There are numerous standalone email marketing platforms that can help you automate your campaigns and track their results. Yet, there are also some powerful contact management and engagement tools that incorporate email marketing features while also enabling you to drive conversions and boost customer retention. Two of these platforms are Gainsight and Totango. Learn more about them in this Totango vs Gainsight comparison.
Written by Ria du Plessis - Digital Marketing Expert Updated 9/2/2021 |
| Gainsight Review | |
Score | 8.3/10 | 8.1/10 |
Summary | This is an automated customer engagement management platform that focuses on customer conversion and retention. | This cloud-based customer success platform focuses on streamlining customer onboarding, retention and offering powerful analytics. |
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Best fit for | Small and medium companies, as well as large enterprises | Small and medium companies, as well as large enterprises |
Both platforms offer different email campaign features.
Totango features a good selection of professional-looking email templates. It also allows you to easily customize them with your content. You can choose between different buttons, colors, call to actions, signatures, images, social links, footers. You can also add company logos. When you are done, you can preview the campaign or send a test email to make sure it looks and works well.
Gainsight offers a user-friendly WYSIWIG editor that enables you to easily create HTML emails from scratch. If you have no coding experience, you can use one of the dozens of templates the platform provides.
One of the highlights of the email editor is the tokens feature which enables you to save time as the tool automatically picks the necessary contact details such as user names.
Gainsight also allows you to drag and drop reports into your email templates. The reports will automatically be filtered according to each contact’s company, ensuring that you only send relevant data to each customer.
Winner
Totango offers more design options.
Totango offers powerful segmentation features. You can create contact segments to divide your audience into different groups based on custom criteria. The segments are easy to create, and you can also preview them to see how many duplicates or unsubscribes each segment contains.
Gainsight’s segmentation tools are called power lists. These lists are similar to what you find as customer segments in other platforms. They represent contacts grouped according to common criteria. The lists are dynamic, and you can refresh them daily, before, or after you send an email campaign. These power lists are also flexible, and you can add as many as 200,000 contacts to one list.
Winner
Both tools offer good segmentation capabilities, however, we choose Totango because there is no contact limitation.
Totango’s automation mainly centers on scheduling email campaigns at particular dates. There are different options you can select, based on your purpose; you can choose to send the emails now, later, monthly, or on a regular basis.
There is also an ‘Ongoing’ option that works like the workflows feature you find in established email marketing platforms such as GetResponse or ActiveCampaign. The Ongoing feature ensures that emails are automatically sent when customers meet certain criteria.
Gainsight features a semi-automated email tool they call Email Assist. This feature can be accessed through CMSs using call to actions in the platform’s Cockpit.
The Email Assist feature allows you to schedule emails. The emails can automatically be sent to new subscribers (welcome emails), or they can be scheduled as recurring messages. If you send regular reports to clients, you can automate them too. Any repetitive communication or reminder can be automated.
Winner
Both platforms offer limited automations. It’s a tie.
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Each one of these platforms has many unique features since they cover different marketing and customer management areas.
This platform allows you to set goal achievement criteria for your email campaigns. According to Totango, this strategy is more effective than generating common metrics such as views or clicks.
Goals are basically analytics on customer behavior. They track the desired outcome you wish to achieve with each campaign, be it new subscribers, or having a good open rate.
The platform allows you to configure white labeling for the emails you send. The default configuration of the platform means that the from email address will appear as campaigns@totango.co, instead of .com. You can change this setting by white labeling your domain. This way, you can increase your deliverability and prevent contacts from marking your emails as spam.
Gainsight allows customers to create three types of surveys with their feedback management module. Surveys can work in conjunction with email marketing because they allow you to gain audience insights and use them to create personalized email campaigns.
The three available surveys you can access are relationship surveys, transactional surveys, and survey alerts. When you edit emails, you can easily drag and drop surveys in their body and the platform will automatically associate your contacts' responses.
Playbooks are recommended tasks users get to complete a given CTA. These tasks can include prebuilt email templates. This feature ensures that you eliminate inconsistencies while working in a team. Playbooks are easy to assign by going to the Administration panel.
They can be added and edited by Gainsight Admins.
Their purpose is to help get the whole team on the same page and standardize typical processes triggered by CTAs and recurrent events, which is why they are relevant for email marketing automation.
Winner
Each platform features useful unique features. It’s a tie.
Let’s look at the different pricing options Totango vs Gainsight offer.
You can test this tool for free as it has a 30-day trial. The platform features two plans: the Community Edition and the Enterprise Edition. The price varies based on each company’s needs. To get a quote, you need to contact the Sales team.
This platform doesn’t offer a free trial. It has different pricing plans for each one of its products, but they are not standard, and they are not available on the company’s website. You can only get a quote if you request a pricing plan by filling out a form.
Winner
Totango wins because it also offers a free trial.
Let’s see how Totango vs Gainsight perform from this perspective.
Totango is a complex platform with multiple customer management features, a learning curve is normally implied. Yet, the email marketing tools are relatively intuitive. You can easily create campaigns using templates and the fact that you can choose your own goals makes campaign tracking easier. You can also customize the interface.
While this platform features a certain learning curve, it also offers plenty of training materials such as user guides with step-by-step instructions and screenshots.
Overall, the email marketing features are not very difficult to use since they lack the complexity you find in standalone email marketing platforms. The templates are easy to select and customize.
Totango tracks campaign performance through its ‘Goals’ feature. When you create a campaign, you add specific goals, and Totango constantly tracks them to see how well the campaign is performing. The goal achievement rate is easy to access, as well as other metrics such as the number of delivered or viewed emails, or your campaign’s engagement rate.
This platform features powerful reporting tools that go beyond email marketing. For this specific area, Gainsight offers straightforward reports on each campaign’s performance. The feature is called Outreach statistics. The main information these reports contain include sent emails, opened emails, clicked links, bounces, emails marked as spam, unsubscribes.
Winner
Both platforms offer basic but reliable campaign insights.
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Let’s see what integrations you can benefit from with Totango vs Gainsight.
Totango integrates with approximately 20+ third-party tools. Some of its integrations include HubSpot, Slack, Salesforce, Dropbox, MinIO, MySQL, Redshift, Snowflake, Zapier, SAP, Segment.io, Zendesk, Jira Software.
Gainsight integrates with around 30+ third-party tools. Some of its integrations include Gmail, Google Analytics, Microsoft Outlook, Slack, Zendesk, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho, Microsoft Dynamics, SAP.
Winner
Gainsight offers more integrations.
Both platforms offer different support options.
Totango allows you to reach out to their support team by filling out a form. Afterward, they will contact you by email. An extensive knowledge base, which is organized by topic, is also available.
With Gainsight, you get a vast knowledge base you can browse before you reach out to the support team. There are multiple useful FAQs and guides. If you can’t find the necessary information, you get assistance via email. Alternatively, you can talk live to one of their agents between 8 AM and 6 PM CST. The live chat option can be found on the bottom right of the screen. A user community is also available.
Winner
Gainsight offers more options.
Each one of these tools is more suitable for particular needs.
Essentially, this platform aims to help businesses drive conversion and retain existing customers. It is mainly considered a customer data platform, customer journey builder, and customer analytics tools. If you are looking for these features, as well as email marketing capabilities, this is a good choice. If your only purpose is getting an email marketing tool, a standalone platform that focuses only on this might be easier to use and more cost-efficient.
Gainsight is mainly considered a revenue operations and customer revenue operations platform. The email marketing tool is a relatively new addition to the platform’s portfolio. Therefore, if you already use Gainsight for its customer analytics, product analytics, forecasting, or user feedback features, it is also a good idea to start accessing the email marketing capabilities. However, if your main priority is email marketing, a standalone platform such as Constant Contact or Sendinblue might be a better, more comprehensive solution.
Both platforms have their pros and cons.
Totango offers a basic set of good email marketing features, as well as complex customer management, growth, and analysis tools. It is relatively easy to create email campaigns and the templates are good, however, the platform lacks the advanced automation and segmentation features you get with standalone email marketing platforms such as Mailchimp.
Gainsight is a very complex platform that offers a plethora of features that focus on customer success and streamlining customer journeys. However, its complexity might make it hard to grasp and if you are only looking for email marketing features, you will not find as many in this platform compared to other tools that focus solely on this niche.
Two of the alternatives you might want to consider if you’re mainly looking for email marketing software are:
Mailchimp: this platform offers numerous email design options, a great selection of email templates, powerful automations, and different reporting and segmentation features.
ActiveCampaign: this platform offers an intuitive email builder, advanced automation, landing pages, and different reporting features.
Both these platforms integrate an email marketing tool although they do not focus mainly on this feature. We choose Totango as our final winner as it offers a free plan, a good selection of email templates, and the possibility to personalize your campaign’s goals.
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