Not so long ago, everything in marketing was done by hand. Fortunately, technology never stops evolving. When the rooster didn’t croak at the right time, alarm clocks were developed. When only monks could write and copy books, Gutenberg invented the printing press. Marketing is no exception. Why do repetitive tasks by hand?
Automation is an inseparable element of any marketing team that wants to work effectively and efficiently. Even better if the automation software can serve multiple channels. That’s what the founder Colin Klinkert thought when he launched Platformly in 2017.
Platformly is its suite of tools that allows for multichannel marketing automation. As a full stack marketing automation software, it lets you capture and nurture leads, send campaigns and interactions across multiple channels in your funnel.
Pros and cons of Platformly
At its core, Platformly is a subscription-based email marketing software. As such, it comes with an email templates gallery and an email builder so you can create emails without a line of code. It also comes with
- Marketing automation
- Link tracking
- CRM
- Forms to capture leads
- Integrations
- Detailed reporting with real time data
All under one roof. Platformly is a hosted solution and you access it via your browser.
Pros
- Easy to use with an uncluttered and straightforward interface
- Strong automation features
- Extensive feature list
- Reporting includes inbound traffic of any kind of campaign you’re running
Cons
- You can’t create your account without entering your credit card details
- Lengthy setup and onboarding process
Who is Platformly for?
Plaatformly is designed from the ground up to be easy to use so novices won’t have any issues but it’s powerful enough to deliver results so that it covers the needs of advanced email marketers.
It works for startups and can grow with your business. You can see that it works for ecommerce businesses when you look at its integrations as well as SaaS companies and agencies.
Platformly user interface
The signup process is quite lengthy and you need to jump through some hoops until you’re all set. You’re not only required to key in your personal and company information, you also need to enter your credit card details. That said, Platformly will automatically check your IP and domain if they’re blacklisted.
Even though the setup takes quite some steps, Platformly is guiding you to create your first project and to add your contacts so that you can hit the ground running as soon as you’ve completed the signup process.
Then, you’re brought to your initial dashboard. It’s where you get real-time insights into your business data so that you can make smarter business decisions. If you decided to skip the onboarding steps, you can always click the Get Started button in the lower left hand corner and go through the checklist.
Once you finally completed your signup and onboarding, you’ll be delighted with an uncluttered, well organised where everything is just a few clicks away. You’ll find all you need in the clearly labelled top navigation so that you can complete the job at hand in no time at all.
Key features
At the core of Platformly is its email marketing. You’ll also get a CRM to keep track of all of your customers and their engagements and a visual automation editor to keep in touch with them at the right time and channel (besides email, you can also use SMS or push notifications).
Email marketing
For this review, I’m only going to look at email marketing since creating and sending SMS or push notifications is the same and Platformly will walk you through its Messages and Broadcasts tool.
Platformly makes it nice and easy for you to create, design and send marketing emails. You can use its rich text editor for simple emails or choose one of its pre-designed email templates and add your content with its drag-and-drop email builder.
Platformly’s email builder will help you on every step of creating your professional emails – with very advanced personalisation possibilities.
Signup forms and landing pages
Having such a powerful email marketing tool is for naught if you have no contacts to send your messages to. That’s why Platformly helps you with your lead generation. You can either create a landing page or optin forms.
Both the landing page builder as well as the optin form builder have a gallery with templates designed to improve your conversion rates.
You can also create a form or landing page from scratch. You’ll find all the elements you may want and you can also add media.
CRM
Having a large list won’t do much if you don’t nurture a relationship with your customers. You can find all your contacts that you’ve captured or imported under the tab CRM. You can filter them for your purposes using tags, interaction activity, or tags.
You can adjust Platformly’s lead scoring to know at which stage a contact is or identify your warmest prospects. Each contact has its detailed profile page that is enriched with data pulled from third-party sources such as Google and Facebook. You can set tags or create segments for your automations.
Automation
Platformly is serious when it wants to help you automate tedious and repetitive tasks. It gives you a simple yet powerful drag-and-drop visual builder so that you can create any workflow you can think of. You don’t need to start from scratch – if you don’t want – to create an automation
The automation builder is flexible enough for you to go into as much detail and steps as you need. As long as you can think of a user journey, whether it’s based on actions, behaviour, location, or any other metric, you can build it.
Link and events tracking
Effortlessly track and among your campaigns be it on social media or with search engine advertising. The tab Tracking is your command centre to track all your incoming links. You’ll get insight into the performance and effectiveness of your inbound traffic sources.
Reporting
Your inbound traffic sources tracking gives you a part of the picture of your marketing efforts. You’ll also want to see email sales reports and see how your funnels are performing. Having all these reports at hand helps you with your forecasting, budgeting, and making decisions with confidence.
Platformly integrations
Platformly provides integrations with popular shopping cart software such as Woocommerce or Shopify. You can also take your marketing up a notch and connect it with your social media, other marketing tools, and the ever-present Swiss Army knife Zapier.
Support
You can email or leave a message on Platformly’s website and expect an answer within a business day when you’re not logged into the service.
Get help by clicking on the question mark in the upper right hand corner or contact support directly via the chat button (lower right hand corner)
If you’re logged in and working on a marketing task, just click on the question mark button beside your profile icon in the upper right corner. Not only will you get access to self-help resources such as a knowledge base or video tutorials, you can also chat with the support team or even request a feature.
Pricing
Platformly bases its pricing on the contacts you have. All in all, it has 3 plans that accommodate companies of any size to start marketing automation.
As you and your business grow, you can increase any limits directly in our account.
Is Platformly right for you?
Platformly includes all the essential tools needed for marketing automation yet has a nice and neat interface. This makes it easy to use so that beginners won’t have issues and is powerful enough for advanced marketers.
It has flexible pricing so that it can work with startups and scale along with it. Compared to its competitors such as Convertkit, it may seem expensive but Platformly comes with a comprehensive feature set and will help you with your marketing tasks of any level of complexity.
If you still would like to automate repetitive marketing tasks but bulk at the prices, you may want to look at MailerLite or try the open source option Mautic.
Original post here: Platformly review
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