In this post, I’ll be reviewing three popular Amazon email automation tools – Feedback Genius vs Salesbacker vs Kibly.
Another one I’ve heard about recently, but haven’t had a chance to review is Bqool. I also didn’t have a chance to take another look at ZonMaster, which is a service I tried early on and have heard good things about recently.
It may be worth looking into if any of the others mentioned in this post don’t meet your needs.
Updated June 2016
IMPORTANT: Feedback Genius has been around a while, but keep in mind that Salesbacker and Kibly are both relatively new, so feature sets may be changing rapidly. Please take specific note of how recently this post was updated (above).
Before I even get into the review, I want to stress that I think sending a follow-up email is very important. Regardless of which tool you use; I recommend that everyone use an email automation tool. (For what it’s worth, I personally take a very simple approach, usually only sending one or two emails).
Each has their strengths and weaknesses, but I’ll give you a preview of the conclusion now:
Salesbacker has the fewest features, but best Free offer (up to 120 emails per month) and is middle of the pack with pricing.
Feedback Genius has an excellent feature set, but is most expensive (per 1000 emails). They also have a Free offer (up to 100 emails per month), which is a few less emails per month relative to Salesbacker.
Kibly is lesser known, but also has a good feature set and best pricing (per 1000 emails). They have a Free Trial (14 days), but they don’t offer any “Forever Free” Plans. I’ve noticed a couple of bugs in their interface, so I do have some concerns about their stability at this point.
Each tool does a solid job of handling the basics. You shouldn’t have any problems with any of them doing what they are fundamentally supposed to though – send customized emails to your Amazon customers.
The tools differ a bit in their usability and feature set, so let’s start with that…
I’m organizing this post and ranking the tools across three key components:
- Features & Usability
- Customization Options
- Price
With that said, let’s jump right into it and take a look at the features I’ll be taking into consideration:
Feedback Genius vs Salesbacker vs Kibly: Features & Usability
(Note: not every feature may be available on all plan levels)
Feedback Genius
The interface is very nice, probably the best of all the tools, and the home dashboard includes a helpful set of summary statistics to provide you with a nice overview of some key metrics, like emails sent, or seller feedback / product reviews received.
In terms of actual features, Feedback Genius offers the following:
- International marketplaces
- A nice set of different templates to choose from
- A page that helps you manage your seller feedback – I can’t say that this seems particularly useful, but it’s kind of nice to have
- Product Review Monitoring
- Helpful reports
- The ability to add attachments to emails
- The ability to blacklist specific customers from receiving emails, including automatically blacklisting customers who submitted negative feedback
- Email A/B split tester
- The ability to search all your orders by Buyer Name
- The ability to automatically send an additional email to customers who have left positive seller feedback (so you can then ask for a review)
Salesbacker
This tool is generally well organized, especially with respect to how it organizes your email campaigns. However, the feature set is relatively bare boned, so it’s probably not too difficult to keep things organized. Features include the following:
- A summary table of statistics, but it’s not much more than the information you receive when checking the Feedback tab in your seller account. There’s really no other reporting offered.
- The ability to ad attachments to emails
- The ability to blacklist specific customers from receiving emails; however, you have to enter details manually
- The ability to go through product reviews, including a direct link that allows you to comment. However, but this also doesn’t seem to be much different than what you could do by going through your reviews directly on Amazon.
- The ability to assign a nickname to your product
The only feature advantage Salesbacker has over Feedback Genius is that it allows you to assign a nickname for your product. This allows you to refer to the product with a simple, shorter name in emails, rather than the full Amazon title, which can seem a little odd in an email.
Kibly
Kibly is also generally well organized, but definitely has room for improvement. Your dashboard page includes some summary statistics similar to Salesbacker, and is probably formatted more nicely.
The feature base is pretty nice, but some of the advanced elements seem a bit buggy. You can tell they are definitely still working through some issues. That being said, they’ve differentiated themselves from Feedback Genius, who clearly has the largest user base.
- As noted above, you have a relatively simple summary of statistics in your dashboard
- International marketplaces
- A nice set of different templates to choose from
- A page that helps you manage your seller feedback
- The ability to add attachments to emails
- The ability to blacklist specific customers from receiving emails, including automatically blacklisting customers who submitted negative feedback
- Email A/B split tester (although this seemed broken in my account)
- The ability to search all your orders by Buyer Name
- A Product Rank Tracker
- A Super URL tool – this is supposed to be different/special in some way, but I’m not aware of anything that specifically makes it different
Feedback Genius vs Salesbacker vs Kibly: Customization Options
This is important because the more you’re able to customize your templates and when they are delivered to customers, the more you can make them seem personalized – providing you with a better chance of obtaining positive feedback or a product review.
I’m looking at customization in two ways:
- Variables available: Basically, this is what allows you to customize your sequence to be more personalized and detailed for the customer. So, you’d build a template that includes a shortcode placeholder for variables like Name, Order Number, Product, etc. In turn, your customer will receive the template email that’s been customized for them based on information from their order.
- Delivery options: Being able to exactly set when each message will go out to a customer allows you to tailor the series to what makes sense for your specific product and the message you are trying to get across.
Each tool allows you to include variables like Buyer Name, Product Name, Order Number, Seller Feedback Link and Product Review Link, so consider those a given. I’ll limit my comments to some of the variables that may not seem as obvious.
Feedback Genius
Similar to having a robust feature set, Feedback Genius wins when it comes to customization and delivery options as well.
They have too many variable options to cleanly outline here, and unfortunately you need an account to see the full list on their site, but some of my favorites are:
- Delivery Carrier
- Tracking Number
- Estimated Arrival Date
There are many others, but these three alone allow you to provide genuinely helpful information when follow up with your customer.
In terms of email delivery options, you can send the email when the order is Confirmed, Shipped, Marked ‘Out for Delivery’, or Delivered.
On top of this, you can choose to only send the email if delivery takes less than a specified number of days, or only for emails between specific dates.
Salesbacker
Unfortunately, Salesbacker doesn’t provide you with some of the nice to have customization options I outlined from Feedback Genius. All you get are the standard ones and the one cool feature I mentioned earlier – the ability to use a Product Nickname as a variable.
You’re also limited to only three delivery triggers – when the order was Confirmed, Delivered or Shipped. However, they do allow you to not send emails to customers who have provided poor seller feedback.
Kibly
Kibly’s similar to Salesbacker in the sense that you don’t get too many of the ‘nice to have’ variable options other than the Product Nickname, plus a Product Tracking Link variable, which gives it a slight edge over Salesbacker.
Honestly, I was disappointed in the Kibly scheduler. It’s not very well described or laid out, so I don’t even have enough confidence to explain what the options are…
Feedback Genius vs Salesbacker vs Kibly: Pricing
Pricing is tiered for each service depending on the number of emails you need. I’ve compared them below based on the lowest paid plan available. As noted above, keep in mind that both Feedback Genius and Salesbacker offer a Forever Free plan at very low volume levels, up to 100 per month and 120 per month, respectively.
- Feedback Genius – $20 per thousand emails (Plan: $20 per month for 1,000 emails)
- Salesbacker – $11.88 per thousand emails (Plan: $19 per month for 1,600 emails)
- Kibly – $6.17 per thousand ($37 per month for 6,000 emails)
As you can see, Kibly blows Feedback Genius and Salesbacker away with respect to pricing, but only if you’ve already got a little bit of volume.
However, even if you’re just starting out, another way to look at this is what service do you want to be using as your business grows. Since these are integrated into your business, it’s not easy to switch on a whim. If you get to the point of sending 5,000 emails per month, you’d still be paying $37 with Kibly, but $80 with Feedback Genius and $79 with Salesbacker.
Feedback Genius vs Salesbacker vs Kibly: Conclusion
Feature set aside, if you’ve already got a bit of volume, Kibly is the clear winner from a pricing perspective, but I do have some concerns about them having worked out all the kinks. This may have changed by the time you read this review, so if you’re driven by price, you may want to check out the free trial to see for yourself.
If Kibly’s still not ready, then Salesbacker offers the best balance between price and stability. However, they are very light on features. I know they are working on adding features, so this is also some that may have changed since I’ve written the review, but they were pretty far behind Feedback Genius in terms of features.
Finally, Feedback Genius is pretty robust and very stable, but they are significantly more expensive (per thousand emails) than the other options.
So, this is how I’d summarize it:
- Kibly – Good price and feature set, but I have concerns about stability
- Salesbacker – Good price and stable, but very light on features
- Feedback Genius – Very stable and a robust feature set, but significantly more expensive
There’s no perfect solution. In the end, you’ll have to weigh the pros and cons and determine what makes the most sense for your business.
Phil Smy says
Hi,
Just wanted to chime in about our product, ZonMaster.com.
We offer:
* International Marketplaces
* Blacklisting
* Review Tracking
* Email Variables
* Customizable Email Triggering Options
* Search Buyers By Name
* Item Rank Display
* Product Nicknames
* Attachments
Our prices start at $9.99 for 5,000 emails. We offer a 15 day free trial. (We are also on ClickBank, so affiliates can make a little cash by recommending us).
We’d love you to give us a look! We think we have the most responsive support and are fiends for developing new features.
Dax Deegan says
Hi Phil,
I actually tried your service early on and there were some bugs that made it difficult to work with. You may have improved since it’s been a while since I tried it, but that was my experience.
Amazon Seller says
Feedback Genius has actually added the ability to assign a nickname to your products since this blog post was written, as part of a larger product management feature.
Amazon Seller says
Actually, looking back at the date of your blog post, that feature was released before your post was published!
Dax Deegan says
Thanks for letting me know…they have so many features, I missed it!
I just updated the post to reflect it properly.
Phil says
Hi Dax,
Sorry to hear that. I can’t find you in the list of users!
Yes, we have made huge improvements and now have a large, growing user base.
If you come back we’ll give you a special deal.
Dax Deegan says
Phil, it was in a partnership with someone, so it wasn’t under my name. After your last message, I checked around a little and some people had good things to say about ZonMaster, so I’ll take another look at it.
I tried your service really early on, so I’m sure a lot has improved since then.
karla solis says
Ill be using ZonMaster.com thanks to this post! =) Thank you so much
amazonseller says
Kibly. This company is completely shady. I suggest to stay away from them. I was tricked by their material and ad, thought it was something that was promoted by or sponsored by Amazon. It was not. would not recommend them at all. I am filing complaint with BBB against them.
their auto emails did not work for me at all. and the open rate was zero after 3 weeks. I have requested to cancel, there is not one to response. asked for manger’s name and contact information and no response. Stay away from this company.