BlueConic, the a pure-play customer data platform, designed to liberate companies’ first-party data from disparate systems and makes it accessible wherever and whenever it is required to transform customer relationships and drive business growth. The vendor states over 300 companies use BlueConic to unify data into persistent, individual-profiles, and then activate it across customer touchpoints and systems in support of a wide range of growth-focused initiatives, including customer…
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Twilio Segment
Score 8.2 out of 10
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Segment is a customer data platform that helps engineering teams at companies like Tradesy, TIME, Inc., Gap, Lending Tree, PayPal, and Fender, etc., achieve time and cost savings on their data infrastructure, which was acquired by Twilio November 2020. The vendor says they also enable Product, BI, and Marketing teams to access 200+ tools (Mixpanel, Salesforce, Marketo, Redshift, etc.) to better understand and optimize customer preferences for growth— all integrations are pre-built and…
I think the overall experience and customer service was better on the BlueConic side of things which is what swayed us in their direction. The GAM connection was also another huge plus for us. We ultimately chose BlueConic as our final CDP and we are very happy with that …
Where you are looking for agility and product placement - this is a great product. We were able to move $750k in product in a month due to the pure agility in offering more targetted discounts to users at the right moment. If you use the software correctly - this is like giving your core website experience steriods to offer users the right products at the right time. This shouldn't, however, replace comprehensive funnel testing. Think of it more like hyper offer-management service
Best suited: - Merging emails coming from: Facebook leads forms, Unbounce or landing pages forms, Google forms, any other kind of lead generation tool and bundling all that information together for a single user "profile". - Passing events generated in multiple applications by the same user (product selected in web, product discarded in cart, etc) and delivering those events into other applications (like a CRM) Less appropriate: - Reading/updating data directly from segment from a frontend application
BlueConic's technology and interface is second to none. They excel at taking potentially difficult tasks and making them easy for users to accomplish without having to stretch the platform's limits or reach out to customer support.
The way BlueConic integrates with websites almost seems like magic; by placing a single tag you're able to track almost everything and deploy website personalization.
BlueConic releases frequent updates to the platform, like new integrations to other platforms and different tools for tracking data.
Multi-platform. Segment has easy integrations in many different web, backend, and app platforms/frameworks. We use the Segment SDK in Android and iOS as well as our node.js backend.
Segment is fairly affordable for early-stage companies that are trying out different analytics software. The "developer" plan is free and is suitable for most companies with products that have a small user base.
The UI is great! It is extremely intuitive and easy-to-learn, and this made it take very little time to integrate this software into our analytics and marketing workflows.
They should have the ability to port data beyond O&O properties. This is likely more complex than I make it seem, but a deal w/ a DMP to be able to do so would likely solve the issue.
Could have some more "out of the box" APIs.
WOuld be great if they had in-house consultants that could come and help set-up best practices with your other existing partnerships (this would be a HUGE ask though; places like Salesforce charge thousands for such services).
More and richer sources. For example, MailChimp is a source but the data you get from MailChimp is quite limited. I ended up writing my own scripts to take better advantage of MailChimp's API because Segment's integration was lacking.
Better examples on how to set up event tracking. Pageview tracking is easy enough, but it would be nice if they had a sample app and corresponding code for it and showed you, via Git commits, how to add various kinds of events.
I think without a bit of training and knowledge it would be hard to walk right into a role or a task inside of BlueConic - it is kind of hard to comprehend everything that is available and all of the options. The language inside of BlueConic is also very different than other things in the industry, so it was hard to understand what it would line up with.
Over the period it took us to set up, we kept going back to their enablement team to help us with the setup, and they were always ready and were very helpful in the entire process. Even with their documentation, they took the time out to help us work through the process. We've never had a message/email unanswered for more than an hour on working days.
BlueConic is more lightweight and allows for more unique experiences at the same time. Again - this isn't meant to perfect the core UX of your site, but sit on top to deliver unique experiences to control offer management and close rates.
We chose Twilio Segment for the good API integration and node resources, I would use Ontraport again, particularly if I didn't have the requirements for API and development/platform integration. Certainly the set up and management is easy and seamless with both the API and the user interface to use depending on circumstances and requirements.
Segment has enabled us to get a full view of our front end activity, join it to our back-end activity, and get full visibility into our funnels and user activity.
Segment lets us send events to ad tools with a full audit trail so all the numbers line up.
Segment also brings data from other sources into our data warehouse, saving our data engineering time from building commodity connectors.