January 4, 2024 · 14 min · Travis Dailey
I’ve been a fan of Bento for several years.
Jesse, their founder, is the nicest guy on the internet (I believe he’s an Aussie so it makes sense). And perhaps the most knowledgeable when it comes to email deliverability.
I’ve used Bento at several B2B SaaS businesses and an ecommerce business. It’s hands down the best customer engagement platform on the market. And incredibly affordable for what you get. Plus, a Bento subscription eliminates several subscriptions a mature business is already paying for.
Let’s dig in.
Table of Contents
Why trust me
👋 Hey, I’m Travis and I’ve been a marketer and operator for going on 10 years.
I was the first employee at TheraNest which became Therapy Brands sold for over $1 million dollars in under 8 years.
I’ve launched several startups and helped industry-leading businesses scale.
In October 2023 I quit my job to consult full-time for bootstrapped SaaS startups, ecommerce sites, and media businesses. I write a weekly newsletter, Funnel Nomics, breaking down how the fastest-growing businesses grow.
Every business I work in lives and dies by its email marketing. And Bento is the tool I recommend the most often.
I’m excited there are companies like Bento and founders like Jesse building cool businesses and useful products.
My review
Bento is a customer automation platform that extends beyond just email automation. And it’s not just a marketing automation platform.
Bento is a small team. They’re passionate about helping their customers. Jesse, the founder, can be found replying to customer questions in their support forum on Discord.
You will not see the CEOs of Mailchimp or MailerLite speaking with customers (unless they pay >$1MM/yr).
The boots-on-the-ground mentality is why I love Bento. They create an incredible software suite and know email marketing inside and out. Just check out Bento’s periodic podcast as a showcase of their marketing knowledge depth.
Bento is a full-service customer automation platform with attribution modeling, omnichannel messaging, and world-class support.
Omni-channel marketing
Email marketing
Drag-and-drop email builders are accustomed to email marketing. And Bento’s does not disappoint. It’s as easy to use as the best on the market.
Targeting
Bento’s segmentation abilities are out of this world. You can drill into target messaging by user behavior. It’s incredibly powerful to send the RIGHT MESSAGE at the RIGHT TIME.
Personalization
Bento adopted Liquid. You might not be familiar with Liquid if you have not worked on the backend of a Shopify store or are a Ruby on Rails developer.
But, it’s an incredibly powerful (and simple) way to create dynamic content.
It goes beyond name replacements. You can create IF statements that will populate sentences when true and a completely different paragraph if false.
This simplifies the number of emails you need.
You can send the same “email” to all new customers when they purchase. And customize the content based on the plan selected their business type, and whether they completed onboarding.
It’s insanely powerful. If you can write a simple Excel or Google Sheets formula, you’ll have no problem learning Liquid.
It’s another feature that I yelled “WHY ISN’T EVERYONE DOING THIS?”
SMS and WhatsApp
Messaging is getting more and more popular. It’s an urgent communication platform, less crowded than email, and typically more personal.
And the younger crowd prefers messaging over email when communicating with a company.
Bento supports both SMS and WhatsApp natively.
Set up omnichannel messaging campaigns using their visual workflow builder (discussed below) by toggling between email and SMS/WhatsApp messaging.
This is highly effective when communicating a sale closing for ecommerce or reminding a prospect of an upcoming demo. Both require timely action and messaging rises to the top.
Integrating and integrations
Integrating Bento with your website, application, or online store is a cinch. Bento supports most platforms with direct integration.
When they don’t have one, you can tie applications together with their API or one of the three automation platforms they support (Make / Integromat, Segment, Zapier).
See their breadth of direct integrations for yourself.
Bento supports 100s more direct integrations (and they’re accepting requests for more in their Discord).
Don’t see your favorite app? Request it for the future. And connect to it now using one of the top automation platforms they support:
- Make / Integromat
- Segment
- Zapier
Anonymous visitors
This is my favorite feature in Bento. Bento creates a user profile for every single person who visits your site regardless if they’re known or not. This is great for tying together a complete user flow from beginning to end.
Bento associates their first interaction with the event when they reveal their identity (e.g., email opt-in form).
It’s powerful and not creepy like some of the other platforms that will reveal users’ identities without them choosing so. (Not sure how I feel about this, yet? Maybe I’ll write about this more soon.)
Visual builder
Every marketer has overwhelmed their teams with numerous workflows.
- One registered for a trial.
- One for viewed pricing page.
- One for signing up for a webinar.
- One for subscribing to your email newsletter.
It’s hard for anyone other than the Workflow creator to know what to change and where to change it.
Bento solved this by allowing multiple triggers in a single workflow. So instead of 5 or more workflows for lead acquisition triggers, you have one.
One workflow for many triggers. When I first used Bento a couple of years ago, I was like “WHY IS NO ONE ELSE DOING THIS?”
Lead scoring
Lead scoring is powerful when done correctly. And most tools do not give you enough flexibility to do it correctly.
You have to write your code or spend thousands of dollars to spin up Madkudu (which is incredible if you can afford it).
With Bento, you can adjust a lead score using any event.
Form builders
Their form builder is one of the easier builders to work with. And since it’s built within Bento, it has access to your contact data.
Hello, dynamic fields!
Personalize forms to ratchet up conversions and give your visitors personalized unique experiences.
Surveys
I was ecstatic when Bento rolled out surveys. For years, I’ve been using Google Forms, Typeforms, and even Reform.
I’d move data around using Zapier.
A built-in survey tool made switching to Bento a no-brainer for my clients who were paying for an email marketing platform and survey tool. (Typeform is quite expensive.)
Reporting
I love Bento’s buying journey map. It’s so much better than the user flows some website analytics tools offer.
Bento’s buying journey map includes website traffic, messages, and any other event logged by users. It’s worth its weight in gold.
AI because why not
Yes, Bento has an integration with OpenAI to help you write emails when you get stuck. It’s useful when you just can’t think of what to write next.
Great, for Monday mornings! Am I right?!
It’s nicely built into Bento’s email drafting experience. No switching over to ChatGPT or another AI tool. Just click a button in Bento when you need a little help crafting a copy.
Transactional emails
Instead of using one tool for marketing emails and another for transactional, you can use Bento. They have an easy-to-use API to connect to for sending transactional emails.
All under one roof. And affordable with outstanding deliverability.
Reputation Monitoring
Bento monitors your sender’s reputation for free. They are obsessed with deliverability and this goes to prove it.
If you ever have a ding, they will be the first to reach out to offer help. And you always jump in their Discord server to bounce ideas off their team and customer base. Their Discord server includes some of the brightest email marketers in the space who are often willing to offer ideas.
Human vs robots
Many email providers like Google and Microsoft open emails when they’re received as a layer of protection for their customers.
Other email marketing tools count all open as an open. Regardless if the email was opened by the reader or the reader’s email tool.
It’s important when you’re making decisions based on the emails your customers have received and not taken action on. You want an accurate count of how many people resonated with the email subject line to open the email but did not take action.
Bento goes the extra step by estimating the number of opens from a robot. This way you can gauge your message’s resonance. You’re not flying blind or worse reacting to poor and useless robot data.
List bombing
This is a niche feature but I’m seeing more and more brands encounter it. I’ve encountered it a time or two. One time I caught it immediately and another time it slipped through the cracks. Both times I was using another email tool (an Enterprise type tool, not going to name names).
Bento alerts you of this activity and goes as far as blocking these emails from being added to your list. This is huge because it also saves you money. And more importantly, it protects your sender rating because you’re not sending to bogus email inboxes (or worse honeytraps).
Pricing
Unlike many of Bento’s competitors, they do not offer a free plan. This is because emails are sent through Bento’s servers.
Do you want to share email servers with a free customer? Didn’t think so.
Email deliverability is of utmost importance for Jesse and the Bento team.
Their plans start at $30/mo for your first 3,000 users. And they offer a generous 30-day free trial. Their team will manually review your site and approve you for email sending.
This ensures everyone using Bento is trustworthy and practicing safe marketing. (No spammers or scammers!)
Bento vs Mailchimp vs MailerLite
Both MailChimp and MailerLite offer free plans. This makes them good places to start if you’re pre-revenue.
I’m a fan of MailerLite for getting new projects off the ground. But as soon as the project begins generating revenue, projects are moved off due to deliverability concerns.
However, Bento’s omni-channel capabilities and ability to create personalized experiences for customers more than cover the cost of their product. You also get access to Bento’s Discord server which is chock full of knowledgeable marketers, entrepreneurs, and the Bento team (including Jesse, their founder).
Wrapping up
Bento, Mailchimp, and MailerLite are great customer engagement platforms for growing businesses.
I’ve started several businesses on MailerLite but the winners always end up on Bento. And it’s the one I recommend the most when asked what I believe is the best bang for your buck regarding marketing automation software.
About Me
I’m a growth advisor for bootstrapped software start-ups, ecommerce sites, and media businesses.
I also write a weekly newsletter analyzing fast-growing businesses called Funnel Nomics. Connect with me on Twitter (X), LinkedIn, or shoot me an email.