Platformly

Platformly is a marketing automation platform for online businesses: SaaS companies, ecommerce stores, agencies and small and medium-sized businesses. The home page says it is "designed to help you run, automate and scale your business", and groups the product into four areas: a CRM, messaging by email, SMS and push notifications, automation, and analytics. Email is the main channel, but the pitch is data. Platformly says it helps you "deeply understand and optimize user interactions with your brand, from their first click to their last", by tying campaigns to link tracking, sales reports and a contact database, so that a sender can see which messages led to purchases rather than only opens and clicks.

What the platform promises

The home page headline is "Increase sales, improve brand loyalty and minimize your workload", and the subhead explains the method: simplifying the process of gathering data, identifying your most valuable customers and retaining them. A later section, "Scale faster", asks you to combine marketing and sales efforts in a single platform and create new sales opportunities with current or potential customers at scale.

Email campaigns

The home page promises to "deliver the right message to the right person at the right time". Platformly's own blog, in a roundup of email platforms that puts Platformly first, gives a longer feature list for the email side:

• a drag-and-drop email builder with stored brand assets (logos, fonts and colors) for consistent branding;
• a library of responsive, customizable templates for newsletters, product launches and behavioral triggers;
• dynamic audience segments based on behavior, demographics and custom fields;
• personalization with merge tags and conditional content in subject lines and body text;
• A/B testing of subject lines, content and design;
• send time optimization, which automatically picks the send time for each contact;
• reporting on delivery, opens, clicks, conversions and revenue attributed to each campaign.

The same post lists as a drawback that the template gallery is smaller than on some other platforms, so more customization may be needed.

The home page's blog links include a complete guide to email deliverability and a post on tried and tested subject lines, and one customer, the CEO of Revogram, says "Email deliverability is skyrocketing my newsletters!"

SMS, push and other channels

Messaging covers email marketing, SMS marketing and push notifications, which the home page frames as "targeted messages that actually reach and engage your audience". The blog adds that Platformly's automation includes SMS and webhook actions for multichannel journeys, and mentions web push notifications and social media among its channels. Twilio & Nexmo appear in the list of top integrations.

Automation

The automation area covers marketing automation workflows, lead generation and webhooks. The home page speaks of automatically delivering "the right content, to the right customer, in the right channel at the right time". According to the blog, the workflow side includes:

• a visual workflow builder for automated email sequences;
• pre-built automation templates for common use cases;
• website and event tracking that triggers emails from user actions;
• if/then logic and branching;
• lead scoring;
• automatic contact management with list hygiene and tagging.

Lead generation tools are pitched as a way to "capture more leads in less time".

CRM and sales pipelines

The CRM gives "full insights into your contact list allowing personalization at scale, to close more deals", and the menu lists a marketing CRM, segmentation and sales pipelines. The home page talks about creating hyper-targeted campaigns and customer-specific offers from actual data, and maintaining customer relationships before and after purchase. The blog describes a 360-degree view of each contact with deal management, interaction tracking and automated follow-ups from one dashboard.

Tracking and analytics

This is the part Platformly leans on most. Link tracking is meant to help you "understand your customers like never before", business dashboards give real-time insights into your business data, and sales reports sit alongside them. The blog describes custom dashboards and widgets that show email metrics such as opens, clicks and bounces next to revenue attribution and campaign ROI, with website activity and sales funnels tracked in real time. A customer quote on the home page says tracking conversions and the whole funnel for online sales is very handy.

Integrations

The top integrations listed on the home page are Shopify, WooCommerce, ClickBank, PayPal, Paddle, Stripe and Twilio & Nexmo, with a full integrations directory and an advanced API for developers. One blog headline on the home page announces "Platformly Now Integrates With Shopify!" Platformly also offers apps for Chrome, WordPress and WooCommerce. The blog says the ecommerce and payment integrations are there to track customer journeys and sales conversions from the store into the platform.

Solutions by business type

The home page describes four audiences. For SaaS, it offers "an all-in-one tool for data-driven growth". For ecommerce, it promises to "get more carts to finish checkout with marketing automations and performance reports". For agencies, it talks about impressing clients with advanced automations and performance reports. For small and medium-sized businesses, it calls itself "the most intuitive marketing platform". Case studies and comparison pages are linked from the resources menu, along with help documentation and a template library.

Pricing, trial and support

The blog gives the pricing: "You can start with a 14-day free trial (no credit card required) to explore all features. After the trial, paid plans start at $19 per month for up to 1,000 contacts", with pricing scaling by the number of contacts and the level of features required. It also says all plans include email support, and that higher tiers offer priority support and dedicated onboarding assistance. The home page has a Pricing page, a free trial button and a Contact Us page, and links to a service status page.

Who it suits

Platformly suits online businesses that want email, SMS, push, a CRM and revenue tracking in one account: a Shopify or WooCommerce store that wants to see which campaigns turned into orders, a digital product seller on ClickBank, Paddle or Stripe, a SaaS team sending behavior-triggered sequences, or an agency reporting results to clients. Starting at $19 a month, a small list can try the whole platform without a large commitment, and the blog says it is built for businesses planning to scale.

The blog itself admits that the broad feature set brings a learning curve and may be more than smaller teams need. A writer who just wants a simple newsletter with many ready-made designs may find the smaller template gallery and the data-heavy interface more than the job calls for.