BenchmarkONE

Puntos a favor

Hatchbuck is great. What? I need to write more? ok. It allows you to create or upload documents, you can include them as well as links into emails, and then combine emails into campaigns where they are delivered at preset times. But that's far from all! Hatchbuck monitors the customer's interactions with your email and awards score points (defined by you) for various activities like visting your website, reading an email, downloading a document or clicking on a link. So when you open Hb you can review the current scores and follow up with the prospects who are raising their hands the furthest. But, there's more! Where Hb 'really' excels is in the logic of these campaigns. For example... if you have a campaign for general interest which you are sending to a generic group and a customer evinces particular interest in your offering (clicks or downloads a lot) Hb logic can detect this and move him to a more aggressive sales campaign. Hb can notify you for any specific buying signal. Hb can send the customer (again, automatically) additional materials based on actions ("oh, you like case studies, eh, take a look at this one") . If you do the campaigns correctly Hb is really a 'fire and forget' homing missile. It has a tremendous number of features (searching and segmentation are awesome) and because of its price structure, it really allows a small company to punch waaaay above its weight class. I'm happy!

Puntos en contra

A few things. I'm not crazy about the HTML design tool. (Or, perhaps, I'm a lousy designer?) It seems too old-fashioned. You can get false positives from the lead score system -- especially if you email to high security places like financial institutions whose bots click on everything to test your email for spy/malware. Its awkward to try to call a super high scoring customer who 'appears' fascinated with your content only to learn that he left 6 months ago and the bots are still screening his email. :-(

Puntos a favor

Very good value for the money. The scoring is very helpful in qualifying prospects and interest.

Puntos en contra

Not much. It hits the highlights and is affordable.

Puntos a favor

Very nice people in service, easy to use. Pricing is all right, looks nice, has some nice dashboard eye candy

Puntos en contra

Simply not reliable anymore, after the relaunch earlier this year, there are too many incidents where you are not in control of what hatchbuck is doing: e.g. unsubscribe doesn´t work: no confirmation that a user unsubscribed and campaigns do not stop, so unsubscribing users might get more emails from you. Embarrassing? Yes. Potentially causing credibility and even legal problem? yeah.

Also, automations set for users who subscribe sometimes do not properly work. Conditions are unclear. e.g. Opt-in process: an online form might be set on option in - but that doesn't mean that it actually triggers the necessary steps. Embarrassing? Yes. Potentially causing credibility and even legal problem? yeah.

Search (contacts) doesn't find contacts.

And - this made me really re-evaluate other options: there was this bug which made other customers´ dashboard appear in my log-in. So I saw all activities going on from another company which also is a hatchbuck user. this made me ask myself if other hatchbuck users at the same time see my stuff/ activities/ personal data of my customers....Again: Embarassing? Yes. Potentially causing credibility and even legal problem? yeah.

I do understand that there might be some issues after releasing a relaunch - however when it comes to processes which involve my leads/ customers and make us as a company look unprofessional (no opt-in, no unsubscribe, potential abuse of personal data of leads....) this is beyond any acceptable level and an absolute no-go. We are located in Germany and people are very sensitive about data protection and laws are very strict - we could get sued for each of the three points mentioned above.

Puntos a favor

Email Drop Campaigns
Email Templates Provided
Easy to Use

Puntos en contra

The only gripe (it's small) that I have is that you can't have a more broad view of your customer database. It only allows 100 per page and wish it could zoom out more, so I could see more customers in front of me at once.

Puntos a favor

Email campaign tracking, social network linking, deal tracking, open, click, and interaction charting. No CRM since Goldmine in the 90's has made it so easy to create email campaigns on the fly based on contact response and interaction. And Goldmine was (and still is) ridiculously cumbersome and expensive to use, program, and manage. Hatchbuck is not. And unlike Constant Contact, the emails that go out through Hatchbuck don't look canned...they look like they could be one-off emails sent from one human to another.

Puntos en contra

It isn't an email client, meaning, you can't send and receive emails using Hatchbuck. The Task reminder functionality isn't awesome. I'm not a huge fan of teal...you can't tweet directly from Hatchbuck...I'm reaching now...