Opensend vs. Retention: A Comparison Guide (2024)

Comparison Summary: Opensend vs. Retention

Opensend and Retention are leading user identification and automation platforms, each with its strengths.

Opensend excels in real-time lead scoring and robust deliverability protection. Its proprietary technology and precise cross-device identification provide advanced insights into customer behavior. Additionally, Opensend offers transparent pricing, rollover credits, flexible contracts, and exceptional customer service.

Retention, while competitive, does not match Opensend’s level of innovation and flexibility, making Opensend the superior choice for optimizing email, ads, postal remarketing, and boosting sales.

What is Opensend?

Opensend is an advanced user identification and automation platform designed to resolve the identity of anonymous visitors to enhance customer engagement and conversion. It leverages AI-powered tools for real-time lead scoring and adaptive learning, ensuring accurate and dynamic prioritization of leads based on their level of engagement through the analysis of time on site, pages viewed, buttons clicked, depth scroll, add to chart, checkout initiated, and more.

Opensend excels in detailed user qualification, robust domain reputation and deliverability protection, and innovative technologies for better open rates and data enrichment. With transparent pricing, flexible month-to-month or annual contracts, and rollover credits, Opensend provides significant value and maximum flexibility while allowing brands to easily try the service with a 14-day trial.

The platform also integrates seamlessly with e-commerce platforms like Shopify, wooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, Marketing Cloud, and others, while offering features like Opensend Revive and postal/direct mail for re-engaging inactive customers.

What Is Retention?

Retention is a competitive email automation platform focused on enhancing customer retention and engagement. Retention provides basic quality attribution (time on site) but does not match the comprehensive measures of Opensend. The platform supports segmentation, CRM integration, and retargeting ads only via Klaviyo.

While it has competitive pricing, it lacks the transparency and flexibility offered by Opensend. They offer a Reclaim program, passing device IDs to clients when the user comes through from a new device. However, they charge clients for these IDs, even if the client already had them. Opensend offers this service for free, not taking attribution for emails that did not come from them.

Retention is suitable for businesses looking for a marketing automation solution but does not provide the same level of advanced features and flexibility as Opensend.

Lead Scoring Algorithm

An effective lead-scoring algorithm is essential for prioritizing prospects and maximizing conversion rates. Opensend uses advanced AI-powered algorithms to score leads in real time, allowing businesses to quickly identify and prioritize high-quality prospects based on their interactions and engagement levels.

This continuous learning and adaptation result in increasingly accurate scores, enabling marketing teams to act promptly on hot leads and improve overall sales efficiency. Retention also uses AI for lead scoring but lacks the real-time adaptation that Opensend offers.

While it can rank leads, Retention’s less dynamic algorithm may lead to slower responses to changing customer behaviors and potentially lower conversion rates. Without continuous learning, Retention's lead scoring does not evolve as effectively over time.

In summary, Opensend's real-time, adaptive AI-powered lead scoring provides a significant advantage, ensuring businesses can accurately prioritize leads and reach them through the right channel based on their level of engagement (email, ads, postcards) more effectively than Retention.

Quality Attribution

Quality attribution is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of marketing efforts by tracking and attributing customer interactions across various touchpoints. Opensend excels in this area by providing detailed and reliable attribution, which gives a comprehensive view of the customer journey. This allows marketers to make informed decisions and optimize their strategies effectively.

Retention offers some attribution features as well, but they are less detailed and reliable compared to Opensend. This can lead to gaps in understanding customer behavior and potentially misinformed marketing strategies. Retention’s focus is on quantity rather than quality, which can be problematic with regard to deliverability, domain reputation, and more.

In summary, Opensend's superior quality attribution capabilities provide businesses with the detailed insights needed to optimize their marketing strategies effectively, making it a better choice than Retention for understanding and improving the customer journey and overall outreach quality.

Domain Reputation and Deliverability Protection

Maintaining a strong domain reputation and ensuring high email deliverability rates are critical for successful email retargeting campaigns. Opensend implements stringent measures to protect domain reputation and enhance deliverability, ensuring emails reach their intended recipients and maintain high engagement levels.

Retention simply does not match the robust safeguards provided by Opensend. As a result, emails sent through Retention may have a higher risk of being marked as spam, potentially reducing overall campaign effectiveness.

In summary, Opensend’s comprehensive approach to domain reputation and deliverability protection ensures that marketing campaigns are more effective and reliable, making it the superior choice for businesses focused on maintaining high deliverability and engagement rates.

Proprietary Technology

Opensend stands out with its innovative proprietary technologies, such as Identity Graph, cookie-based technology, fingerprinting technology (when users come from cookieless browsers), proprietary lead scoring algorithm, and multi-channel delivery, which significantly enhances open rates and data enrichment. These unique tools provide precise tracking and deeper insights into customer interactions, enabling more effective and targeted marketing campaigns.

Retention, using 3rd parties to gain data and identify users, does not offer the same level of innovation as Opensend. The absence of comparable proprietary technologies means that Retention cannot provide the same depth of data and effectiveness in its marketing tools.

Ultimately, Opensend's cutting-edge proprietary technology offers a distinct advantage in creating highly effective and data-driven marketing campaigns, making it the preferred choice over Retention and the reason why companies like Jordan Craig and many others have moved over from retention to Opensend.

Cross-Device Identification

Accurately tracking website visitors across multiple devices is essential for understanding the complete customer journey. Opensend excels in this area by offering precise cross-device identification, allowing businesses to seamlessly track user interactions across various devices and gain a comprehensive view of customer behavior.

Retention also provides cross-device tracking but charges clients for “new” IDs that are simply current users on new devices. Opensend offers this service free of charge. This can lead to fragmented data and a less accurate understanding of customer interactions, making it more challenging to develop cohesive marketing strategies. Not to mention, Retention’s Reclaim program is costly for data that clients already have.

Opensend’s advanced cross-device identification provides businesses with a more accurate and comprehensive understanding of customer behavior free of charge, making it a superior choice compared to Retention

Transparent Pricing

Opensend offers a transparent pricing model that is both clear, fair, and flexible, ensuring businesses know exactly what they are paying for without any hidden fees. This model includes the added benefit of roll over credits, allowing businesses to maximize their budget by carrying over unused credits to future periods.

Retention, while offering competitive pricing, lacks the same level of transparency and flexibility as Opensend. This can lead to potential confusion and unexpected costs, making budget management more challenging.

In summary, Opensend’s transparent and flexible pricing model provides significant value and predictability, making it a more favorable option for businesses compared to Retention.

Roll Over Credits

Opensend offers the flexibility of rollover credits, allowing businesses to carry forward any unused credits to future billings. This feature ensures that companies can fully utilize their investment without worrying about losing the credits they have paid for, providing better value and cost efficiency.

Retention, on the other hand, does not offer rollover credits. This lack of flexibility can result in wasted resources and higher costs for businesses than was agreed upon, as unused credits do not carry over to future billing cycles.

In summary, Opensend's rollover credits provide greater financial flexibility and value, making it a superior choice over Retention.

Flexible Contracts

Opensend provides the option for monthly contracts, offering businesses the freedom to scale their usage according to their needs without being locked into long-term commitments. This flexibility is particularly beneficial for growing companies or those with fluctuating marketing demands.

Retention requires annual commitments with no trial period, which can be restrictive and less adaptable to changing business needs. This can be a disadvantage for businesses that prefer more flexible contract terms.

Unlimited 2-Week Trial

Opensend offers an unlimited 14-day trial, allowing businesses to explore all features of the platform without restrictions. This comprehensive trial period enables companies to thoroughly evaluate Opensend's capabilities and determine if it meets their needs before making a commitment.

Retention does not provide a trial period. This can restrict businesses from fully assessing the platform’s potential and making an informed decision.

Best-In-Class Customer Service

Opensend is renowned for its exceptional customer service, offering timely and effective support to ensure businesses can resolve issues quickly and efficiently. Opensend assigns you a designated Customer Success Manager who will be your guide and help you with optimizations to get the most out of the leads that are being identified.

They’re your go-to resource and will review your account’s performance regularly and proactively make recommendations. This high level of support helps users maximize the platform’s potential and achieve their marketing goals.

Retention offers some customer support, but it does not consistently match the high standards set by Opensend. This can lead to slower resolution times and a less satisfactory user experience.

Opensend Revive

Opensend includes other unique features, such as Opensend Revive, designed specifically to re-engage inactive customers. This tool helps businesses boost retention rates by targeting and revitalizing contacts who have not interacted with previous campaigns, effectively turning dormant leads into active participants again with the goal of extending the LTV of customers.

Retention does not offer a comparable feature to Opensend Revive. Without such a dedicated tool for re-engagement, businesses using Retention might miss opportunities to re-activate inactive customers, potentially affecting their overall retention and conversion rates.

Retargeting Ads via Meta Integration

Opensend seamlessly integrates with Meta to facilitate retargeting ads, enabling businesses to re-engage visitors who have previously interacted with their site. Visitors wouldn't be able to retarget otherwise because they come from cookie-able browsers or devices.

Opensend has developed its proprietary cookie-based and finger-printing technology to identify users from cookieless browsers such as Safari, Firefox, and more. This integration enhances outreach and conversion rates by targeting users with personalized ads based on their behavior and interactions, thereby driving higher engagement and sales.

On top of helping merchants reach more visitors via Meta, Opensend also helps by providing brands with more than one unique identifier imported in a Meta custom audience to provide a higher match rate within the platform of interest.

Retention also offers Facebook integration for retargeting ads, allowing merchants to reach more customers but only provide one email as the identifier for Meta. This doesn't help with increasing the match rate within the platform. This limitation can result in less effective retargeting efforts and lower conversion rates.

In summary, Opensend’s advanced Facebook integration for retargeting ads provides superior capabilities for reaching and converting customers horizontally and vertically by allowing a broader reach, while providing a higher match rate within the platform.

Billed for Net New Leads

Opensend’s billing model is designed to charge only for net new leads, ensuring that businesses pay solely for fresh, valuable leads, while providing a credit-based system where if the credit purchased in a given month is not used, it can be rolled over to future months to allow brands to never lose any credit they paid for.

This cost-effective approach helps optimize marketing budgets and provides clear value for investment, allowing companies to manage their spending more efficiently. Contrary to Retention, Opensend offers the equivalent of the "reclaim program" at no additional cost because Opensend only aims to provide net new emails to its customers. The additional device IDs for existing emails are provided for free to allow clients to activate the appropriate flow when an existing user is visiting the website via a new device.

Retention’s billing practices are less favorable in comparison, as they do not exclusively focus on net new leads. This can result in a much higher cost per email because it is based on "up to" a certain amount of emails; when a client doesn't consume all the purchased emails, the price per email can suddenly change dramatically.

In summary, Opensend’s billing for net new leads offers a more economical and efficient solution, making it the preferred choice over Retention for businesses looking to optimize their marketing expenses.

The Verdict: Opensend

Compared to Retention, Opensend emerges as the more advanced and high-performing solution, thanks to its advanced features, flexibility, and user-centric approach. Opensend’s real-time, adaptive AI-powered lead scoring algorithm, is able to provide more qualified leads for higher conversion and ROI, and can protect domain reputation and deliverability to ensure that businesses can effectively manage their retargeting campaigns across different channels (emails, ads, and direct mail).

The innovative X-Ray pixel technology and precise cross-device identification provide unparalleled insights into customer behavior, enhancing marketing strategies and improving conversion rates.

Furthermore, Opensend offers transparent pricing with rollover credits, no annual contracts, and an unlimited 2-week trial, making it an attractive and risk-free choice for businesses of all sizes. Its exceptional customer service and unique Opensend Revive feature for re-engaging inactive customers further set it apart from Retention. The seamless Meta & Google integration for retargeting ads and cost-effective billing for net new leads add to its appeal, providing businesses with comprehensive tools to boost sales and optimize marketing efforts.

In summary, Opensend is the superior choice for businesses seeking a powerful, flexible, and user-friendly cross-channel retargeting and automation platform. Its advanced capabilities and customer-focused features make it a must-have tool for achieving outstanding marketing results and maximizing return on investment.

Sources: