Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization vs. Drupal vs. Overdrive

It's a potent tool that can move your marketing activities to a new level. At the same time, you need to have the skills and expertise in-house and not expect Bloomreach to be the miracle coming and solving all your challenges without any hard work on your side.

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Overall, I would give my rating of Drupal a 7/10 because there is an easy user experience for those without a website background but there is some technology work required to build more website capabilities that aren't as user-friendly. Drupal is specifically well suited to update content (like changing Relationship Manager cards when there is employee turnover), post announcements (putting up a holiday banner to let our customers know the dates we will be closed over Thanksgiving, Christmas, etc., and creating a sophisticated website hierarchy of pages (for our firm, several dropdowns depending on if you're looking for personal banking, business banking, investment banking, about us, etc.).

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We use Overdrive for customer websites to access all our G Suite.

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• The product recommendations engine allows for us to create a personalised experience for every customer across the 3m emails we send each month. This ensure that our customers remain connected to our brand.
• The customer data platform attached to Bloomreach Composable Personalization Cloud provides an all-in-one solution for our business intelligence needs. Allowing up-to-date purchasing, behaviour, and engagement reporting from our email to website activity.
• The ability to integrate with Meta and other paid ad formats allows for us to create a connected omnichannel experience for users, ensuring we are providing the right message, to the right person, at the right time, in the right place.

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• It has excellent security features and consistent updates.
• It allows for extensive customization with the integrated themes and core code, especially when you first install it. This allows our dev team to get creative with marketing initiatives.
• There is a large online community of Drupal users that consistently help answer any questions and issues

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• G drive integration
• Mobile access's
• Security
• Can design templets

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• Could improve some of the dashboarding to make reporting on emails more time efficient
• Could offer a way to easily combine email templates if they already exist separately
• A way to allow multiple people to work in a scenario at the same time and all saves be registered

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• Security and new release notifications are a hassle as they happen too often
• Allowing them to write PHP modules is a big advantage, but sometimes integrating them is a small challenge due to the version the developer is working on.
• Steep learning curve, but worth it

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We are extremely satisfied with Bloomreach. It is a central and indispensable pillar of our personalization and data-driven marketing strategy. The platform provides us with unparalleled scalability across 27 countries and guarantees high availability and stable performance, even when working with an enormous volume of data.The fact that the platform is intuitive and allows a wide range of our teams (from CRM to UX) to work effectively with personalization significantly reduces our dependence on IT support and accelerates campaign deployment.Given the robustness of the architecture and the positive results we are generating across channels, renewing the contract is a logical step to ensure our future organic growth.

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The time and money invested into this platform were too great to discontinue it at this point. I'm sure it will be in use for a while. We have also spent time training many employees how to use it. All of these things add up to quite an investment in the product. Lastly, it basically fulfills what we need our intranet site to do.

In my time working with Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud, I always liked to work with it. It is crucial that you get support from experts from the beginning to show you how to work with the vast amount of options and activities to choose from. The learning curve is also well-rounded because of its user-friendly interface and highly skilled customer support.

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As a team, we found Drupal to be highly customizable and flexible, allowing our development team to go to great lengths to develop desired functionalities. It can be used as a solution for all types of web projects. It comes with a robust admin interface that provides greater flexibility once the user gets acquainted with the system.

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It has always been available with great response times. Honestly in almost 5 years there was like one outage and I have to admit that it was solved so quick that I don't even know if it's fair to even call it that. Bloomreach is extremely reliable, can't fault it.

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Drupal itself does not tend to have bugs that cause sporadic outages. When deployed on a well-configured LAMP stack, deployment and maintenance problems are minimal, and in general no exotic tuning or configuration is required. For highest uptime, putting a caching proxy like Varnish in front of Drupal (or a CDN that supports dynamic applications).

ten out of ten, Bloomreach has revolutionised our marketing capabilities. It has allowed us to get real time data insights from our customers, and then put these into action. Previously it would be a very time consuming and slow process for us to get any sort of campaign out but not anymore, this has lead to increased conversions and revenue

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Drupal page loads can be slow, as a great many database calls may be required to generate a page. It is highly recommended to use caching systems, both built-in and external to lessen such database loads and improve performance. I haven't had any problems with behind-the-scenes integrations with external systems.

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While I wasn't involved in the implementation or initial launch phase, making it impossible to comment on that process, I must highly praise the customer support team. They are exceptionally responsive and consistently demonstrate expert knowledge. The support staff is always very helpful in resolving most issues and providing clear guidance, making the experience much smoother post-launch.

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As noted earlier, the support of the community can be rather variable, with some modules attracting more attraction and action in their issue queues, but overall, the development community for Drupal is second to none. It probably the single greatest aspect of being involved in this open-source project.

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The Training was awesome

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I was part of the team that conducted the training. Our training was fine, but we could have been better informed on Drupal before we started providing it. If we did not have answers to tough questions, we had more technical staff we could consult with. We did provide hands-on practice time for the learners, which I would always recommend. That is where the best learning occurred.

very informative and patient

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The on-line training was not as ideal as the face-to-face training. It was done remotely and only allowed for the trainers to present information to the learners and demonstrate the platform online. There was not a good way to allow for the learners to practice, ask questions and have them answered all in the same session.

All the deployments were done on time

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Plan ahead as much you can. You really need to know how to build what you want with the modules available to you, or that you might need to code yourself, in order to make the best use of Drupal. I recommend you analyze the most technically difficult workflows and other aspects of your implementation, and try building some test versions of those first. Get feedback from stakeholders early and often, because you can easily find yourself in a situation where your implementation does 90% of what you want, but, due to something you didn't plan for, foresee, or know about, there's no feasible way to get past the last 10%

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Bloomreach is far superior than SFMC as that platform requires too much technical knowledge. Ometria is very good and I would say is quite similar to Bloomreach although I would say Ometria is a smaller company. Dotdigital is also very powerful but not more so than Bloomreach. This being said, Dotdigital and HubSpot does have telephone support which is amazing and something I would like to see from Bloomreach in future or at least shorter wait times for customer support live chat.

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Drupal can be more complex to learn, but it offers a much wider range of applications. Drupal’s front and backend can be customized from design to functionality to allow for a wide range of uses. If someone wants to create something more complex than a simple site or blog, Drupal can be an amazing asset to have at hand.

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We can turn google drive into a website easily & provide the best customization for the websites.

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there is an option of multiple projects per organisation, customers and assets can be copied across. Multiple sites can be managed in one project, different activities organized under initiatives. Splitting work into sensible units is therefore well possible. The billing is based on number of tracked and number of stored events, no package-based deals. It should therefore be well scalable from a small e-store to a large corporation.

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Drupal is well known to be scalable, although it requires solid knowledge of MySQL best practices, caching mechanisms, and other server-level best practices. I have never personally dealt with an especially large site, so I can speak well to the issues associated with Drupal scaling.

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• Emails, banners, and weblayers brought us an increase in conversion and additional profit.
• From a marketers perspective, it allows us to reach far and wide and see how well a campaign is doing in real-time.
• Knowing the customer allows improved communication and personalize our recommendations.
• Bloomreach Engagement has created revenue uplift with acquisition and conversion.
• The most effective tool out there when ROI is in question.

• Given the endless possibilities that Drupal can have, we tend to have great support going on when we get a website launched
• It has become much much faster and easier for us to launch a new project due to reusability
• Configuration management in Drupal helps greatly with CI/CD, saves us costs

• Cost efficient
• Security

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