companies outgrowing lower-end, disconnected email marketing applications. Companies with a more formalized marketing organization that send a lot of emails (tens of thousands monthly or more) will be better served with a product like Inbox25 that is less complex, easier to use, and much more affordable (30% lower by our experience) from the larger marketing automation products on the market. Our company has 3 full-time marketing staff with over 100,000 contacts (with valid emails) that we target in various direct and drip email campaigns and Inbox25 fits our needs just fine. I suspect that we may outgrow the product eventually but I think it'll meet our needs just fine for many years to come.
