Adobe Target vs. Braze vs. Leanplum

If you're using the Adobe stack and tools to power your website, Target is a great solution to implement. I've utilized Target within two organizations, one running on Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), and the other on Adobe Magento. I don't see how companies could harness the full capacity of Target without also having Adobe Analytics integrated. This is their 'secret sauce' and might not be a good solution for companies who are invested in Google Analytics 360. Integration was straightforward but did require support from the Adobe team to implement successfully. While Target is a great tool for digital teams to support, you'll need your tech team aligned and available to support implementation.

Incentivized

Braze is a fantastic tool if you're looking to build a large number of CRM journeys using complex canvas structures and maximising use of customer data to segment and personalise. There are numerous tools to ensure each channel is maximising impact and engagement. Braze offers great features for testing, managing message frequency and control groups and using dynamic attributes and liquid code. If you're looking to limit your use to single-send campaigns with no or few automations, I don't think this is the right tool. From my experience, many Braze users also use external tools for analytics rather than Braze's native analytics.

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I think Leanplum is great for any company that needs to use push notification to drive revenue or KPI growth. I often find that it can be very costly to integrate analytics solutions & also build good reporting from the data. Leanplum provides a lot of great analytics & reporting right out of the box, especially around push events. This makes it much easier for the managing marketing user to optimize campaigns and increase their team & company's KPIs.

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• This application gives us an incredible integration with Adobe Analytics that allows its operation to be the best and determine the performance of our website.
• It offers us an analysis based on user behavior and a web page customization option to adapt and meet the needs of those users.

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• Canvas feature has been really good for creating customer journey paths and long-term messaging campaigns.
• They have been addressing feature requests to continue to improve the Canvas feature. One of the simplest but most-handy features is allowing Delay steps wait for a very specific date on a calendar -- so you can plan seasonal campaigns or when you have evergreen-style drip campaigns it allows for avoiding public holidays/etc.
• The catalog feature provides a lot of use-cases and flexibility for personalizing comms or customizing comms for whitelabeled versions of our standard comms (for our B2B2C scenarios).
• We use the catalog as a repository of our B2B2C brand info, messaging customization - it basically allows us to offer a whitelabeled configurable version of our optimized automated in-life comms in the branding of our b2b customers.

Incentivized

• Viewing the history of a campaign. Leanplum shows exactly what a customer has been sent on which dates/times and due to which actions.
• AB Testing - allows us to see which messages are appreciated/opened more by which customers
• Team collaboration - we can see easily how recently a campaign or message was updated

Incentivized

• This is something a lot of testing tools struggle with, but I think the WYSIWYG ("What you see is what you get") editor - or Visual Experience Composer (VEC) in Adobe terminology - could definitely use some work. It's a struggle to execute many tests beyond simple copy, color, placement changes, and even the features that do exist are often clunky if not altogether broken.
• The interface itself can be a bit counterintuitive in certain parts. If you are familiar with other tools, it's likely middle of the road in this respect; think much easier to understand than Monetate for instance, but a far cry from the simplicity of an Optimizely.
• It can be a bit buggy from time to time. The worst example is the frequency at which the tool will fail to save due to an error, but not inform you of this until you try to save, at which point your only option is to log out, log back in, and make all of your updates once again. It can become an extreme pain point at times, and I personally have just gotten into the habit of saving every couple of minutes to avoid a massive loss of productivity.

Incentivized

• Enabling GIF/videos to be directly uploaded on to Braze's platform
• Easier way of creating canvases; right now it is too complex for someone new who is starting off in the company to understand what things do and where things are
• Ability to track duplicate user profiles within the entire audience segment
• Automated deduplicating email addresses/phone numbers in each targeting segment; right now it's done manually after extracting csv files

Incentivized

• Ability to create User Stories with a predefined funnel of actions that will chain themselves
• Ability to tag users once they enter or leave specific segments
• Should show in a simple page the main KPIS that matter for all our games at once
• More granularity in granting access to subsets (not sharing everything per account)

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We have a team of people trained on how to use the application and it integrates well with the other Adobe products we use. Our future roadmap of testing will require some complex scenarios which we hope Target will be able to accomplish

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

Incentivized

The recent UI update is a complete mess. It is difficult to navigate and find features that previously existed. The reactiveness of the page depending on window size is also ridiculous and it is absurd that depending on how large your window is, entire columns of functions will disappear with no indication that they are missing. The usability of the tool has fallen off a cliff.

Incentivized

It is an easy-to-understand platform, thanks to its design and accessibility. You can, for example, easily find any users and their data, check exact volumes of segments, follow the history of messages sent, and create reports. We can connect Braze with other platforms for analysis or email design (Snowflake, Hightouch, Stripo...).

Incentivized

i don't think we use the full functionalities of the tool, but to use the full functions, it's almost impossible (Too hard)

The bottleneck is never the software program

On several occasions, we have had the need to ask for help from the Adobe Target support team, and I must say that they have provided us with an excellent experience, as they take care of solving the problems quickly and with high precision

Incentivized

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

The instructor that came to train us was awesome and this training was very useful. I would recommend it for anyone who is going to be using this software. I only mark it lower because it is an added expense to an already expensive product, and a lot of the training covered the "Target" portion of the software (which again, we didn't use)

The training was very easy to understand, however it would have been more useful to my development team than me. It was also primarily over-the-phone, which is never as easy to follow as in-person. We ended up scheduling and paying for an in-person training session to supplement the online/phone training because it wasn't helpful enough.

It's really well explained, there are lots of documentation about all topics. When we want to perform in a specific area, there are always a dedicated path. For each new feature, there is always some videos explaining the purpose and the new functionalities. Also I used to do the certification which allows me to show my achievements in my business environment.

Incentivized

Implement using a global mBox on the page so you can change any and everything over the traditional method. Traditional method is good if you do not have technical web dev resources, do not know Javascript/jQuery, or you have money to blow on mBox calls. Global deployment reduces mBox calls and allows you to touch many parts of the page easily. A lot more customizable

We seriously considered another software but because we use so many other Adobe products this made the most sense for us. If you are not dependent on other Adobe software and are a smaller company, in my opinion, Target may not be the best fit.

Incentivized

Braze is just the best one when it comes to aesthetics and usability, which matter when you're working every day, making complex or even simple changes to highly contextual campaigns for multiple stakeholders. Even without following tutorials, you just get it instantly and start crafting journeys very quickly. And they continue to keep adding new features at a rapid pace, so credit where it's due.

Incentivized

I was not a part of making the decision to use Leanplum over its competitors.

Incentivized

• We have been able to run specific A/B tests that have shown an increase in conversion, which in turn has led to very large banked sales numbers for the year.
• We have been able to prove that using and automated Merchandising process did not decrease conversion. This allowed us to greatly increase efficiency by opening up resource time.

• We are currently trying to reduce churn of our members, numbers are stable but not as good as they could be.
• We have achieved well in the upselling of our products, and expect to see a good proportion of revenue from this at the end of the year.
• Higher engagement in our app work, performing much better than email. Keeping things interactive really helps.

Incentivized

• It helps us build the right features for our users with the help of A/B experimentation
• Re-engagement notifications help us keep company data metrics

Incentivized