In today’s day and age, I strongly believe the most important factor in business is marketing and marketing has started gaining its due importance. Any business, company, product/service provider, or brand needs a strong marketing strategy to bring in leads and generate revenue. If you cannot market your product/service in the market, your target audience will never be reached. Being in the COVID era, only marketing will not do it all for you. The world has shifted towards digital marketing.
Everything is carried out virtually. Marketing is also digitized. Whether you want to run social campaigns for your brand, do email marketing. Generate leads, analyze trends, or streamline the overall marketing process, it cannot be done manually. Everyone wants to save time and increase efficiency. This is exactly what Marketing tools like Wishpond and ShortStack do. Both the tools have pretty much the same features; however, both are still different in their unique way. Hence I would like to do a comparison between them and Let’s find out more about the two of them.
Wishpond vs ShortStack 2024 Detailed Comparison
Wishpond Overview
Wishpond was founded in 2009, in Canada. It is an exhaustive and comprehensive marketing automation tool that helps business owners, marketing agencies and brands ease their process of lead generation. It eradicates the need for obsolete and manual ways of carrying out marketing. Be it sending customized emails to customers based on their engagement on your website, segmenting your leads into categories and scoring them based on various parameters, or running innovative content, Wishpond does it all for you.
Wishpond is used by more than 5000 business owners worldwide. Various tools are provided within this marketing automation tool. A few of them are namely: promotions & contests, forms, email marketing, landing pages, lead scoring, and website popup. Today if you cannot engage your audience with different forms of content, your business is dead. Content Management has become extremely important. Wishpond takes care of your content management, content marketing, lead generation, and landing pages. It is an all-in-one robust marketing automation tool.
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ShortStack Overview
ShortStack was founded in 2011 in the United States. Businesses of all sizes, agencies, and brands have certain parameters and a target audience in mind when running marketing campaigns. For these campaigns to be successful you need a fully backed up marketing automation tool. ShortStack is a cloud-based marketing campaign tool. It helps you create landing pages, personalized social media campaigns, custom forms, and contest creations of all kinds. It helps you design your campaign using various themes, widgets, and templates.
ShortStack is undoubtedly one of the top digital marketing platforms that cater to content engagements, lead generation, and campaign management. ShortStack enables you to generate and maintain clean and focused lead lists. No duplicate entries can take place, lead authentication tools are also integrated within the solution to prevent fake emails and inactive users from entering your list. It is a monthly subscription-based marketing campaign solution tool.
Key Features and benefits
Unique features of Wishpond
Wishpond provides tools within its software to carry out marketing automation. Features such as ROI/Analytics tracking for better customer understanding are also available. You can also run drip campaigns using Wishpond. A/B testing is another unique feature provided by Wishpond. Lead scoring and segmentation allow you to filter out potential leads and then run custom social campaigns for them.
Unique features of ShortStack
Unique features of ShortStackShortStack gives its users an option to use their domain name for running campaigns to increase the trust and rank better by implementing SEO techniques. Customers tend to trust your pre-existing brand; ShortStack lets you leverage that via this feature. Another attractive feature is the large variety of templates available on ShortStack, Be it video contests, YouTube Contests, Instagram Contests, landing Page contests, or anything else, prebuilt templates are available on the platform. The cost of these professionally designed and customizable templates makes them even more valuable for your business or brand.
Comparative analysis of common features
Email Marketing
With the number of products/services available in the market increasing, customized and personalized emails are the need of the hour. Email marketing is an extremely powerful digital marketing tool that helps you reach out to your target audience effectively. When you have a large customer database, manual methods fail to cater to the needs of all. Email marketing/automation helps you build stronger customer relationships and saves you valuable time.
Email Marketing – Wishpond
Wishpond’s email marketing tools are extremely intuitive and user friendly. It has a plethora of mobile-responsive email marketing customized templates available. You can choose from a wide range of industry-specific templates and launch your campaigns in no time. You don’t have to be technically sound or know HTML. Easily choose from the drag and drop objects and style your campaign at ease. No need to customize them separately for mobile devices as well. Wishpond takes care of that. Send engaging email newsletters to your subscribed customer list and notify them of new products, new services, or any update about your business.
Email Marketing- ShortStack
ShortStack offers a comprehensive email marketing solution. Customized emails can be sent before, during, and after social campaigns and contests using email templates. Use scheduled emails to reach out to potential leads from your customer list. It offers auto responders for each form filled by a customer. This helps in increasing email open rates and develops a call to action (CTA) for your leads. Various filters are present to refine your customer list in correspondence to a particular event, contest, or product launch. Target the right audience each time with ShortStack. There is no need for integrations with other email marketing tools, you can collect entries and send out emails in one place. They are also CAN-SPAM and GDPR compliant, so you don’t have to worry about security and safety. Double opt-in ads are another lucrative feature to increase user subscriptions.
Verdict
It can be concluded that the email marketing solutions provided by ShortStack are more comprehensive, robust, and secure when compared to Wishpond.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are those pages on your website that will help you convert your target audience into potential leads. They generally have forms to be filled by visitors for you to capture their details. It is also called as a lead capture or destination page.
Landing Pages-Wishpond
Customized and easy drag-drop landing page templates suitable for your business/brand are available on Wishpond. They are all mobile-responsive and cost-efficient. Powerful optimization tools such as website popup and A/B split testing. Create customized forms for lead capturing and also leverage pre-filled and hidden form fields for maximum lead conversion. Personalized updates and platform friendliness make their landing pages more valuable.
Landing Pages-ShortStack
Use landing pages as incentives for leads to become loyal customers. Add prizes and rewards for lucky winners based on entries filled in a form sent via emails. Make use of your own personal and customized domains to increase SEO ranking and brand awareness. The unique action-gating feature on ShortStack helps in better lead conversion. Providing customers discount coupons, e-books, giveaways, etc are a few ways in which action-gating takes place.
Verdict
Lucrative features and better customization of landing pages on all platforms make Wishpond a better choice for productive landing pages.
Marketing Automation
Marketing Automation is nothing but a method of automating the marketing process for your business, agency, or brand by streamlining the marketing process on multiple online channels and platforms.
Marketing Automation- Wishpond
Wishpond leverages its marketing automation features to send email campaigns at the right time to the right audience. Maximize the benefits of marketing automation by identifying hot leads and informing your sales team regarding the same. Integrations with various apps make all the activities easier. GotoWebinar, Slack, Mailchimp, and Salesforce are few tools Wishpond integrates with to ease marketing automation.
Marketing Automation- ShortStack
ShortStack allows you to update content for your marketing campaigns as per your convenience. Make the content visible while away from your desktop. Set up customized trigger actions after particular activities carried out by people visiting your marketing campaigns. CRM capabilities are also enhanced by inbuilt form integration tools. Integration with platforms such as Zapier enables smooth email marketing operations. Automated feeds feature extracts all relevant text, images, and videos relevant to a particular hashtag used by you for a particular campaign or contest. All rights issues are resolved by the ShortStack team.
Verdict
It can be concluded from all the evidence above that ShortStack has a wider range of features and is more suitable when it comes to marketing automation.
Contests & Social Campaigns
Online and social engagements today are extremely important for any business or brand to prosper. Contests/competitions/rewarding incentives attract the audience. Video submission contests, image-based contests, form filling, etc are a few types. Marketing campaigns comprising of these contests help in generating better leads and reaching a wider audience.
Contests & Social Campaigns – Wishpond
Contests and social media campaigns are the best way to attract a large number of people to your product/offer. They help in filtering out customers and building a filtered email list. Such contests and engagements help in increasing the number of followers and traction on various social media pages. These ultimately drive more sales for the business. Wishpond integrates with 40+ other apps and gets your campaigns up and running in no time. Be it sweepstakes, photo contests, video contests, or any other, Wishpond has it all.
Contests & Social Campaigns – ShortStack
Shortstack has a variety of contest templates available for you. They have customized contests for each social media channel. Be it Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, or any other platform. For contest winners or reward earners, use their random data collecting and selecting a feature, to choose a random winner for your giveaways and contests. Shortstack has a style panel feature that helps you customize your campaign theme, color, and style concerning your brand. You also get the option to choose the publishing pages and platforms. You can embed the contest/giveaway on your website, landing page, or any social media page.
Verdict
ShortStack is undoubtedly a better choice when it comes to running campaigns and holding contests for your business or brand.
Benefits of Wishpond
- Content Management, Content Marketing, and Multi-channel marketing features
- Analytics, website and lead traction features along with customizable CTA’s
- Lead Scoring and Lead Management
- Multiple language support in German, French, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish other than English
- Drag-drop and easily customizable plug and play features
- API access and CRM integrations
- A/B Split testing and custom CSS/JavaScript options
- Marketing automation, landing pages and social media contests
Benefits of ShortStack
- Variety of themes, styles, and templates for marketing campaigns
- Lead and contact management tools
- Email Marketing, campaign analytics, and form embedding features
- Variety of Widgets, tools and integration options
- Inbuilt Anti-fraud mechanisms and intuitive contest building
- Automated responses and No-code customization campaigns
- Good lead capture and engagements options
Overall Comparative Analysis
Performance and Speed
Wishpond
According to customer reviews, it performs well for small businesses and agencies. The speed in terms of lead generation timelines and effective marketing automation is above average; however other competitors in the market do provide better speed and performance.
ShortStack
When it comes to performance and speed, ShortStack aces the game. The customized contest templates, automated responses, trigger actions, and widgets increase the speed significantly as well.
Security & Safety
Wishpond
It does not have any specific compliances or security norms in place which help customers know that their data is secure, safe, and not under the radar.
ShortStack
In terms of security, Shortstack wins the race. Its anti-fraudulent mechanisms, GDPR compliance, and CAN-SPAM compliance, all make it a much secure lead generating and marketing campaign tool. They are also PCI compliant and ISO 9000 certified.
Ease of use
Wishpond
When it comes to user-friendliness and ease of use, most customer reviews and product features display that Wishpond keeps the customer’s ease of navigation in mind for all its services. The easy to use prebuilt templates, drag-drop features, lead scoring, and lead generation mechanisms are all user friendly.
ShortStack
In terms of ease of use, Shortstack is no less. Most customer reviews indicate satisfaction concerning ease of use. However, people who are not technology-savvy tend to struggle at times due to the automated responses and widget triggers. Lack of understanding and functioning does happen with some customers.
Customer Support
Wishpond
The customer support team is very helpful and available 24/7. Support is available via email, phone, live support as well as training.
ShortStack
The only thing not available in the ShortStack Customer support is training. Rest all the support platforms are the same as those of ShortStack.
The Pricing Battle
Wishpond
Three pricing options exist in Wishpond. They are namely starting at 49$/month, everything you need at 99$/month, and rapid growth at 199$/month. All the yearly plans have a 14 day free trial period for up to 15,000 leads.
ShortStack
ShortStack also has three pricing plans that work monthly and annually. They are the Business plan at 99$/month, Agency plan at 199$/month, and Brand plan at 499$/month. The annual costs are lower than the monthly costs; however, compared to its competitors it is highly-priced. A free trial is available only for business plans with up to 250 entries and 1,000 views.
Pros & Cons
Pros of Wishpond
- Dynamic content, customized templates, and list management
- Drip campaigns, lead scoring and report analytics
- Free trials for all versions
- Integrations with more than 100+ apps
- A large variety of resources available on the site in the form of Infographics, webinars, Marketing EBooks, and blogs.
- Form building and A/B testing
Pros of ShortStack
- Caters to small businesses, large enterprises, medium-sized businesses as well as freelancers
- Automated responses and customer engagement features
- Customizable web pages, landing pages, and campaigns using CSS and JavaScript without the need to know them.
- 24/7 active and helpful customer support
- A large variety of designs, themes, and styles available for customizing campaigns for your brand/business
Cons of Wishpond
- Top-level domains cannot be used for landing pages, sub-domains need to be used
- The free trial needs you to fill in your credit card details
- Pre-existing fields in forms are not present
- The support team has delays in replying at times
- Integration with Zoom for webinars is not yet present
Cons of ShortStack
- The technical automation and few advanced features make it a little difficult for users to adapt to
- No resources to track where the database entries are coming from
- A free trial is only available for a business plan and that too has limited entries and views
- Relatively expensive and Customising landing pages in CSS is a little tedious
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FAQs:
👉🏻 Can these tools be used for free?
Both these tools come with free trials. However, you need to enter your credit card details and even one day exceeded after the trial period is charged. Up-gradation or down gradation to different plans as well as cancellation can be done anytime.
👉🏻 What are some of their competitors?
Some of the major competitors of Wishpond and Shortstack are: Sharpspring Hubspot Akero Perdot Award Force Spinify Submittable
👉🏻 How safe are these platforms?
Most of the people are apprehensive when it comes to the safety and security of their data. Both Wishpond and ShortStack have access to a lot of data as the marketing campaigns cannot be run without them. Both the platforms detect frauds and any security threats.
Conclusion : Wishpond vs ShortStack Comaprison
In this article, I have tried to explain every possible aspect you need to know before getting started and after personally having hands-on experience using both tools I feel that both Wishpond and ShortStack are two best Marketing Automation and lead generation tools. Almost all the features are common in both of them. However, some features are unique to both.
Wishpond is suitable for small and medium-sized businesses as well as agencies. ShortStack is suitable for all sized businesses as well as freelancers.
In the end, I presume that it all depends on your brand and business requirements. They both stand almost at par in the market. In terms of user satisfaction also both of them have at par scores. It cannot be said which one is better.
