Pros and Cons of Ongage: Analysis of a Top Email Marketing Software

As your business grows and you start to scale your digital marketing efforts, you also outgrow basic marketing platforms with limited features. For instance, once your email campaigns become more complex and require more advanced segmentation, you’ll need more robust email marketing tools. These platforms come with comprehensive features for workflow automation, testing, audience analysis, and analytics.

One such feature-packed email marketing platform is Ongage. To provide a clear picture of what Ongage can do for your business, this article lists the pros and cons of Ongage. Hopefully, the information will prove useful as you choose the best tools for your marketing efforts.

Despite trends like influencer marketing and virtual reality/augmented reality marketing campaigns, email marketing remains an indispensable strategy for many marketers. Email marketing campaigns help keep customers engaged and also increase brand awareness. Not to mention that email has an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent. This ROI is higher than any other marketing channel today.

However, to reap the full benefits of email marketing, you have to make sure that you do it correctly. An email marketing strategy can be difficult to optimize, even for the best marketers. Moreover, according to marketers, personalization, data quality, and email design comprise the three most important factors that affect email optimization.

Given the importance of properly optimizing email campaigns, it becomes even more crucial for businesses to choose the right tools for their email marketing efforts. Easily deployed email marketing software like Ongage support marketers with industry-leading capabilities in audience segmentation, personalization, campaign management, and analytics. The sections below also explore Ongage’s features and potential limitations in-depth.

Overview of Ongage

Ongage is an email marketing software with comprehensive features for optimizing and running large-scale email campaigns. The platform also aims to improve deliverability and audience engagement through its core features. These features include micro-segmentation, advanced personalization, intuitive campaign management, and an analytics dashboard.

As a platform that helps clients to reach more inboxes and engage better their audience, Ongage comes with in-depth audience segmentation capabilities. For instance, marketers can use the software to send campaigns by time zone or to build dynamic content feeds for sending millions of personalized emails.” to “For instance, marketers can use the software’s powerful send time optimization tool to send campaigns at a time customers are most likely to engage with them. Combining this with the dynamic content feeds feature makes sending millions of personalized emails a breeze.

In addition to micro-segmentation, Ongage also offers a wide variety of tools to improve personalization. For instance, marketers can use the software to send campaigns by time zone or to build dynamic content feeds for sending millions of personalized emails. These features make it easier for businesses to build more meaningful connections with their customers.

Ongage also comes with a robust analytics suite and powerful data processing capabilities. Through the platform’s analytics suite, you can keep closer track of metrics such as ROI and engagement rates. The software’s advanced data processing capabilities also ensure that you can efficiently leverage data from other platforms for your email marketing campaigns.

Below are the key features and the pros and cons of Ongage

Pros and Cons of Ongage

Advanced Audience Segmentation

One of the most important features of Ongage is that it supports deeper levels of audience segmentation. Using the software, marketers can slice customer lists with up to 150 data points, creating highly targeted micro-segments.

Ongage also uses four types of audience segmentation: behavioral, psychographic, geographic, and demographic. With these segmentation capabilities, marketers can create lists out of data points such as location, age, and wants and needs. Moreover, subscribers can be segmented based on behavioral data such as clicks and conversions.

As a result of this advanced audience segmentation, marketers can create and send highly targeted messages to their subscribers. All customer segments can be viewed on the Ongage dashboard as well for easier organization.

Ongage lets you build segments in meaningful ways.

In-depth Personalization of Email and SMS

Since 69% of marketers prioritize personalization in their email marketing efforts, Ongage comes with a wide variety of features enabling in-depth messaging personalization. For instance, the software can update existing subscriber lists based on recipients’ clicking habits. These automated updates make future retargeting efforts easier.

Aside from these automatic list updates, Ongage also allows marketers to create emails with dynamic content, dynamic content feeds, and dynamic fields. This can be achieved through if-then-else conditions. For instance, using these rules, you can use the same campaign to send unique, personalized content to subscribers based on the cities they live in. Moreover, you can modify send times for one campaign based on subscribers’ IP or ZIP code.

In addition to all these features, Ongage allows businesses to set up a fully customizable email preference center without the need for coding. Through this preference center, subscribers can tell businesses what kind of content they want to see and when they want to receive emails with such content.

Automated Email Campaigns and Workflows

With more businesses turning to email automation to speed up workflows, Ongage also offers various automation opportunities. Using the software, you can easily create personalized customer journeys based on each customer’s actions. You can set up transactional emails and SMS, like welcome messages and purchase receipts that are triggered by customers’ actions.

Additionally, Ongage comes with a Webhooks feature so you can easily move data between Ongage and your CRM platform. Using this feature, Ongage moves customer data such as opens, clicks, hard bounces, and unsubscribes from the Ongage platform to CRM platforms.

Moreover, you can kick off drip campaigns using common events such as cart abandonment and data points such as conversions and birthdays. These automated workflows ensure that no customer falls through the cracks and no remarketing opportunities are missed.

With Ongage automation, you can organize and automate recurring tasks as you see fit.

Easy Campaign Management

Aside from all the above features, Ongage also provides plenty of functionalities for easy email campaign management. For instance, Ongage makes it easier for marketers to create well-designed emails through a WYSIWYG editor, a BEE Free drag-and-drop editor, or HTML code. Marketers can also create emails in minutes through responsive built-in email templates and add customized unsubscribe links.

Ongage also offers various testing capabilities, which come in handy since testing helps improve CTR rates. A split campaigns feature or A/B testing allows you to test email aspects such as subject lines and sender names. You can also opt to perform non-even split tests.

Improved Email Deliverability

Ongage can also help improve the deliverability of emails and SMS. Marketers can use Ongage’s in-house SMTP to ensure that emails get delivered on time. You can also use different SMTP relays for various lists, segments, and ISPs. Ongage offers plug-and-play functionalities for these SMTP relays for easier management.

Though some clients have complained about Ongage’s limited integrations, Ongage offers hassle-free integrations with over 15 SMTP relays and MTAs, including Mailgun, SendGrid, Amazon SES, and Inbox. Ongage also readily integrates with SMS vendors Sinch, Twilio, and MessageMedia. These integrations ensure that your subscribers receive all email and SMS campaigns from your business.

And while integration capability matters if you’re already working with multiple third-party applications, keep in mind that deliverability is a function of multiple factors, not least among them analytics, which allows for accurate segmentation, dynamic content, and personalized emails for better engagement.

The Ongage Campaign Overview page provides insights on your campaigns.

Robust Analytics Suite

To help marketers figure out how to create email campaigns that improve conversion rates, Ongage also comes with a full-featured analytics suite. The platform can track a wide variety of metrics, analyzing campaign data by list field, contact, and ISP. You can also analyze campaign performance by date, subject line, or country.

Ongage’s analytics dashboard also provides access to a variety of reports, though some users have reported a learning curve when using the dashboard. From this page, you can access reports such as a campaign overview snapshots, aggregate reports, events analytics, and transactional analytics. You can also view a contact activity report to keep closer track of metrics such as clicks and conversions on a per-contact basis.

Ongage’s analytics dashboard also provides access to a variety of reports.

All these analytics features ensure that marketers get the data they need to continuously improve the performance of email campaigns.

Reliable Data Security

In addition to improving the deliverability and effectiveness of email marketing campaigns, Ongage also helps improve data security. Ongage protects your email list from data breaches with Hotmark, an endpoint solution that detects security threats.

This feature ensures that your contact database remains clean and secure and that your sender score remains high. This also helps improve the deliverability of your email campaigns.

Multiple Pricing Plans

Lastly, Ongage is available in four paid plans, which are available with different features and price points. Though these paid plans are a little too expensive for SMBs, they can be a worthwhile investment for businesses planning to significantly scale their email marketing efforts.

For instance, the Starter plan costs $399 and lets users send up to a million emails or SMS per month. Meanwhile, the Basic plan can accommodate up to four users, who can send up to 5 million emails and SMS per month. The Basic plan also supports automated drip campaigns and provides businesses with their own customer success manager.

For $1,499 per month, users can sign up for a Premium plan, which can accommodate up to 8 users and 15 lists or databases. If you regularly send a high volume of emails to up to 100,000,000 contacts and have a larger email marketing team, the Ultimate plan and its customized pricing may be a better fit for your needs.

Is Ongage the right email marketing software for your business?

Whether or not Ongage is the right choice for your email marketing efforts depends on your business’ unique needs. If your subscriber list continues to grow each day and you’re considering significantly ramping up your email marketing campaigns, Ongage and its comprehensive features make for a good choice for your business.

However, if you’re just figuring out how to send email campaigns, the platform may have too many features to be a good investment for your business. The good news is that there are plenty of other email marketing systems for you to choose from.

If you’re interested in learning more about email marketing strategies, you can check out our 2022 guide on email marketing best practices.

By Louie Andre

B2B & SaaS market analyst and senior writer for FinancesOnline. He is most interested in project management solutions, believing all businesses are a work in progress. From pitch deck to exit strategy, he is no stranger to project business hiccups and essentials. He has been involved in a few internet startups including a digital route planner for a triple A affiliate. His advice to vendors and users alike? "Think of benefits, not features."