Envoke

Envoke provides everything we need to launch and measure successful email campaigns

Comments: None

Pros:

Envoke makes creating and sending newsletters easy and simple. Managing contacts is a breeze and pulling out analytics is very straightforward.

Cons:

There is not a lot to dislike. Sometimes when I am in the middle of a newsletter, I need to change the layout which involves cutting/pasting and resetting hyperlinks that don't transfer and this is a bit of a drag.

The Ultimate Canadian Answer for Newsletters and Contact Management

Comments: What works for one subscriber may not be for others. Customization is the key to handle different groups and Envoke makes it easy to cater to your target markets by creating collateral and content their users will find informational, interesting or newsworthy.

Pros:

More usable features than one can imagine. Everything is thought of and easily available. Don't like something or need a change or update the management team is very nimble and keen to help you and advance the system for all users.

Cons:

It took a while to fully understand and utilize this elaborate system. And for a small business not fully ready to roll out there should be no charge up until you use it. It may cost some considerable expense to keep systems live for potential customers. But when they are ready to use it on a small or large scale it becomes highly addictive. Anyone who tests or tries it should be encouraged to use it more often rather than shut them down. Even a sample database of 100 subscribers could grow to thousands rather than risk hard earned users to opt-out and eventually go to the competition.

Ridge Meadows Retired Teachers' Review of Envoke

Comments: We can now send out our messages to large groups instead of having to send them one at a time

Pros:

The ease of sending messages to multiple contacts all at one.

Cons:

It is hard to add graphics to our messages to "spice them up"

Stellar customer support, okay product

Pros:

We chose Envoke because it's a Canadian company that was willing to engage with our procurement process, and could provide us with a customized service that allows us to connect mailing lists with segments of our internal contact databases. Their customer support is really stellar and they invest a lot in making sure that we know how to best use the tool.

Cons:

The UI for creating and managing messages needs a refresh, and is based on a model where new messages are created from a template filled with dummy content that you swap out (rather than a UI based on providing a canvas and a drag-and-drop library of elements that fit with our design). Some of our users who've worked with Mailchimp and other services find this awkward. We work on an agency-type model, so there's one administrator account that manages over 50 'client' accounts, and the workflows related to this are tricky - it's not clear which client account you're in, you can't open (and compare between) multiple client accounts at the same time, and you can't set global preferences (ex. Analytics tagging ON by default, 'sent by Envoke' message OFF by default) that will automatically be applied to all new accounts. Giving a single (client) user access to multiple client accounts is also awkward, and means that some of our users have four or more different usernames for different Envoke accounts. Creating those user accounts involves some minor frustration with the workflow for creating and sending users their account credentials and passwords.

Great Tool!

Pros:

Envoke functionality is great and fully meets our needs. I really appreciate the FANTASTIC customer support, the online documentation and the embedded helper information. This makes it very easy to create lists and filters, upload contacts, build templates and emails and schedule campaigns. We reduced production time significantly- it only takes a couple minutes to setup an email campaign! I also really like the AB testing functionality (very easy to use and very effective), the welcome autoresponders or how easy it is to resend to contacts who did not open. Highly recommend this tool!

Cons:

New features are added all the time. This is much appreciated!