Email automation software with optimized personalization to drive engagement.
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Braze
Score 8.6 out of 10
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Braze is a customer engagement platform that enables relevant and memorable experiences between consumers and the brands they love. With Braze, global brands can ingest and process customer data in real time, orchestrate and optimize contextually relevant, cross-channel marketing campaigns and continuously evolve their customer engagement strategies.
Small businesses with even smaller marketing budgets and no email marketing experience would be better off selecting a lower-end email marketing provider. However, Adestra will provide a growing company with every email marketing tool along the way.
Braze is great for a whole swath of businesses and use cases. Retail and QSR immediately come to mind when thinking about what businesses benefit most from using Braze. Really any business model where guests can purchase something with some moderate frequency (daily to a couple times a year). Some scenarios where Braze might not be the best could be a car dealership (although you could use Braze to help with car maintenance reminders, product upsells, etc) or a real estate broker. Although, I'm a marketer and not a salesperson so maybe those businesses would excel with Braze
Adestra's "dynamic" list allows users to consolidate multiple lists in combination with data filters and exclusion lists. This implements segmentation and is a powerful marketing tool.
Adestra's MessageFocus API integration provides developer-tools for list, campaign or transactional automated requirements.
Campaigns can be sorted into project folders. This allows marketers to group campaigns together for management or reporting requirements. Moving or copying campaigns from one project to another is a simple process.
Data downloads via Reporting is available at every level, from overview to individual KPI.
Creating "core" tables helps marketers develop lists with similar attributes. Whether a list has many fields or simply the one required email address field, a "core" table helps to quickly map data labels from spreadsheet to online database. Creating data labels on the fly is a simple process, as well. The "core" table also groups similar contacts into one core database.
Any list can be quickly "emptied" for to manage refreshed data. The contacts within the "emptied" list would still be members of the "core" table and so the process does not negatively impact reporting.
Unsubscribes can be managed in one list (as a default) or individual lists. Creating individual unsubscribe lists -- dependent on business requirements -- would allow for a preference center, whereby recipients could be given a choice as to which campaigns they receive.
The Form tool creates signup forms, simple surveys and landing pages. These can be hosted via Adestra or otherwise on the web. The tool provides for branding and proprietary cascading stylesheets, with a number of actions available through a drag-and-drop interface.
AB testing. It's so easy to create the variables and set the audience split, along with winning paths, we've run a lot more tests in just the past month than a 6 month period with our previous provider.
Canvas building. While it's a bit confusing at first, I do appreciate there's a way to solve almost any journey we want to create, and it's visually really easy to digest when building.
Content blocks. Having these built for our core email sections, like headers and footers, have been a real time saver. And we can see the benefits for if we ever need to change a core element, like our logo.
As of this writing, there are at least 3 different editors available (a drag-and-drop, a WYSIWYG and HTML). However, only a small template library is available if requested through support. Those expecting to find ready-built templates for re-branding would find them through the third-party EDM Designer drag-and-drop editor.
More sophisticated customer segmentation—more akin to a CPD—would be useful. Some things that are harder in Braze are attribute calculations (a new attribute calculated based on values of other independent attributes) and detailed purchase history lookback for nuanced segmentation.
Reporting. We generally don't use Braze's out-of-the-box reporting because it's a little bit clunky.
Better, more precise deliverability monitoring and reporting.
We are on a mission for an omnichannel experience for our customers and are already making good progress with Braze able to fully support and optimise this
I have been self-trained on different ESPs for over 10 years, so my experience isn't comparable to most users. However, I've trained people on various email marketing platforms, and with some training, clients have a positive user-experience with Adestra.
It's easy to use and understand. However, it's not perfect (the last set of UI/UX updates definitely improved this), and for Braze to be really 10 out of 10, an easier process to integrate Braze with data/website/apps would be needed -> right now, marketing is limited by what was set up initially, and moving this beyond MVP is extremely hard.
I have had campaign related issues solved very quickly. When there are technical issues, that involve more than one departmental, it may involve a longer turn-around and management.
Very responsive and helpful on simple questions, but not great other than that. They do not have a way for the customer/user to escalate a ticket. You have to contact your rep and in some cases, they don't respond within 24 hours so you have no idea if they have escalated it. There is no phone number for an urgent issue - you have to rely on email
For medium and large sized businesses, Adestra competes well with dotMailer. While many of the functions are available through either provider, creating campaigns, managing lists and reviewing metrics are somewhat different. As of this writing, dotMailer's drag-and-drop editor dominates that platform and performs well for low-end users with little-to-no HTML experience. Even high-end users will appreciate how quickly campaigns can be built via the drag-and-drop editor. While Adestra utilizes the EDM Designer drag-and-drop, the third-party functionality is not completely cohesive and lack of a template library gives dotMailer a bit of an advantage.
Braze fit our use-case. Every CRM/CEP has their positives and negatives and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. It's worth doing your due diligence on your current needs and assessing future needs as well. Sometimes scalability will be a priority and Braze will facilitate that, sometimes cost efficiency is a priority and perhaps that's better served by Klaviyo. Integration capability also matters and it's important your MarTech stack speaks to each other. Braze has a robust list of partners whereas other tools may require some middleware. It's worth doing your research when selecting your CRM/CEP because if you select incorrectly, you may be back at the drawing board within a year or two.
Our customer experience is much more cohesive- it allows multiple departments to run numerous campaigns at the same time without them conflicting with one another which is great- saves contributors a lot of unnecessary back and forth
Better tracking- we are able to pivot away from campaign styles faster using Braze tracking as it is faster and more reliable
Reduced execution time- our team has gotten back dozens of hours of time because of the streamlined execution process and user-friendly interface. This has provided us with more time to think creatively and focus on the bigger picture
We are able to run more complex campaigns in order to target customers across more stages of the shopping and browsing experience
