EngageBay Marketing Bay Review 2023: SMB Champion?
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Bonfire Rating: 4.8/5 EngageBay Marketing Bay is the perfect marketing platform for scaling your business from the ground up!
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Let’s face it, finding the right tools to handle your small business’s marketing efforts can be a challenge. Without the right info at hand, it’s so easy to pick the wrong one. We all know how much time and money this can cost , especially when moving your marketing efforts to a new platform. I’m AJ, and I’ve got a blackbelt in marketing from building my digital agency over the last decade . After selling my business for a seven-figure exit , I started Small Business Bonfire (SBB) to share my expertise with anyone looking to make their business dreams a reality. For this review, we dive into one of our favorite marketing platforms—EngageBay Marketing Bay. We give our honest take on the platform based on months of testing everything it offers. Let’s jump right in and get started!
You Can Trust Small Business Bonfire Since 2009 Small Business Bonfire has been testing and rating thousands of business software to help you (our small business owners) start & scale your organizations. If you want to know more about how we test, please read this article here.
What is EngageBay Marketing Bay?
EngageBay Marketing Bay is one-third of EngageBay’s impressive array of cloud-based platforms designed to scale your business efforts across the board . As the name might suggest, Marketing Bay covers the marketing side of things, while Service Bay handles Service, and Sales Bay handles, well, sales. What’s great about Marketing Bay is that it integrates seamlessly with the three platforms to provide a sort of hybrid approach to your marketing, sales, and service efforts. Here are some features we love about Marketing Bay: Marketing automation Email marketing tools Landing page creation Contact management Web capture forms Campaign creation We love how easy Marketing Bay makes it for beginners and veterans alike to manage their marketing needs. This makes it perfect for startups and small/midsize businesses (SMBs) looking to scale. Whether you’re a one-person show or running a full-time business, EngageBay Marketing Bay has the features and tools to quickly get your campaigns off the ground without breaking the bank.
Pros and Cons of the EngageBay Marketing Bay
There’s a lot to love about EngageBay’s Marketing Bay, but it’s not without its flaws. Let’s review the pros and cons to paint a clearer picture.
EngageBay Marketing Bay Pros
Affordable pricing
Fantastic free forever plan
Great integration with sales and service
Lead capture tools such as web forms and landing pages
Tons of email marketing tools
Automation capabilities are great
EngageBay Marketing Bay Cons
Free plan is limited to 250 contacts
A/B testing and custom reporting only available with advanced plans
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Who is EngageBay Marketing Bay Best Suited For?
EngageBay Marketing Bay is one of our favorite marketing platforms for SMBs. In this section, we’ll narrow down who it’s best suited for. Small businesses – EngageBay Marketing Bay’s features are great for small businesses looking to scale their efforts without breaking the bank. Midsize businesses – For a little more investment, Marketing Bay offers many advanced features with their higher-tiered plans. Midsize businesses can take advantage of these powerful marketing features and the integration offered with Service Bay and Sales Bay. Startups – Marketing Bay is incredibly affordable and has a great free forever plan—perfect for companies just starting or those running on a shoestring budget.
Who is EngageBay Marketing Bay Not Suited For?
Marketing Bay is one of the top marketing tools in the game, but that doesn’t mean it’s meant for everyone. Here are some situations we don’t think Marketing Bay is well suited for: Large enterprises – Let’s face it, if you have a large organization with advanced marketing needs, there are better options out there. Companies with many custom coding needs – Marketing Bay isn’t built for those needing extensive customization or complex integrations.
EngageBay Marketing Bay Software Pricing
EngageBay Marketing offers four plans. They are the following: Free – Free forever Basic – $12.99/month Growth – $49.99/month Pro – $79.99/month
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How Does EngageBay Marketing Bay Pricing Compare?
Let’s see how Marketing Bay stacks up against the competition regarding pricing and features . We’ll compare the introductory plans of each to give you a better idea. Here are some of the most popular marketing alternatives: EngageBay Marketing Bay – Free Plan Available 250 marketing contacts Landing pages Email marketing templates Custom Fields HubSpot Marketing Hub – Free Plan Available Landing pages Mobile app Ad management Add up to 1 million contacts Freshmarketer – Free Plan Available 100 marketing contacts Social media campaigns Additional 10,000 contacts with Shopify integration Email marketing campaigns Sugar CRM Sugar Market – $1000/month Email marketing tools Predictive analytics with AI 10,000 marketing contacts/month Social media management tools As you can see, three out of four of the most popular marketing platforms in the game offer free plans to take advantage of. We threw in Sugar Market here to show you the difference in features when the price tag starts to get pretty steep. Sugar Market is in a league of its own in terms of both pricing and features. It’s a great option for enterprises looking to ramp up their marketing efforts. However, they don’t offer a free trial or any kind of free plan, so they lose this round , in our opinion. What ultimately sets EngageBay’s Marketing Bay apart from the competition is the surprising amount of powerful features they offer with no price tag attached .
EngageBay Marketing Bay Pricing Tips
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Annual Plans Save By paying upfront with an annual plan, you can save 8% with Marketing Bay.
Biennial Plans Save Taking the savings a step further, Marketing Bay offers 15% savings by paying for two years upfront. This allows you to budget your business expenses well in advance (and save some money in the process).
Refer and Earn You can earn up to 30% recurring commission by recommending EngageBay to a friend. These savings can really add up if you bring in a ton of new users. We find it extremely easy to recommend the platform to just about anyone (cause it's so great).
EngageBay Marketing Bay Core Features
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Marketing Automation
EngageBay Marketing Bay has some excellent marketing automation tools. To make things easier, they break these up into three categories: Sequences Automations Workflows Throughout our testing, we took advantage of these tools quite a bit. We'll break each one down to show you the marketing software's capabilities. Sequences Sequences allow you to automatically send emails to contacts based on user-defined conditions. We started by creating a sequence of emails based on an opt-in campaign for affiliate marketing. This allowed us to trigger emails automatically when someone signed up to discuss affiliate deals on our website. The sequence builder tool within Marketing Bay is incredibly powerful and user-friendly, making it easy to set conditions and customize emails as you go. Here's an example of the creation process. One thing that we liked about the sequence builder was how we could easily personalize each email by automatically adding contact information, such as: First and last name Email Phone Company Website URL Social media Ticket ID This tool works well for service, sales, and marketing teams looking to streamline customer interactions. Automation EngageBay CRM offers powerful marketing automation with its Growth plan. With this automation, you can manage your marketing efforts effectively while focusing on what matters—nurturing your client relationships. At Small Business Bonfire, we love any kind of automation to make our lives easier. We're happy to say there's an impressive amount of automation here for the price. Some marketing automation capabilities that EngageBay provides include the following: Sending a notification when a deal is created Automatically scheduling appointments Assigning agents to contacts when tags are added Create a calendar update or notification when an event is created Update deals based on specific criteria In short, the sky's the limit to what you can accomplish with Marketing Bay's automation. Workflows Workflows are similar to the automation provided by EngageBay. The main difference is that they must be engaged manually instead of with a trigger. Workflows allow you to create a campaign of activities and then have the system take over from there. Here are some examples of the kinds of things you can do with workflows: Schedule and send an introductory email to new contacts or leads Send thank-you emails after events or webinars Send follow-up emails if they haven't responded As you can see, workflows are a great way to automate your marketing efforts and streamline customer interactions. EngageBay's Marketing Bay makes setting up and managing workflows incredibly easy with its user-friendly interface.
Dashboards
EngageBay's marketing solution offers customizable dashboards to bring your data together in one place . The dashboard feature provides real time insights into the performance of your campaigns and automations, allowing you to make more informed decisions when managing marketing efforts. EngageBay also offers a comprehensive set of reporting capabilities that let you track performance metrics like: Top broadcasts Contacts overview Email stats Contacts by source Forms Sequence list What gives this feature just a little extra "oomph" is that you can easily drag each of these metrics around to your liking. Here's the setup we used during our three-month testing period.
Email Marketing Tools
Marketing Bay also includes a great suite of email marketing tools that helps you build , manage , and track your campaigns . Here's what you get: Email creation with templates Real-time analytics and reporting tools A/B testing capabilities Email broadcasts We got started by creating a follow-up email to send out to our affiliate clients. We were impressed by the gorgeous templates that Marketing Bay had to offer. We've created emails using customizable templates with many other platforms and can honestly say EngageBay's Marketing Bay is among the best in the biz . Here are some templates they offer to give you a better idea. As you can see, it's easy to sort between a ton of categories, such as: Offers Promotional Corporate Celebrations E-commerce Education This made it easy to find one that suited our needs. Here's what we ended up with (in just a matter of minutes). EngageBay made it extremely easy to navigate the process with their drag-and-drop email builder. If you're looking for powerful email marketing tools to give your business the edge it needs, Marketing Bay might be your answer .
Landing Pages
If you're looking for a simple yet effective way to create stunning landing pages for your business, EngageBay's Marketing Bay has got you covered . Their landing page creation feature is definitely one of the highlights of their service, and we were blown away by the awesome templates (pictured below) that they offered. We ended up going with our own to really test out the landing page creation capabilities of Marketing Bay. We're happy to say that the process was smooth sailing throughout. Here's what we were able to create with zero coding experience . You can also track the performance of your landing page using built-in analytics tools, which can help you to further optimize and improve your marketing efforts .
Contact Management
Effective contact management is a cornerstone of a great marketing platform. Luckily for us, creating and managing contacts was easy as pie (or it was a piece of cake if that's what you prefer). For example, adding a new contact was as simple as clicking "create new contact" and filling out a few fields. Here's what it looked like. Some aspects of contact management that we loved include: Manual contact scoring Custom fields Adding tags and notes is easy You can track everything from emails to automations for contacts You can create custom smart lists for contacts to easily organize them We were able to put in some affiliate marketing contacts we have from SBB deals. Here's what our contact hub looked like throughout our testing. All in all, Marketing Bay offers all the features that we typically look for in terms of contact management. The fact that the majority of these are available completely free of charge makes a homerun in our opinion.
Web Forms
With EngageBay's marketing tools, you can create inline web forms that allow lead capture and customer engagement . We got started and were again surprised (and impressed) by the great-looking themes provided by the marketing platform. Here's what we saw when we clicked "create an inline form." While the custom form option was tempting, we went with one of the templates. Here's what we were able to come up with. We can safely say there's virtually no learning curve with form creation (which is not the case with a lot of other marketing platforms). All that to say— Marketing Bay exceeded our expectations yet again .
Campaign Creation
EngageBay Marketing Bay allows you to create campaigns with both email and SMS . During our testing, we used this feature extensively for our affiliate marketing campaigns. For starters, we created an email broadcast by simply clicking "create broadcast." From there, we were given the option between the following types of broadcast: Regular broadcast A/B broadcast RSS to Email We went with a regular broadcast and named it "SBB Affiliate Marketing Broadcast." From there, we entered the email details, including who it's from and the reply address (shown below). Then, we chose recipients (in this case, our affiliate contacts), wrote the content, and hit save. The whole thing took less than 10 minutes and has probably saved hundreds of hours at this point (in our three months of testing). The SMS broadcast was similarly easy to set up. We connected WhatsApp with the platform, but there are lots of options to choose from . Here's a list of what they offer for SMS support (screenshot below). Here's the SMS campaign that we set up (in a matter of minutes). Overall, the campaign creation process was extremely intuitive and, honestly, quite a bit of fun. If you're looking to grow your marketing efforts , Marketing Bay has your back.
What are the Limitations of EngageBay Marketing Bay? EngageBay Marketing Bay offers some of the best marketing software we’ve seen in a while, but even Superman has a weakness (kryptonite). While I’m sure Marketing Bay would do just fine around kryptonite, it does have some (but not many) limitations. Most of the platform
