Gist Review: Features, Pricing, & Alternatives

Tired of using email marketing tools lacking modern capabilities like automation? Switch to Gist, an all-rounded marketing software focusing on automation and customer relationships.

However, like any other tool, Gist has a drawback. It has a cluttered interface with a learning curve. So, what can you expect from it as a new user?

Let’s find out in this Gist review. 

SMB Guide’s Verdict for Gist

Gist gets an 8.7 out of 10 rating.

Gist excels as an all-rounded marketing platform offering CRM, email marketing, and automation capabilities. Its focus on event tracking and sales productivity gives it an edge over most competitors. 

However, Gist requires improvement in a few areas. Its email builder has customization limitations, and the interface needs improvement.

Overall, the software delivers value. It makes Gist suitable for growing sales-focused businesses prioritizing automation and email tracking.

Factor	Rating (out of 10)
Pricing & Plans	9
Marketing Automation Capabilities	9
Email Builder	8.5
Campaign Performance Tracking	9
User Interface and User Experience	8
Integrations and Compatibility	8.5
Customer Support	9
SMB Guide Rating	8.7

In this review of Gist, I’ve followed SMB Guide’s detailed criteria for evaluating the marketing automation software.

Pricing & Plans

Gist offers three scalable pricing plans, including a forever free package. The free plan provides decent features such as automation and tracking capabilities.

Paid plans offer more functionality in customization options and access to API and webhooks. The paid plans include a 100% satisfaction guarantee and a two-week free trial period.

Billing is monthly, and here are the plans:

Free

It is the entry package supporting up to 200 contacts and 2 seats.

Price

• Free

Features

• Unlimited conversation history
• Meetings and calendar integration
• Website and event tracking
• Mobile app
• Basic email templates
• Contact segments and tags
• Web, email, and push notifications
• Send broadcast emails

Who it’s for: Startups with a small contact list looking to access automation tools for their marketing campaigns.

Professional

It is a paid plan supporting up to 1K contacts and 5 seats.

Price

• Monthly: $48

Features

• All features in the free plan
• Facebook and Twitter integration
• Automated Chat triggers
• Satisfaction ratings
• Drip campaigns
• Conditional content
• Double opt-in customization
• Visual email builder

Who it’s for: Businesses with growing subscriber bases that are looking for a robust way to engage and offer support across multiple channels.

Premium

It is the top plan, supporting unlimited seats and 1K contacts.

Price

• Monthly: $128

Features

• All features in the professional plan
• Custom chatbots
• Real-time message sneak peek
• Unbranded messenger
• Facebook and Instagram ads
• E-commerce integrations
• Automatic event tracking
• Automated meeting scheduling

Who it’s for: Large enterprises with growing subscriber bases looking for scale marketing and support with automation.

Marketing Automation Capabilities

Gist provides marketers with a visual workflow builder to create drag-and-drop automation sequences. Marketers can combine conditional actions and branching logic to create intricate multiple paths based on user action.

Gist also provides various triggers, such as time-based, user behavior, and external events. Time-based triggers allow automation at specific intervals, making it easy to manage time-sensitive campaigns.

External event triggers integrated through API and can also initiate marketing automation workflows within Gist. Gist supports multi-channel automation through several channels.

These include social media networks like X, Instagram, and Facebook. Not only that, it also includes chatbots and SMS, providing a coordinated and integrated marketing strategy. The multi-channel functionality helps prevent the creation of silos within the marketing efforts. 

Gist also supports dynamic content personalization within the workflows. Marketers can use the recipient attributes to personalize the email content. It can include offering special deals or product recommendations to ensure the content is relevant to the recipient.

Email Builder

Gist provides a library of 200+ pre-made templates categorized under seven verticals. These include event invitations, newsletters, and more. The templates look professional and well-designed for easy customization.

Marketers will also find a responsive email builder. Paid plans give access to the drag-and-drop editor, while the free plan only allows using the HTML builder. The good thing is that the editor allows customization of the templates.

Marketers can add elements like blocks, social media icons, and more. The HTML editor is suitable for marketers looking for granular customization control.

Gist emphasizes the importance of mobile-responsive email marketing campaigns. That is why all its templates are responsive and optimized to render seamlessly on mobile devices.

The responsiveness is built into the template design, requiring no extra effort from the user. Gist also includes email preview and spam testing capabilities in the email builder.

The email preview feature lets marketers view how the template renders across various clients and devices. The spam test checks the deliverability of the emails.

Campaign Performance Tracking

Gist provides powerful campaign performance metrics such as CTR, views, ROI, and more. Through the real-time dashboard, marketers can see how their subscriber base interacts with the campaigns. 

The CTR and open rate metrics are well presented, allowing marketers to know the engagement levels. Conversion tracking goes further, enabling marketers to link email engagement to specific actions like purchases.

It helps provide businesses with a holistic view of the email campaign performance.

Gist also allows marketers to define and track their email campaign goals. Aligning the goals with KPIs enables marketers to measure their campaigns’ effectiveness and optimize where necessary.

The best part is that Gist visualizes the progress of the set goals. Now, Gist supports A/B testing various email elements, including content, subject lines, and CTAs.

It helps marketers identify the most effective variations to use in their campaigns. Gist also provides actionable insights into the test results on where to improve.

Marketers who rely on and prefer in-depth analytics will find Gist integrates with third-party analytics tools like Google Analytics. The integration allows marketers to combine the granularity of Google Analytics with Gist’s email metrics for a comprehensive overview.

User Interface and User Experience

The Gist interface is modern and intuitive, but navigating its features is complex. Accessing some core functions requires digging through the menu to find them.

Users on the free plan also have limitations on the features they can access, such as reports. It makes creating, sending, and managing email campaigns challenging for first-time users.

Gist provides an email editor with drag-and-drop functionality and 200+ templates for campaign creation. The templates are modern and customizable, and marketers with coding skills can edit them through HTML. 

After customizing the email templates, marketers can use the preview and spam testing features to fix inconsistencies. The preview checks how the email appears on various devices, while the spam test optimizes for deliverability.

Lastly, Gist allows dashboard customization and the creation of shortcuts to frequently used functions.

Integrations and Compatibility

Gist seamlessly integrates with well-known CRMs like Zoho and HubSpot. This integration allows businesses to sync their data for a unified view of subscriber engagement. The integration process is simple, requiring a few clicks and minimizing the learning curve.

Gist also has webhooks and RESTful APIs that marketers can use to integrate custom systems. Businesses with niche tools will find this flexibility convenient.

The software also provides comprehensive API documentation, making building and maintaining them easier.

Marketers looking to integrate e-commerce systems directly will find Gist compatible with WooCommerce. However, users with Shopify, Magento, or Square sites will need to use Zapier to connect them to Gist.

The e-commerce integration enables customer data syncing, which helps create targeted campaigns. Now, Gist acknowledges the importance of data-driven marketing.

It is why it directly integrates with analytics tools like Google Analytics for granular campaign insights.

Gist also supports social media integration for social sharing and tracking, a key component in modern marketing. It allows marketers to cast a wider net for lead generation and conversion.

For marketers on the go, Gist offers a dedicated mobile app that mirrors the functionality of the desktop version. The software also simplifies syncing data between the mobile app and desktop without disrupting workflow.

Customer Support

Gist support options include live chat, email, and a knowledge base. Live chat is the fastest with response, where it takes less than three minutes for feedback. 

Email is also efficient, taking up to 30 minutes for feedback. The agents’ responses are helpful even on technical issues like building the APIs.

Gist also provides a comprehensive knowledge base with guides on topics like marketing and other software’s inner workings.

Gist – Unique Features

Gist excels as an all-rounded email marketing platform, and two features stood out during our evaluation. They are:

• Custom Chatbots: Gist allows users to build custom chatbots for their site even without coding skills. The chatbots help automate engaging visitors, lead generation, and booking meetings. They also help scale every part of the business on autopilot.
• Surveys: Gist allows marketers to create in-context customer surveys to help capture and automatically act on valuable customer insights. Whether from nurture campaigns or onboarding, you can turn questions into valuable insights.

What the Experts Say About Gist

Gist has received many positive and few lukewarm reviews on sites like G2.com. Here is what the users said about their experience.

I’m using Gist in a SaaS product to welcome and on-board new users and to send new feature emails. Also using automations to trigger messages based on certain user actions. Users of Intercom will likely see a cost reduction by switching to Gist, and also get a handful of other integrated features included too.

Dan W., Founder – Verified Capterra review

My experience with the software has been very positive. Some portions take a little work to setup and get used to, but that’s like learning anything brand new really. Within days I had the whole system setup and working with little effort. The support team are very responsive and assist when required. A good experience and definitely worth checking out if you’re a small to medium-sized business website owner.

James T., Website Owner – Verified Capterra review

Gist Alternatives

At SMB Guide, we understand that even though Gist offers all-inclusive software, not all businesses will find it ideal. So we decided to research for the best Gist alternatives that provide what it lacks.

ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign shares similarities with Gist in providing automation tools, CRM, and email marketing capabilities. However, its seamless CRM integration and focus on complex workflow automation make it stand out.

Regarding pricing plans, ActiveCampaign provides scalable plans but without a free package. The entry plan costs $15 monthly and supports 1K contacts.  It makes ActiveCampaign suitable for businesses prioritizing personalized customer journeys and complex campaign workflows.

Brevo

Brevo excels in email and SMS marketing. It also offers SMBs one of the most affordable pricing plans in the industry. Like Gist, Brevo offers an all-rounded solution with CRM, email marketing, and automation capabilities. 

Regarding pricing, Brevo offers four scalable plans, including a freemium. Like Gist, Brevo’s free plan has feature limitations but provides a good entry point for startups. Paid plans start at $9 monthly and support 500 contacts. It makes Brevo suitable for businesses focusing on transactional emails and SMS marketing.

Sign up to Brevo for free today!

Klaviyo

Klaviyo is a marketing automation platform similar to Gist. It’s known for its seamless integration with ecommerce platforms. While both platforms excel in data-driven marketing with highly granular segmentation and automation capabilities, Klaviyo is better suited for smaller businesses.

Get started with Klaviyo for free

Get Started with Gist

Gist provides all-inclusive software that excels at email tracking and sales productivity. Its focus on automation, customer relationship management, and support makes it stand out.

Combining all these factors and features is why it gets a high rating and our stamp of approval.

Sign up for free and get started with Gist.

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