A Developer's Perspective on Sendoso: How I Learned to Stop Uploading CSVs and Love APIs
Use Cases and Deployment Scope
- Our sales org uses to send one-off gifts to their leads.
- Demand gen marketers pulling lead lists from some other vendor and sending large amounts of gifts for direct mail campaigns.
- Automated gift sends for leads in large scale marketing campaigns that are NOT direct mail. The best example of this is we promise a gift to all leads who attend a webinar and provide us with their address.
My role is the developer who makes that 3rd use case work. I have code which will pull attendees from Zooms API, push them to a Marketo campaign, this Marketo campaign will then send leads to Sendoso via Webhook to complete the sends.
Pros
- Gift customization (custom logos, etc).
- Support, chat support is great, AE is also attentive.
- Sendoso has the integrations we need and they work most of the time.
Cons
- Data integrity: Analytics page has had incorrect data, leads that were confirmed to have received a gift from us are missing in Analytics. This does seem to have gotten better over the past year.
- Nonsensical UI: Making a config change for a touch requires going all the way through the step-by-step wizard, Marketo integration will be selected but the next part of the form has fields asking for Salesforce info. Sometimes new 'required' fields are added to the touch config, the next time you edit that touch you are force to make a selection on that new field, what about the touches that haven't been edited? Are they just broken? A good example of this is the new 'packaging option.'
- API Standardization: No real rate limiting (we brought down the Sendoso site this past summer when we turned on automation, we then rate limited ourselves to prevent this. Most APIs would handle this itself). Return error codes/reasons are sometime nonsensical (for example, we recently received a rate limit error that lasted for 5 days, even if we sent a single API call, this was recently fixed by Sendoso engineering).
Likelihood to Recommend
I think the biggest hurdles are just making the UI more intuitive, making the API more consistent, and ensuring that the analytics page can be trusted by the customer.
