Bloomreach - The Agentic Platform for Personalization vs. HCL Unica

One scenario Bloomreach is particularly suited for is omnichannel abandonment campaigns. We have scenarios that look whether a customer has been into one of our stores, and then if they are subscribed, we can send them more information about the products they have viewed. That wouldn't be possible without Bloomreach. Another scenario that Bloomreach is well suited for is price drop - we can alert users that an item they've viewed has dropped in price, and this has been a really successful campaign for us.

Incentivized

I think it is wel suited for a business with a lot of one on one relations in the database. For example a supermarket that sells products to a client and gives a reduction on that product. It is nice if the selection process is not to complex and does not involve to many calculations. It is also nice if it is very clear what you want to follow up. In our environment we have lots of many-to-many relations. for example one product is held by more then one client. And that client might have more of those products with other clients. These kind of situation demands for a lot of calculations with derived fields(*), and there things go far too slow. Unica is probably not such a good solution for us, because our environment is too complex, and so is to process of creating the selection, we often have to change things in the selection flows. Because of the complexity it is difficult to see what the flow is exactly doing afterwoods, it also takes to much time to modify existing campaigns. The interface is not handy to work with, if you have long lists of variables, of tables or derived fields(*) you have to scroll through trough them, you can not really search them or reorder them. You can not drag and drop fields or other objects like derived fields in the flow, what would be easy if you have to make frequent changes to the proces flow. When you copy objects something the content of the object changes because the links with other objects or lost. (*) derived field: field to calculate something

• 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.

Incentivized

• Ability to translate Multiple SQL queries into a very easy to use visual GUI.
• Provides the ability to pre-define segments, run them once in off hours, store them in their own system tables for quick youth and a significant reduction in CPU utilization on the database.
• It’s use of Reusable objects. Including user variables to pre-define calculations one time, macros that you can create and pass values to parameterize the SQL code And the creation of templates to easily replicate work.
• It’s ability to bring in external data on the fly that can very easily be mapped into any flowchart.
• It’s flexibility and creating UNIX script via triggers to automate sending of files to multiple vendors with different FTP sites
• It’s flexibility in the output layouts that it can create.

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Greater integration of real time (Interact) capabilities with outbound channels, in particular IBM eMessage Email & SMS delivery.
• Additional outbound channels to be integrated into eMessage, including Facebook Fanpage & Twitter DM broadcasts. At the moment these are possible only through custom additional integration.
• Support for additional marketing database technology, e.g. MySQL, Exasol, ParAccel, WX2.
• Provision of database technology with software purchase, as Web technology (IBM WebSphere Express) is supplied for free, but no database is supplied - since IBM also market DB2, which is a supported technology it seems a shame.

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.

Incentivized

There are three main factors to renew a licence: 1) Cost to migrate to another platform would be rather expensive and time consuming, plus the requirement of retraining employees to use a new tool 2) It has been proven time and time again that it is a market leader in the space (10 years +) 3) It can be built upon, with the addition of additional IBM EMM modules - despite theories it does have very strong digital capabilities.

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.

Incentivized

I think it is easy to use, if you don't have to do to complex selections.

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.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

The project team consistently delivers excellent collaboration and is always available whenever assistance is needed. Their responsiveness and commitment make working together smooth and efficient. Bloomreach support, which is included for free in the platform, can also be quite useful, especially for quick clarifications. However, the quality and speed of their responses can sometimes vary, depending on the issue.

Incentivized

I didn't use the Unica support since it is with IBM, only before.

The Training was awesome

Incentivized

very informative and patient

Incentivized

All the deployments were done on time

Incentivized

- We had to rebuild a part of the datamart afterwards to tighten up and simplify the selection process. But as it was too time consuming to rebuild all the existing campaigns, we no run campaigns on different versions of the datamart. - The response tracking of the campaigns never worked out well, it was impossible to implement a direct response where there is a link between the lead and the response in our operational process

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.

Incentivized

The contact history and the response history are so powerful. You can track whatever you want to help the call center to push relevant offers to our customer. In addition, predictive models can be built, with patience, in IBM Campaign. If you have some complaints from the call center about any campaigns, you can easily validate it into the contact or response history.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• 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.

• It helps my clients drive their business which in turn, drives more profit for them.
• It helps my clients determine what works, and what doesn't work, in terms of their social marketing campaigns.
• It helps navigate proper budgeting through determining what clients' users respond to, and what they find unique.

Incentivized