After creating my own iOS app and heading up growth for startup companies I have found that there are a number of tools and platforms that can be used to improve companies marketing automation and messaging capabilities. In my research, I have seen certain tools that have a better UI but lack necessary functionality and vice versa. It was surprisingly difficult to get clear details and pricing on many of the tools out there and so I wanted to provide some quick information to help in researching marketing automation and messaging platforms, particularly for iOS consumer applications.
Appboy seems to be the best tool for In-App messages because the mobile focus and functions they provide in comparison to the other comparable tools. Appboy’s pricing is based on two inputs Data Points and # of Emails sent. They don’t charge based on MAUs/Profiles. The MAU plan will charge you $100/10K MAUs. The lowest pricing to fully unlock their drag and drop if-this-then-that Canvas and Email will be $15K/YR. That would include:
- 2M Emails
- 120M Data Points*
- Unlimited Push Notifications, In-App Messages, API Calls and Webhooks
*Data Points include Sessions, Updates to Custom Attributes, and Custom Events.
Intercom has worked hard to develop into a full customer support and marketing offering from where it started mainly has a desktop chat window. Their focus is still mainly on communications, but isn’t that where all great marketing and customer support stems from? The pricing is $6,168 a year for around 25k users.
Kahuna enables B2C marketers to engage consumers across push, email, in-app, web push, and social channels effortlessly. Their Enterprise pricing, more details, and demos are gated and I didn’t find the patience to wait to find out how they could help since the other competitors had this information more readily available.
Their pricing starts at $2000/month for up to 50,000 subscribers and includes unlimited email and push messaging.
LeanPlum ties together Messaging, Automation, A/B Testing, and Analytics — all in one integrated platform. The base pricing tier I found was 50,000 MAU’s $40-50k per year to start.
Smooch is a good tool for e-commerce companies but also would not be best for anyone starting a consumer application. They have a free “Labs” pricing tier and a $495 “Growth” tier before getting to the “Enterprise” level.
As a side note: I believe that OneSignal and UrbanAirship are more engineering tools that will require more development because they have less front end tools for marketers.
Key things to look for:
- How user-friendly is the interface that you will be going into on a daily basis?
- How do they calculate their pricing? These companies have very smart employees and understand that charging by users can add up.
- Don’t buy into any platform that touts too much Artificial Intelligence.
- How many options do they provide for robust in-app messaging to your users?
