SEINō an alternative to Power BI, Tableau, or Looker Studio?

When CRM managers or Email Marketers pitch SEINō to their internal data team, a common question arises: "Do we really need SEINō? Can’t we just build dashboards in Power BI, Tableau, or Looker Studio?"

It’s a fair question. In this post, I’ll take the opportunity to share why I founded SEINō, how it provides unique value, and when other solutions might be sufficient.

The purpose behind SEINō

It's important to note that SEINō was born from personal experience as a campaign developer. My CRM team was responsible for sending emails to multiple countries in different languages, and my job was to simplify the campaign deployment process by making the emails more dynamic and pulling translations and copy from an external dataset.

However, when you deploy dozens of campaigns per week and manage different lifecycle campaigns in multiple languages, reporting becomes complex and very time-consuming. Most companies I know, therefore, skip the always-on campaigns in their weekly reports simply because it takes too much time.

I found out the hard way that as soon as you want to automate your reports in a more advanced way, most email platforms will just tell you to use their API and wish you good luck. I’m not even talking about merging that data with e-commerce data to get revenue and other commercial insights, because that's a totally different cookie.

My team asked the IT team for help starting a new data project to create simple custom reports using our data warehouse. However, the process was slow and complicated. It involved many meetings, conflicting priorities, and technical challenges that made progress difficult and frustrating.

The project didn’t succeed, and that’s when the idea for SEINō was born.

After researching, I realized my team wasn’t alone in facing these challenges. Many CRM teams struggle with similar issues, often resorting to using Excel sheets and manually copying and pasting data to get the job done from both their Marketing Automation Platform and Google Analytics. (I’ve experienced this firsthand)

That’s when I decided to create a solution to empower CRM teams to take full control of their campaign data without relying on IT. I wrote down a simple vision:

A world where every CRM team can effortlessly demonstrate their value and take full control of their marketing campaigns.

How SEINō makes a difference

At its core, SEINō was built to address the challenges I experienced myself. Combining campaign data with e-commerce metrics can be tricky. Traditional dashboarding tools required manual data engineering, endless back-and-forth with IT, and delays that slow your momentum. Maintaining and monitoring your data pipelines is a task in itself, often requiring dedicated resources and constant oversight.

With SEINō, this process is automated, making insights immediately accessible and freeing your team to focus on strategy rather than logistics.

Simplifying CRM data projects

Email campaign reports can be difficult to manage because data like sends, opens, clicks, bounces, complaints, and unsubscribes come in at different times and need to be stitched together. This data can also be enriched with subscriber details, making it even harder to get a complete picture of what’s happening. We are talking about processing every unique interaction within your campaign.

SEINō simplifies this by transforming your campaign data (regardless what marketing automation platform) and combining all metrics into one view, allowing CRM teams to understand their campaign performance without relying on IT support.

Making segmentation easy

Segmentation was a big challenge for my CRM team. To analyze different markets, RFM segments, or engagement trends, we often needed help from an data analyst. SEINō changes that by giving marketers the tools to explore, refine, and act on data independently. It also lets us pull in customer attributes, making reports more detailed and easier to create.

Speeding up CRM data projects

Internal data projects can take months or even years, with too many stakeholders and conflicting priorities slowing everything down. SEINō was created to solve these delays by making setup quick and easy. Anyone with an API key can get started, and with best practices already built in, most teams can be up and running in a single day.

Enriching with Google Analytics data

Based on click events and UTM tags, SEINō can automatically enrich your campaign data with Google Analytics data. We can track GA4 key events (conversion goals) and e-commerce events such as purchases and sold products. It’s a simple way to get deeper insights into your campaigns.

Proactively monitoring

With SEINō, you can track the metrics that are most important to your campaigns and set up alerts if something goes off track. This means teams can act fast when needed. SEINō also gives daily updates, helping teams see trends like customer growth or churn so they can make decisions quickly and confidently.

Scalable technology

SEINō’s technology is designed for scalability and speed. It handles large datasets efficiently, ensuring insights are always just a click away. As a small tech company, we care deeply about our platform, codebase, and customer experience. We design and build everything in-house and take feedback from our users very seriously.

Continuous development

Finally, SEINō evolves with customer needs. Unlike static dashboards that can become outdated, SEINō is continually updated with new features and the latest technological advancements. It’s not just a platform; it’s a partner in your CRM growth journey.

Maybe you don’t need SEINō 🫶

As much as I love SEINō and believe in what we stand for, I understand that not every CRM team needs us in their current state. SEINō’s advanced capabilities are designed for specific use cases and may not be ideal if:

• You have robust internal resources: If your team has dedicated analysts or IT teams managing complex dashboards and enough resources, existing tools may already cover your needs.
• Static reporting is all you require: For businesses not leveraging dynamic analyses or segmented insights, SEINō’s capabilities could exceed requirements.
• Limited number of campaigns: SEINō shines the most if you have many campaigns running that you need to organize and analyze.
• Your email platform’s reports suffice: Built-in reporting within email platforms might meet your reporting needs. SEINō adds value when combining multiple campaigns, identifying trends, or enriching your campaign data with e-commerce data from Google Analytics.

Conclusion

SEINō isn’t meant to replace tools like Power BI, Looker Studio, or Tableau; it’s designed to complement them, serving a different purpose. We recognize that data centralization is important and that leadership often prefers a unified, company-wide dashboard. Traditional data visualization tools excel at that.

However, most CRM teams need more than just static reports in their day-to-day work; they need real-time control over their campaign performance and the flexibility to turn their data into insights.

SEINō empowers them to:
✔ Zoom in and out on trendlines
✔ Create segments on the fly
✔ Track database development
✔ Split and group campaigns by key attributes
✔ Do it all in an intuitive, easy-to-use interface

For those CRM teams, I truly believe SEINō is the perfect alternative to Power BI, Looker Studio, or Tableau.