At my old company, Gainsight was used whenever one of the following was true:

• Emailing operational updates to existing customers. This isn’t necessary what Gainsight classifies in their Operational email guidelines, but anything impacting a product/service the client has contracted. This could include product updates (new courses/content), course sunsets, downtime, billing issues, etc.
• NPS/CSAT/Market Intelligence surveys
• TechTouch programs on behalf of the CS division.

Pardot (or Marketo, in this circumstance) would be utilized whenever prospects were involved (we never sent to prospects out of Gainsight) or emails were going to existing customers about new products that they did not have. If there was any revenue generating activity that they wanted to track from source & lead → closed opportunity, we recommended using Pardot.

@mobrien14  thank you for your insight.  Is the reason you never sent emails through GS to prospects because you wanted to tie the opportunity to the campaign to evaluate its effectiveness?  Trying to understand why you couldn’t do that same thing in JO since we import the opportunities into GS as well.  Is the reporting capabilities of that more robust?

@THH1006 It wasn’t so much a matter of couldn’t -- there’s nothing in Gainsight that prevents you from uploading a .csv of prospects or querying for their information and sending them an email via JO. However, we didn’t do that because:

1. Wanting to not blur the lines of what Gainsight’s purpose is for our business & CS as a whole.
2. The size of our prospect database vs key stakeholders in our customer database.
3. The messaging being sent to a paying customer was quite different from what you’d tell someone who has none of your solutions.
4. We didn’t import opp data directly into Gainsight, so we wouldn’t be able to tie that specific communication/campaign to subsequent opportunities without a sizable uplift.

Like I said, these aren’t hard rules and there isn’t a firm line of whether or not you should email marketing campaigns via Gainsight. If it makes sense for your business to do so and you’ve accounted for the differences, it’s definitely doable. 

@mobrien14 definitely hit a lot of the points in far more detail than I probably would have, but same here (Hubspot in our case). Essentially, Hubspot for anything marketing/upsell related, and Gainsight for client-only enablement/product update communications.

Product-based emails (alerts) come through Sendgrid and don’t touch Gainsight, and the marketing team owns Hubspot. It also keeps the unsubs separate and divided, so clients don’t inadvertently unsubscribe from ALL emails and then miss an important company update.