Listrak Review: Email Service Provider

Email Marketing Lary Stucker

listrak

The third review in¬†our Email Service Provider Round-up¬†is Listrak. Listrak was named¬† “favorable” by the¬† Jupiter report for Top ESP 4th quarter 2007 and that coupled with its list of features put them as an ideal candidate for our project.

User Interface

listrak dashboard
Listrak has a nice simplified UI. When creating/ uploading a list it has a large set of rules you can assign, including bounce handling options, list hygiene, analytics integration, message options and corporate notification lists (individuals assigned to review TEST campaigns prior to sending and Admins who get information on list import data).

Building out the profile templates is the only way to generate proper segmentation. If you are going to create ongoing  email marketing programs it would be essential that the profile templates contained all of the required data.

Listak had excellent reporting capabilities and integration with Google Analytics.Listrak Spam Score

It has a nice SPAM Assassin reporting tool that evaluates an email and gives it a SPAM score with recommendations.

It has advanced user options that allow management to set specific restriction on access and availability of lists, templates and capabilities for the rest of the marketing department.

The Bad: The email creation wizard does not attempt to auto generate a Text version of your email. I know that is a small thing, but it is a time consuming task and having a program auto generate a text version is a nice feature to have.

Uploading my first list timed out, which may have been my internet connection but concerned me especially if we were using our corporate database to synchronize subscribers.  A timeout like that could cause serious problems.

I wish they had easier access to descriptions of features and terms like “Spam Detected.” Does that mean that the recipient marked it as SPAM or that the ISP did?

Deliverability

Listrak has a dedicated deliverability team and authentication tools. Part of my review was to send the same email campaign using each ESP that was in the round-up to determine what the baseline deliverability rates for each ESP.

Results of the Listrak test email campaign:

  • Number of emails sent: 200
  • delivered: 148
  • Hard Bounces: 50
  • Soft Bounces: 2
  • Unique Opens: 22 (15% open rate)

A 15% open rate was the highest of any of the ESP that were in our round-up!

Final Thoughts

Listrak was one of the smaller ESPs that we reviewed but they quickly became a front runner in our comparisons. An attentive sales team, strong showing by third party review groups like Jupiter Reports, a slick User Interface and an impressive baseline diviverability score won me over.¬† The only downside to using Listrak that I could find was their small market presence.¬† When creating a long term Email marketing integration strategy you want to make sure that you choose a solution that is going to be around for a while.¬† A has strong market presence is usually a good indication of stability and unfortunately Listrak didn’t have that going for them.