EmailOctopus vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement: Which is a better fit?

David L.: Hi, I'm David. I am a podcast host and newsletter founder. I work for Echo Fox Media. We're a team of two, it's me and my girlfriend. As far as the rating for EmailOctopus, I would give it a five out of five. So before, I was using MailChimp. The main issues that I had with that was mostly just the price because I was expanding my subscriber account, and the more emails that you have to send out, the more they charge. And so I started looking in to see what other newsletter services were out there that were a little bit more on the budget friendly side, and I saw that EmailOctopus across the board from everything that I'd seen online was the cheapest one. I mean, it's free up for to I think like 10,000 or something like that. So the main issue that I had was price. EmailOctopus definitely came through for me on that one. So one of the big reasons why I chose EmailOctopus was that I saw a lot of people that I'm friends with on Twitter using it. Because for me, social validation is a big thing. If I see other people that are podcast hosts, other newsletter writers that are using it, to me, that shows me that it's pretty legit. Like I mentioned before, price was a big thing, but just seeing that other people were using it and having good experiences, I never really saw anyone make any complaints or have any issues with it. So for me, it was a pretty straightforward decision. Yeah, so getting started with EmailOctopus was pretty good. At first it took a little bit to get my contacts transferred over and some of my campaigns, getting that imported. It was pretty easy, but just took a little bit of figuring out because obviously it's a new platform. But once I had everything imported, it didn't really take too long to figure out how to navigate around the new platform. It's pretty simple. They have the automations, they have the campaigns, they have your contacts list. It is pretty similar to what I've been used to with MailChimp before. So I mean, it takes a little bit of getting used to, but nothing too crazy. Yeah. Yeah, so for anyone else who might be thinking about using EmailOctopus, I would say definitely go for it especially if you're more on a budget, because like I had mentioned before, once you start building up your subscriber account, it can get pretty spendy with sending things out. Another piece of advice that I would give for joining is just make sure that you spend time to get to know the platform. Like I mentioned before, it's pretty straightforward, but you'd want to know the ins and outs, like getting to know how their campaigns work, their automations for sending out welcome emails, because that's a big thing for making sure that you're retaining your followers, is spending time to make sure your automations are good. So just really get to know the platform. Also, use some of the resources that they have because I've been taking advantage of... I forget the name of it, but there's a database that they have a partnership with so that you can reach out to other newsletters that use EmailOctopus that might be in a similar category. For me, mine is on History, so I actually use that to find a couple other history newsletters that I did ad exchanges with. So I would say also take advantage of the resources that they offer you.

Sabal: Hi, my name's Sabal. I am a data impact associate. I give Pardot a review of four out of five stars, and for more reviews, see below. Before my organization started using Pardot, we were on eTapestry's built-in mass email communication software system. It wasn't working for us because it was a technology of the past. It was very clunky. We had a very limited amount of mailable prospects we had, and it was very manual, and the resolution for videos, images wasn't the best. The first biggest selling point for Pardot was its native integration with Salesforce. So now whenever we have a contact in Salesforce, it's automatically synced to Pardot, which makes it a lot easier for my team to use and navigate. And the second reason why we chose Pardot is because of its really intelligent tools, such as Engagement Studio where we can automate a lot of our tasks and be a much more efficient organization. Pardot definitely is not the easiest tool to use. We have to hire consultants to help us build it and integrate it with Salesforce. It took us about a full year before we became confident with using Pardot, and every day my organization is still learning more things that the tool can do for us. If you're a small team and want to be super efficient, Pardot is a great tool for you because it takes a lot of the manual work out, especially with drip campaigns and a lot of its automation tools.