We use dotMailer for eCommerce marketing automation, life-cycle automation, cross-selling, and so forth. dotMailer is much more powerful than your standard email platforms in that it can perform eCommerce related functions out of the box. It doesn't have to be tailored to an eCommerce use case.
Pros
Segmentation by distance.
RFM segmentation.
Product recommendations.
Cons
Integration is overly complex.
Cannot progressively profile from anything other than an email address.
Too expensive.
Likelihood to Recommend
Well suited for a company with a larger marketing budget as this is a costly program compared to the other ESPs. If your use case is not eCommerce, you would probably be better off with a standard ESP like Drip.
dotMailer was originally used only in our Europe region, but when I came on as the North America Marketing Manager, other e-mail products were not working for us. dotMailer was attractive because we can have all Marketing staff that deal with a specific brand on one account with a corporate rate. We are able to share templates, compare performance, develop contact lists and cross-promote our services globally, all through one uniform platform. The introduction of Easy Editor templates really improved my experience with dotMailer, as it no longer requires any use of HTML formatting and so we can just drag and drop elements. Folders make it easy to categorize the types of images you use on a regular basis. The reports are robust and the segment feature allows you to section out your audience to drive more engagement. In today's digital world, there are so many products to choose from, but for our needs, dotMailer is perfect.
Pros
Easy Editor - no HTML required. It's very easy to drag and drop your elements, customizing the campaign according to your needs.
Reports- the reports are robust, showing you your open rates, browsers used, who clicked what, etc. It is easy to section out this information and deliver it to the appropriate stakeholders.
Templates - building your own template library makes creating and sending campaigns and quick and easy experience. In a global company like ours, it also enables consistency across the brand locations throughout the world.
Cons
Updating contact lists can be cumbersome. It would be much easier if we could just make mass update to contact lists without having to export and re-import them. For example, if you upload a list of Joe's contacts and then want them to all be individually tagged with Jane instead, you would have to export the list, change everyone's rep to Jane, and then import the list again.
The time zone on our account is set to London which creates challenges for the other cities (New York, Chicago, Seattle, Sao Paulo) that we send emails for. We definitely have to be cautious when scheduling out emails so that we get the timing correct.
I would love to be able to view previous months' activities and expand the comparison tool to view trends over time.
Likelihood to Recommend
dotMailer is a great tool whether you are a standalone shop or a global company. I am not familiar with many other programs, but my favorite thing about dotMailer is the ability to have all of our constituents on the same account to share templates and ideas, as well as gauge our performance levels. To any colleague within our Group, I would 100% recommend dotMailer.
