The Acquia Digital Experience Platform is an "Open DXP" with its two core pillars being content and data. Built on top of one of the largest open-source content management systems, Drupal, it aims to provide the flexibility and interoperability a modern organization needs. With its customer data platform, it allows organizations to understand who their customers are and deliver personalized experiences. Acquia's DXP offers variety of other tools including digital asset management,…
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Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Score 8.1 out of 10
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Companies use Interaction Studio to tailor interactions with customers and prospects to increase loyalty, engagement, and conversions. Using real-time cross-channel personalization and machine learning capabilities, Interaction Studio adds to Marketing Cloud’s robust customer data, audience segmentation, and engagement platform.
Acquia Cloud is well suited for organizations and teams without the ability to support their own hosting, such as on AWS, Digital Ocean, etc. If a team has the ability (and desire) to manage it themselves, I'm not sure I would recommend it. However, if your team needs reliable, hands-off Drupal hosting, I would definitely recommend Acquia Cloud. Once a deployment pipeline is configured, it's very nearly set-and-forget as far as server configuration is concerned
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is particularly well suited for automated marketing that includes multiple touch points like email, SMS, etc., where we need to automatically send triggered messages to customers based on their behavior or recommend products by sending personalized messages. It is a great tool that allows us to easily create and manage campaigns and to track and analyze customer behavior in order to optimize the campaign.
Evergage plays nicely with most code frameworks and has been very stable. The only situation in which we could not (yet) find a way to use Evergage is in conjunction with Handlebars.js templates.
Enterprise-level data security considerations are well-handled by Evergage. Trust me... as a top-level PCI compliant company that builds travel loyalty solutions for major US banks, we have no greater concern than data security.
"No flicker" synchronous integration is a VERY important feature Evergage offers -- I'm unsure if any other competitors offer the same as I think Evergage has a patent on this. So when the webpage loads, users don't see the original page contents flash before being replaced with personalized/alternate contents.
The powerful user interface is easy-to-use and comes in two flavors: a more traditional CMS-style "admin" view and an on-page WYSIWYG view.
Test use cases in the browser prior to going live.
It's easy to build and measure A/B/n tests, either as rule-based tests, or as % split testing.
I love the ability to create user segments based on "sentence-style" logic structures that incorporates actions, KPIs, even third-party data.
Evergage is built to accommodate everyone from non-technical users to coders. Use the WYSIWYG editor to bring things to life, build complex front-end use cases with Javascript/JQuery, or use the API for control from the server side.
the support portal can be hit and miss. sometimes there are very helpful people who get back to you in a timely manner, but more often there's a lot of lag time for the ticket to get picked up and in between responses, which can also be less than helpful.
it seems like the different departments within acquia (support, management, build teams) don't communicate with each other.
because features are so dense and granular, sometimes the workflow or how they are connected can be really complex to access.
Some of the reporting functionality could use some work, but they are making vast improvements.
The catalog user interface for available promotable items could benefit from the ability to customize the viewable columns and add filtering.
The amount of time that Evergage considers a user's session to be active could be increased. I find myself having to log back into the tool multiple times throughout the day, as I will leave the tool to check emails and during that time, I get logged out.
We're moving away from Drupal as a platform. Drupal 8 and 9 were simply too overburdened and difficult to maintain compared to other offerings. PHP seems like a dying language so we are currently in the process of migrating all of our Drupal 7 functionality and custom modules to a Python/Django/Wagtail platform. This doesn't mean Acquia isn't a great service, they are professional and top-knotch, but the only way we'd say with them is if I didn't complete the migration.
When you first engage with Evergage you have to make a choice on how you're going to use and deploy their product. Are you going to use it for, as is my case, an "in-app" deployment for your SaaS application or for your public facing website. We elected to use it for "in-app" first so we could build knowledge and have a measure of churn reduction. We've done well enough that we're developing a strategy for use on our public facing website now for better lead building and qualification. We're about to double our engagement with Evergage essentially. Evergage has been incredibly responsive. They use great customer service tools and eventually gave us our own account manager. As an IT person, once setup, I intentionally worked to remove myself from the product as a support means so our customer service people are working directly with Evergage and great things are happening. Evergage has just been constantly improving for the better.
You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.
Evergage is quick loading and very responsive. We always have concerns about page load time and the integration of Evergage with our websites has never once caused any issue in this regard.
They are absolutely fabulous and have never dropped the ball in 8 years of us being on the platform. If it wasn't for Drupal 8/9 being unrealistically complicated compared to other offerings like Django/Wagtail we'd be still with Acquia and Drupal.
It would be a full 10 except for a couple of times when it took over a week to get a response. Otherwise they are very responsive, very knowledgeable and very helpful. They really have a great team overall, not just support but even account reps are always eager to help and provide ideas and best practices.
Training program is not very well established. There is very little documentations. More often than not it's in-person training. I wish there were more video tutorials so that somebody can learn the system quickly. Their documentation is very much like an RFP. Long and very technichal. They should definitly improve on this area.
From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.
We use AWS (a variety of services inside AWS) to host our less than mission-critical sites. These are great options for sites that are relatively simple, technically, and/or that can tolerate occasional problems. However, Acquia Digital Experience Platform does provide a level of concierge service that I have appreciated when it comes to running a highly available web application.
Appcues - I like them. Very easy to use, which is the one main advantage they have over Evergage. That said their simplicity means the tool is limited in what it can do compared to Evergage. Plus Evergage's data logging capabilities in addition to messaging make it more useful for my needs.
Since the beginning of the website rebuild project, our agency gathered our needs and expectations. We also shared several technical or SEO specifications, and they have been able to fully adapt the software to our needs, in order to create a custom interface that we can easy use on a daily-basis.
It's done a really nice job of allowing us to focus on business-specific needs as opposed to infrastructure/security issues. The platform is rock solid from a support and security standpoint.
The ability to add automation and levels of personalization without having to break the bank has been a big boost to clients.
Unfortunately, our adoption of Site Studio was short-lived due to some inherent restrictions that limited the level of customization we were able to do.
Positive: allows better functionality without hiring or diverting a whole team of developers, which would be extremely costly.
Positive: fits into our existing campaign structure neatly without needing a complicated separate process.
Positive: support has been excellent and responsive, quickly aiding and resolving problems.
Negative: can be too powerful, leading to campaigns that break if they are not thoroughly checked before deployment. Also, can become a crutch acting as merely a content management system when it's segmentation capabilities are not understood or explored.
