Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review Vero tends to play nice with companies that have their websites as the primary source of truth. This allows them to send as many events as they need and develop more complex workflows that introduce conditionality into Vero emails. However, for those that rely more on Salesforce, it might have more limited applications. The product is fairly easy to use, so it's easy for multiple people on the team to pick it up and do what they need for their respective groups. On the other hand, creating email templates will require some knowledge of HTML/CSS, unless those are copied from another source. That would require another product of course that provides more robust layout editing features and templates.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Email template editor allowed our developers to design emails to looks like beautiful marketing emails or basic personal emails. The Vero API allowed our developers to connect triggers and events from our visitors to kick start campaigns. Campaign flows were fairly easy to create and define. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review While Vero offers some WYSIWYG editing, it's on the limited side, as it mostly allows you to edit copy, but not necessarily the layout. The UI/UX has improved dramatically over the course of the last few years, but it can still lag from time to time and experience sluggishness. While reliability is really good, it does have lapses from time to time that will introduce delays into emails being sent out. Once or twice, the system went completely down for a period of time. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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
Read full review Usability Can be difficult to learn, but once you understand Mboxes and the nuances of the system it's very user friendly
Read full review Reliability and Availability i don't think we use the full functionalities of the tool, but to use the full functions, it's almost impossible (Too hard)
Read full review Performance The bottleneck is never the software program
Read full review Support Rating 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
Read full review In-Person Training 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)
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Vero's price tag is far more attractive but for what you will find to be clear and obvious reasons. Vero has no CRM unlike
HubSpot and
Infusionsoft . Vero also has limited tracking unlike the seemingly endless possibilities offered from
HubSpot which as we all know comes with at a significant cost, often not feasible by a small startup company.
Read full review Return on Investment 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. Read full review The overall costs of using Vero have been much lower than using two comparable products that handle transactional emails and newsletters, respectively. MailChimp has relatively recently integrated their Mandrill product for transactional emails, so that's worth looking at as well. Using a single product for many things lowers the learning curve, as team members only have to learn one product well, rather than several. While infrequent, Vero's outages have impacted our operations at times. If absolute reliability is crucial to your business, then you may have to find a larger provider with a more robust infrastructure. As mentioned, though, it hasn't been a big problem for us. Read full review ScreenShots