Encharge

I was super excited about Encharge, it seemed to be all that I was looking for. But it may not be the one for me or for the use I need it for.

PROS
+ It has conditional content with liquid - something unusual that has become a must since I started using it with Kit.
+ It has snippets, so you can change content in once place and change it in all the emails that contain it.
+ You can filter out or tag people who got sent but didn't open, who opened, who clicked, and even those who replied to an email (something amazing that Kit lacks).
+ You can add an integration to know which website pages they visited.
+ You can edit the list/grid view of your contacts to show the fields you want.
+ The segments can have colors (!) which is very nice.
+ In the contact view, you initially only see the fields that have content, which is super comfortable - when editing the contact, you do see all fields and you can add fields too.
+ The filtering is great, has tons of criteria to it.
+ Importing my contact list was super easy, just a CSV and all the tags got added automatically (having some 350 tags, that's a major step).

So there's many things here that are better than in Kit, Drip, MailerLite, Brevo or Keap, which I've tried over the past few years.

CONS - workable
- There's no proper email templates, so you have to base an email on the previous email of that sort.
- You cannot save your default colors or fonts, so every time you make an email you have to choose them again (or duplicate the previous email).
- I find it visually complex, also that all emails are to be found in one section to add them there to the workflows, but I've seen that in other tools - it's about staying organized with giving the emails a name, and getting used to it. A plus in this sense is that emails can be saved in folders, which may be a saver.
- I understand they've been super busy with the Appsumo launch, it's been taking 1-2 days to get some of the initial things resolved. Slower than I'd like but with some patience, it's ok.

CONS - severe (for me)
I purchased tier 6 in order to get the Thrivecart integration. But the first thing I noticed was that Thrivecart flagged this wasn't a regular ESP integration: the only thing you can do in Encharge (and not even on Thrivecart) is "sync" the user.
The process of adding tags, sending emails etc is done via an a Encharge automation, where you select the "event" being a Thrivecart purchase and then you need to *manually* type in the product name, code whatever in order to filter out what they purchased to send them the respective emails. Seems like the Convertbox connection works in a similar way.

I feel dismayed, since I have 50+ Thrivecart products (and I create several new per year, almost per month) so keeping track of all the coded product names to type them correctly by hand (there's not even a picklist to choose from) seems the recipe for disaster and extremely time-consuming.

Moreover, some of the advanced event conditions cannot be accessed from the plan offered in Appsumo, only with the Premium plan. So it remains to be seen whether some basic functions for a regular Thrivecart connection can even be filtered out in Encharge with this LTD (meaning, which product they purchased, whether it was with a payment plan or not, or which payment plan, with or without bumps and upsells, etc). I hardly know how to set up a test integration to find out - the documentations isn't ready and I don't know how to find the actual text to write into the conditions for the event to make sure it's exactly the right text.

I'm still excited about many of the features so right now I'm torn between returning the product altogether and staying with Kit, or keeping Tier 1 "just to play" (if I ever have time to play or find a way to use Encharge without using the Thrivecart and Convertbox integrations, which currently are basic to my setup).

I honestly feel disappointed and slightly cheated. Why making such a fuss about a Thrivecart integration that is not really an integration? Not a user-friendly integration, that's for sure. Too bad, because if they did have an actual proper integration with Convertbox and Thrivecart, I'd be a raving fan. (And don't talk to me about Zapier/Make/Pabbly because having such a ton of tags, optins and automations as I have, it's certainly not a good alternative).