We are currently exploring the three Tessitura integrated providers. There have been a few discussions on this top, but are all pre-Prospect 2 and Monkey Wrench.
Can anyone chime in on their experience with any of these (including if oyu moved from one to the other)?
Our priorities:
Automation
Custom templates
Web integration/user tracking
We have 15 distinct email lines of business.
I actually just went through the process of evaluating all three. We are mail2 users and decided to stay with mail2 and are test-driving prospect2.
In mail2 we use the scheduled campaign and the scheduled workflow functionality and it does what we need as far as pre- and post-show emails go. It also has the capability of doing membership expire reminders and abandoned shopping cart reminders, but we have not implemented for various reasons.
mail2 has very versatile templates and with their relatively new master template, I've never needed to use anything other than that. What I do have an issue with is you can't do conditional content with their out-of-the-box templates and have to be comfortable writing some html. Not something I even remotely have the time to do. Luckily mail2 stepped in and wrote the HTML for me but I don't think that's something they would do on a regular basis, it was kind of a special situation.
As far as web integration goes, we have several different sign-up forms depending on which part of our website you are coming from. But they are iframes which I've never been fond of. But it's very easy to lookup contacts and see what might be going wrong ... why a contact isn't receiving email and should be or vice versa. And it all lives in a custom tab in Tessitura so my Ticket Sales agents can see this as well.
We evaluated Wordfly and really liked the drag and drop editor. But I was very uncomfortable with the way it works as far as the pre- and post- show reminders go. And it would have required a completely new set of SOPs and a lot of training for my staff for very little ROI versus what I was already using.
We also looked at MailChimp and Monkeywrench and it was very slick but I was uncomfortable with the lack of or what I might call extremely strange way of suppressing contacts that made me feel like "are they suppressed ... are they not suppressed?" We use a lot of suppressions in our sends and it can't ever be a question mark.
We are evaluating Prospect2 and I have high hopes. I like the looks of their drag and drop editor and it will still do the things I love about it so it looks like a good mashup for us. But it will easily be December before I get my hands on it because I want my IT department to integrate it with our test Tessitura so I can fully test it and there are a few other things that are higher priority at this point since what we have works just fine.
Hope that helps. If you have any questions, email me at leeann.douglas@strazcenter.org.
Thank you LeeAnn! This was VERY helpful.
I know this was posted over a year go but I thought I'd try to respond. Have you switched over towards Prospect2? I thought Mail2 and Prospect2 were the same thing? Or at least made by the same people? We are choosing between WordFly and Prospect2, we currently use MailChimp. The automation features of Prospect2 is what is most appealing.
We have been live with Prospect 2 for almost a year now. L2 Interactive sells both products currently -- mail2 and Prospect 2. Eventually mail2 will be going away ... my best guess is when SOAP calls are no longer supported in June of 2020 but that's a guess. We use many of the automation features of Prospect 2 and are going to use even more. I'd be happy to jump on a call with anyone who wants to talk about Prospect 2 and how we use it/why we chose it.
I'd love to speak to you about it sometime this week or next week if you wouldn't mind taking the time!
I'm on vacation next week. How about the 22nd?
That works with me!
Send me a private message at leeann.douglas@strazcenter.org and we can set up a time.