Freshworks Freshmarketer Review

• Integrated marketing software makes it easy for sales and marketing teams to guide prospective consumers through the sales funnel.
• Choosing comprehensive marketing software for your business involves consideration of pricing, flexibility in functions and customer service.
• We chose Freshmarketer as the email marketing platform with the best marketing integrations because it provides multichannel engagement and allows you to send personalized campaigns across channels, including WhatsApp, SMS and chatbots. 
• This review is for business owners who are considering Freshworks Freshmarketer for their email marketing service.

Email marketing software should help small businesses structure their entire marketing strategy. To do so, it's important that the platform offers integrations with key third-party marketing applications, or at least an open API so developers can build them as needed. An email marketing platform with strong integrations is able to help teams do much more than just devise and send an email marketing campaign; they can become central command centers for an overarching marketing strategy.

Freshworks Freshmarketer is a great choice for marketers, as it offers affordable plans and seamlessly integrates with the CRM software they already use. It is a great option for small businesses looking to communicate with and engage their prospective and existing customers. Using the software, you can segment customers on your email lists, track key metrics and run reports to monitor trends. For all those reasons, Freshmarketer is our best pick for marketing integrations. 

Key takeaway: Freshworks Freshmarketer's email campaign function helps startups and small businesses organize and prioritize their customer base, send custom messages to different audience segments, and optimize their sales and marketing processes.

Freshmarketer Editor's Score: 92/100

Why Freshmarketer Is Best for Marketing Integrations

Freshworks Freshmarketer is a convenient and affordable all-in-one marketing solution that offers robust marketing integrations typically found in higher-priced software. We were impressed by this platform's capabilities and add-ons that support a broader marketing strategy. For marketing teams, Freshmarketer enables key tactics like customer segmentation, email list maintenance, content personalization, and data capture and analysis. This makes it an effective tool for mapping a customer journey and then tailoring email marketing campaigns to be as effective as possible in converting leads to customers.

Tip: Segment your email lists by a variety of parameters to offer hyper-customized and unique messaging. Personalized email marketing can improve customer engagement and conversion rates.

Pros

• Freshmarketer has many features and integrations to help scale sales teams.
• Freshmarketer is affordable for an all-in-one marketing solution.
• You can combine Freshmarketer and Freshsales CRM to access tools for targeting your audience.

Cons

• It can be difficult to get in touch with a customer service representative at Freshworks.
• Add-ons to basic plans can get pricey.

Usability

Freshmarketer offers a user-friendly experience that even tech-averse users will likely find intuitive. An easy-to-use system means less training and limited disruption to your team's workflow when you're transitioning to Freshmarketer. Artificial intelligence-powered, data-driven reports make it equally straightforward to review and track data in your system.

Freshmarketer offers a range of tools for interacting with customers. We liked the two-way email sync and multiple integrations, which allow you to keep existing software solutions and increase their effectiveness when you combine them with Freshworks Freshmarketer's email campaign function. 

The simple navigation adds to the flexibility of the product; it's lean and doesn't include unnecessary features users rarely need. We found it easy to choose how and when to communicate with audiences, which parameters to segment email lists by, and which options for scheduling and automation we wanted to employ. However, we had the opposite experience on a mobile device; we found the software to be slower and clunkier than the desktop client's.

The email campaign functionality is part of a larger CRM software platform, so it's the CRM that offers the ability for API integrations. It integrates with various popular tools, including Trello, Zapier, Shopify, Outlook, Gmail and Asana. Some users have reported minor bugs, but those frequently depend on the specific integration and CRM customization settings. Learn more about Freshworks' CRM platform in our Freshsales CRM review.

Source: Freshworks

Freshmarketer Features

Freshmarketer delivers tons of convenient email marketing tools in one user-friendly suite. These are the Freshmarketer features we like most:

Personalized Emails

Freshmarketer's email marketing capabilities allow users to set up product demonstrations and then send emails to potential customers based on how those particular customers interacted with the product. This feature helps customize messaging and build a unique relationship with each prospective purchaser. Personalized emails serve to improve user engagement with the content you send, improving the chance of conversion and reducing unsubscribe rates.

Source: Freshworks

Newsletters

Freshmarketer allows you to send scheduled newsletters to users on your email list. These newsletters can be used to inform users about new products and services, offer discounts and coupons, or just serve up interesting content for education or thought leadership. Newsletters are a useful way to keep your brand top of mind with subscribed users and help usher them through the sales funnel. [Related article: How to Build an Email Marketing Contact List]

Event Invites

With Freshmarketer's ability to segment lists, businesses can easily define the parameters of their audience and promote events to an interested customer base. In addition, sending event e-blasts with Freshmarketer can help boost registration or motivate customers to participate.

Product Updates

Communicating product updates – a key email marketing strategy – with Freshmarketer is not only easy, but it can also be automated in conjunction with Freshworks' Marketing Cloud. It's easy to send simple, straightforward emails that keep your customers in the loop about business updates when they happen.

Internal Updates

It's just as important to keep internal audiences, like your employees and stakeholders, informed of business updates as it is to notify your customers. Segmentation of internal audiences is a breeze with Freshmarketer's unique approach to the segmentation and scheduling of emails.

Freshmarketer Pricing

Source: Freshworks

Small businesses on a budget will love the free version of Freshmarketer's software for up to 100 marketing contacts. Features include contact and account management, contact life-cycle stages, and built-in customer communication via chat, email and phone. This free plan would work well for a small company with a limited client base, but if you need enough wiggle room for up to 1,000 contacts, you'll need to upgrade to a paid Freshmarketer subscription.

Fortunately, the paid plans, which are priced per user per month, are still affordable for many small businesses. You can also receive a discount if you sign up for an annual contract. Here is a breakdown of each plan:

• Freshmarketer Growth starts at $19 per month when billed annually ($23 per month when billed monthly) and delivers multichannel engagement, behavioral targeting, user segmentation and performance reports.
• Freshmarketer Pro begins at $149 per month when billed annually ($179 per month when billed monthly) and is the most popular subscription tier because it offers seamless and personalized multichannel marketing.
• Freshmarketer Enterprise starts at $299 per month when billed annually ($359 per month when billed monthly). It includes all of the features of the lower-priced plans, along with "governance, customization, and advanced metrics."

Did you know?: Freshworks offers a 21-day free trial with no credit card required.

Setup

Source: Freshworks

Setting up an email campaign with Freshmarketer could take a few days to a week, depending on the level of customization, segmentation and targeting for different email templates. There are additional charges for larger data migrations and add-ons, but prospective users will need to contact Freshworks' sales team and product experts for an exact quote based on their specific needs.

Customer Service

For troubleshooting, first you choose the tool you need help with (email campaign users would choose Freshworks Freshmarketer), and then you are redirected to a support hub page. Here, you can choose to interact with a representative through the live chat in the bottom-right corner of the page or explore the knowledge base. 

If you select the live chat option, an automated system will gather basic information, and then you'll wait for a live representative. When we tested the live chat, representatives responded within a few minutes. (We waited about two to five minutes to ask our questions.) Live chat for Freshworks is available 24/7. The knowledge base holds dozens of how-to guides, as well as articles about marketing emails and email settings configurations; many of these resources have detailed, step-by-step instructions with screenshots.

Tip: Freshworks does not offer a phone number to call for support, but if you push the live chat representative, you can at least get in contact with a sales agent.

Drawbacks

Overall, the biggest drawback of Freshworks Freshmarketer is the limited customer support. There's no phone option, and users of the online support channels have sometimes felt abandoned. Even after submitting support tickets, users reported unreliable troubleshooting timetables and unresolved issues.

In addition, Freshworks' Freshsales CRM platform, which is separate from Freshmarketer but can integrate with it, is best suited for startups and small businesses that are just beginning to expand, as the customization of reports and API integrations aren't built for quick scalability. Users have also complained about the pricing structure for add-ons and a learning curve for troubleshooting small bugs in the system. 

Methodology

To identify the best email marketing services, we compiled a list of popular platforms based on online research and carefully examined each service's online reputation. We spent several weeks researching each email marketing service by investigating its offerings, watching tutorials and how-to videos, testing the software (when possible), and reading user reviews. We also evaluated each service's pricing structure and customer service by contacting each finalist and posing as a business owner. When selecting our pick for the best email marketing service for integrations, we considered which types of all-in-one marketing integrations small and midsize businesses would likely want, as well as the email marketing budgets of businesses of that size.

FAQs

Is Freshmarketer a CRM?

Freshmarketer is a marketing automation platform that offers tools for managing the customer experience, sales and marketing. Freshsales is the CRM software from Freshworks.

What integrations does Freshmarketer offer?

Freshmarketer offers a variety of integrations with popular business tools, including Gmail, Zapier and Asana. 

Is Freshworks Freshmarketer free?

Freshworks offers a free version with limited features, as well as a 21-day free trial so you can test the software before upgrading to a paid plan.

Overall Value

We recommend Freshworks Freshmarketer for …

• Small businesses looking to scale up.
• Small business owners looking for affordable all-in-one marketing automation software.
• Marketing professionals who need an integrated marketing solution with feature flexibility and add-on scalability.

We do not recommend Freshworks Freshmarketer for …

• Companies that are new to email marketing and need a lot of support from the vendor.
• Large enterprises looking to scale quickly.