In my opinion, Ascend is behind other CRM tools and companies when it comes to features. Having the ability to directly hook into the website is a huge plus when it comes to other tools and that’s why I can sell it to my clients but there’s a lack of features and capabilities thats really holding larger companies back and a good portion of smaller to medium-sized businesses.
Missing Features:
Ability to filter out people from email campaigns based on their labels
- We do have the ability to add labels to clients and those labels are in separate groups that emails can be sent to but let’s say I have product 1, product 2 and a group of email subscribers. If you purchased one of the products, the corresponding label is assigned to you. I want to be able to send an email to my subscriber’s group but I want to exclude the ones who have purchased product 1. Currently, this is not possible without manually going through the subscriber’s list and selecting those who are both subscribed and have purchased the product.
Show and hide sections in an email based on a users label
FluentCRM, a WordPress plugin allows you to have conditional sections and having this ability opens many different doors when it comes to the content being delivered to your subscribers and customers.
Ability to remove the header from emails
Having the header section locked in place makes absolutely no sense to me and it completely ruins some email campaigns. If I want the first piece of content in an email to be a large header image, I should have the capability to do that but unfortunately due to the header section that cant be moved or deleted, the only option is to remove the text from the top and leave a large white space between the top and the image.
More modules and options for emails
Creating an email should be very similar to creating a website. There should be sections and in those sections are modules of content. Even though in the emails, there aren’t sections, we still have the ability to add multiple items like images, buttons, and more. This needs to be expanded to other options like accordions, strips or boxes so we can add banner like sections with buttons and text on a full-sized colored background
A better footer
The footer is pointless in my opinion. We can barely provide any actual information or customize it. While the features in the current footer are great, it needs more. Similar to my above requests, we should be able to completely remove the footer section (including the blank space it leaves when everything is turned off), and build our own version with text, buttons, social icons, and the ability to customize the entire background of just the footer. Why is it that the Ascend branding can have a box with content but we can’t do that with our own emails?
Ability to round images
This one is self-explanatory, we cant round images without external editing software, this should be a feature.
I’m sure I can come up with more but this is sufficient for now. To summarize, Wix, you really don’t give customers a reason to purchase and stick with Ascend aside from the fact that it directly integrates with the site. Ascend could be one of the best tools out there but it’s only scratching the surface right now when it comes to customizability.