EngageBay Review

What Is EngageBay?

EngageBay is a unified toolkit for marketing, sales, and customer support. The company was based in 2017 and has dedicated itself to making marketing technology accessible to small and growing businesses.

The platform’s impressive repertoire includes tools for:

• Email marketing, templates, and auto-responding
• Web forms and landing pages
• Drip campaigns and multichannel campaigns
• Sales & CRM tracking and automation.

And that’s only the tip of the iceberg!

Many users have praised the service’s versatility. Let’s find out if it's flexible enough for your business. 

EngageBay Features

Usually, these all-in-one solutions are a bit rough around the edges. With so many features, blindspots and underdeveloped tools aren’t unusual. Let’s see how well EngageBay tackles this issue!

Marketing 

Our first stop is going to be the integrated marketing suite. It has all you need to lure in leads and generate prospects.

Email Marketing Campaigns

Drip campaigns are a great way of improving your click-through rates. The app simplifies setting up and launching campaigns from scratch based on your triggers and parameters.

You decide the content, audience, and timing of your messages. You can rely on EngageBay and its automation tools to do the rest. It will send them en-mass via sequences and broadcasts. The app can also automate welcome messages, reminders, and follow-ups.

Email Templates

Spruce up your boring old sales emails with colorful templates! There are hundreds of them, and you can customize each with the drag-and-drop editor.

Web Forms

The simple web form builder can create payment, contact, and subscription opt-ins. It lets you add and edit elements, such as your logo and brand colors. You’ll also receive alerts whenever your clients fill in your forms.

Landing Pages

EngageBay has a landing page builder as well! It’s similarly customizable and straightforward. Additionally, it allows you to change your page’s meta title, description, and keywords.

Social Media Marketing

You can track your engagement across all of your social media from one place. 

Convenient, right?

You can also schedule and manage your posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Live Chat

Chat up your leads when they’re on your website! 

You are free to edit and position the widget. Furthermore, the app will:

• Track how much time your visitors spend on each page
• Automate and personalize messages
• Sort and qualify leads based on how they’re responding.

SMS Marketing

EngageBay will send SMS messages based on user behavior. Or, you can set triggers such as failed payments, promotions, product refills, etc.  You can also segment and target your subscribers and personalize texts based on customer attributes.

Push Notifications

Send out unlimited push notifications in real-time to anyone on your contacts list. 

You have creative freedom with this feature, too! 

You can design smart campaigns with custom icons, images, colors, and links. You can even save your favorites and reuse them later.

Video Marketing Templates

The EngageBay software has loads of customizable video templates — mostly intros for products. You are also free to choose the thumbnail image for linking your content. Once you’re happy with your handiwork, you can share it with your team members so they can use it, too. 

Multichannel Campaigns

Finally, the platform enables you to combine multiple marketing channels in intelligent campaigns. That means you can use every weapon in your arsenal: 

• emails 
• texts 
• landing pages 
• web chat 
• videos

And whatever else you need.

CRM & Sales

What happens when you’ve managed to build a contacts list? 

Well, EngageBay has an all-in-one suite just for that! 

It’s meant to provide an effortless transition into building customer relationships and tracking deals.

Here are some of the standout features:

Contact Management

Keep all your valuable customer insight under one roof. You are free to:

• Search through contacts with filters
• Organize and save them into separate lists
• Import and sync them with Google, Office 365, etc.
• View every interaction on a timeline.

Visual Deal Pipeline

This handy feature lets you keep an eye on every stage of your deals. What’s more, you can prioritize specific ones based on your conditions. The software will notify you when they demand your attention. 

Appointment Scheduling

The EngageBay app will also lend you a hand with scheduling meetings. It will arrange them automatically based on individual/group calendars. You can adjust the finer details, such as: 

• event buffer times 
• daily appointment limits 
• reminder emails.

Task Management

Stay on top of every task with this app. You can create them manually or set up rules to automate them. Furthermore, you can filter and group them and set up reminders.

Automatic Data Logging

If you’re not a fan of manual data entry, this could be one of your favorite features of EngageBay. 

The software records and updates all client correspondence and lead progress in real-time. And since all teams can share this data, everyone can stay on the same page at all times!

Sales Reporting

EngageBay’s reporting module provides you with data on sales processes. You can stay informed on lost and won deals and even predict sales. Naturally, you can visualize everything as graphs and charts.

Lead Scoring

This tool will help you identify the most promising leads. You can locate them, follow up with them, and close even more deals. 

Leaderboards and Gamification

Sometimes, friendly competition is good for productivity. 

EngageBay includes gamification as a fun way to introduce high-performance culture to your company. You can initiate contests with rewards and measure your team members’ success on leaderboards.

Service

The third and final toolset is designed for customer service. Treat your clients right via live chat, tickets, support macros, and more.

Here’s how EngageBay aims to help with that:

Support Tickets

Thanks to this feature, you’ll receive all tickets in one inbox. You can monitor pending, unsolved, and unassigned support requests. On top of that, you can:

• Queue and route them
• Automate on triggers like status, priority, and replies
• Resolve multiple issues with one ticket.

Canned Responses

This is one of the most time-saving tools the EngageBay helpdesk suite offers. 

If there are any frequent questions, you are free to save your responses and reuse them later. You can also personalize and automate them.

Helpdesk Reports

The software lets you generate reports on the performance of your support team. They’re pretty easy to grasp! You can visualize and customize them and create date ranges.

However, they might be too simplistic and lack some detail. There’s no analytics on your social media, for example.

Support Groups

Are your team members overwhelmed with messages? EngageBay can create support groups for a better workflow. You can segment team members and clients and direct incoming tickets to the correct group.

Support Macros

Macros let you pre-define standard responses to common support requests. They will be triggered if certain conditions are met. 

For example, you can set:

• ticket status
• ticket type
• priority
• tags

Mobile App

You can also use EngageBay on the go as an app for iOS and Android. It has most of the core CRM functions. That includes contact management, team communication, and sales reports.

However, both versions haven’t been updated for years. They’re quite buggy and clumsy.

Integrations

EngageBay has multiple integrations with apps such as:

• Zapier
• SendGrid
• Mailgun
• Mandrill
• Xero
• Shopify
• Amazon SES
• Stripe
• QuickBooks.

It covers all the major platforms you’ll use. Its API also lets your developers create custom integrations. 

Security

Worried about your sensitive data?

No need for that!

This service is GDPR compliant. It’s hosted on Google Cloud and uses SSL encryption for protection. Also, according to the privacy policy, the company will never sell your personal info to any third party.

All in all, EngageBay takes security seriously.

Ease of Use and Interface

This software has a lot to offer in terms of raw functionality. The question is:

How user-friendly is it?

As soon as you load EngageBay, you’ll notice how clean the dashboard looks. I was expecting some clutter, but I was pleasantly surprised.

Still, it will take time to get used to the enormous amount of tools. As useful as the integrated setup is, it’s a bit overwhelming initially. 

You can check out the EngageBay help center if you feel lost. It contains guides to help you get started. You can find instructions on basic tasks, like marketing automation, lead generation, integrations, and others. They’re well-written and easy to follow. 

Additionally, there’s a blog section on the website with tips on marketing and CRM software alternatives.

Customer Support

If you ever get stuck using EngageBay, I have good news:

Customer support is reliable and quick to react to all your queries. Most EngageBay reviews on G2, Capterra, and TrustPilot indicate so.

And my experiences were positive, too!

You can reach out via email, phone, and live chat. I’ve contacted them via chat and email. The reps immediately responded to me on the website. It didn’t take them long to respond to my email, too — about half an hour.

In both cases, they were very pleasant and answered my questions. 

Pricing

Now let’s focus on the pricing scheme.

There are four major tool suites:

• All-in-One
• Marketing
• CRM & Sales Bay
• Service Bay.

Each has a free, Basic, Growth, and Pro plan, except the Service bay. That package is always free!

Let’s take the All-in-One option, for example. In this case, the EngageBay pricing plans are as follows:

You can save 10% by opting for annual billing or 20% for biannual. There’s no free trial, but a free plan is even better!

The All-in-One package grants you every feature. Meanwhile, Marketing, CRM & Sales, and Service have a separate set of tools. I’ve already covered them while talking about EngageBay’s features earlier.

EngageBay vs ActiveCampaign

One of EngageBay’s biggest competitors is ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign’s talents are primarily in email marketing. But, it also has tools for:

• Marketing automation
• CRM & sales automation
• Service & support.

Let’s start our comparison with an overlook of the features.

ActiveCampaign has more robust email automation — such as split automations. It has more templates, too! It also supports email scheduling based on machine learning, which is impressive.

However, it’s lacking in the service department.

EngageBay has support options like macros and canned responses. They can save you a lot of effort. Also, ActiveCampaign’s customer support channels (chat, email, and Facebook Messenger) are exclusive to an add-on called Conversations. It costs $19 per month per agent — and EngageBay’s entire service package is free. 

What about the ease of use, though?

Well, both apps require a bit of adaptation. It’s nothing too bad, but it’s worth knowing before you make the switch.

If you want to contact ActiveCampaign’s support, you can do so via email and chat. But, unlike EngageBay, you can’t reach them through the phone.  

Finally, let’s talk about pricing.

I’ve already mentioned that EngageBay has a free plan. It limits your number of contacts and users, but you can use almost all of the features! ActiveCampaign isn’t quite so generous, but it has a free trial. 

Its pricing will also depend on your number of contacts. So, if you have 1000 contacts, here’s what you can expect:

• Lite — $30/month (limited to one user)
• Plus — $70/month (limited to 25 users)
• Professional — $187/month (limited to 50 users)
• Enterprise — on request (unlimited users).

Things can get very pricy if you have more contacts.

But the bottom line is this:

Both programs are powerful in their own right. If your marketing strategy relies heavily on email automation, ActiveCampaign is an excellent fit. 

On the other hand, EngageBay has a social suite that is both free and has some extra features. 

EngageBay Review — Verdict

We all love free things — and this service has a lot to offer in that regard.

It has a surprisingly serviceable free plan! Usually, such options are hardly worth using because they’re so limited in scope and functionality. You can also use the tool suite for customer service completely free of charge.

Generally, the range of features you have at your disposal is extraordinary. It’s not just essentials — you have automations for every little task. On top of that, EngageBay prioritizes customer support and doesn’t treat it like an afterthought.

However, it has a couple of downsides, too.

The neglected mobile apps, for one. The software could also be just a bit more novice-friendly overall. Besides, I wish the reports were more comprehensive.

But, all things considered:

EngageBay is a smart pick for early-stage startups and small businesses looking for an integrated solution that doesn’t cost a fortune.