Email Service Provider Close-up: Predictive Response

By: idealconsult

This post was updated March 2017 to reflect new information about Predictive Response and its Salesforce integration. We talk about Predictive Response as a "marketing automation lite" solution because it is a great entry point to marketing automation, but notably contains far fewer features than a full solution such as Pardot or Marketing Cloud. For example it does not include forms, landing pages, or social monitoring/posting capabilities. If you'd like to learn more about Pardot and Marketing Cloud, visit our post here.

Predictive Response, one of only a few ESPs built exclusively for Salesforce, thinks of email communications and marketing automation in some really smart ways. Everything in their platform is process driven and designed to adapt to how people respond to email. For example, an email campaign isn’t a single action, but instead contains many stages such as sent, not opened, opened, no links clicked, and completed. At each stage you can choose to have follow-up emails sent to the person based on which stage they are in. You do have to think through your scenarios in detail before you can begin running your email program, but that’s part of any drip campaign.

The point of integration with Salesforce is built around Campaigns. Once you have your campaign populated with your targeted segment, you turn to the Predictive Response interface to create your emails and configure the automated follow-ups. The email statistics are summarized in Salesforce as a score, which is a number aggregated from the total activity of your subscribers in your campaigns. You can assign a numerical value to an open, click, or even a web page visit. These numbers are tallied up in Salesforce so that you can target your most active email subscribers, but the data is stored directly in Predictive Response to keep data storage loads under control.

Predictive Response has added some new features in recent years that keep its offerings in line with their competitors. Their EDMdesigner is a drag and drop email editor that allows any user, even one unfamiliar with HTML coding, to design nifty email layouts. Some features typically only found in more expensive marketing automation solutions are available in the Enterprise edition, such as the ability to send text messages to members of your Salesforce campaign via Twilio and create dynamic content based on your marketing personas.

Features: Predictive Response is what we call a “marketing automation-lite” solution. It offers about half the features of a full marketing automation solution like Pardot but is also much less expensive. It’s a great solution for companies who have outgrown MailChimp but may have drawbacks for those who want to centralize all marketing activities in one place. Some advanced features of Predictive Response are:

⚡ Lightning Ready
A/B testing
Drag and drop editor
Real-time reporting
Drip campaign capabilities, based on previous behavior (such as if an email was opened or clicked)
Native Salesforce integration
Prospect Tracking and Lead scoring
SMS blasts
SPAM analysis

AppExchange Rating: 4.9 out of 5 with 29 reviews

Predictive Response is an entirely native Salesforce application and gets mostly positive reviews.

Other Integrations: Predictive Response does not integrate with other platforms. It is a managed package for use with Salesforce exclusively.

Pricing: Pricing is offered in Starter, Professional and Enterprise levels.

Here are the price points if your list size is 10,000 with 20,000 emails sent a month:

$310 per month for Starter, with 20,000 emails sent or less
$460 per month for Professional, with 20,000 emails sent or less
$760 per month for Enterprise, with 20,000 emails sent or less

If you're interested in upping the ante on your mass email or are looking into full marketing automation, check out our whitepaper for more information:

Go to the marketing automation whitepaper