Following $6 million in series A funding from FirstMark Capital and others in 2013, the rapidly growing company along with its rapidly and broadly adopted product known as TriggerMail became Bluecore. But its function is as it was before the rebrand: an ecommerce focused trigger marketing product that uses email to retarget vacillating or distracted customers and grow online sales.
Essential to Bluecore is customer behavior, assimilated in an automated fashion across disparate sources. Once…
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Braze
Score 8.7 out of 10
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Braze is a customer engagement platform that enables relevant and memorable experiences between consumers and the brands they love. With Braze, global brands can ingest and process customer data in real time, orchestrate and optimize contextually relevant, cross-channel marketing campaigns and continuously evolve their customer engagement strategies.
Bluecore is fantastic for building and sending email campaigns. They're also spectacular at providing insight on where your subscribers actively are vs predictive behavior. This is particularly helpful in sending the right message at the right time to the right person, all with product recommendations. I don't think they would be particularly appropriate for building something in SMS (we've found a lot of success with Attentive) and I don't think Bluecore helps much with social media analytics
Braze is likely at its best for companies that engage with customers on both an app-level and web-level. It gets even better if you have the opportunity to leverage some of the additional channels Braze unlocks such as in-app messages and content cards. If you're only using Braze to send SMS and Email and the occasional push, you're likely better off finding a cheaper platform. Braze organizes its analytics in a very odd way in my experience, so I'd also recommend pairing Braze with a secondary reporting tool of your choosing.
Braze's usability is one of the main things that makes it stand out from its competitors. The UX and UI are excellent, and it ensures it is not overcomplicated where it doesn't need to be. The online documentation is also handy to help support teams in your business.
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
Bluecore impressed us from the start because of their focus on the email. I got the sense from SmarterHQ that they viewed themselves more as a segmentation tool. While also very useful, Bluecore made it easier to close the circle and take that segmented list all the way through creative process to the actual send, with a consciousness of how we secure the conversion. Since becoming a customer, Bluecore has continued to blow me away with their innovation and professionalism, leaving no doubt that we made the right choice.
Compared to Salesforce Commerce Cloud, Braze is much more user friendly, flexible and provides for easier segmentation and personalization. The reporting in Braze is also much easier to use. Compared to Marketo, Braze has a better UI and UX, and an easier learning curve for new users. The set up and maintenance of customer journeys is much easier. The only thing I miss from Marketo is the ability to view the customer log, which allows you to see the automation that happens against each user profile, allowing for easier troubleshooting.
Positive: A growth hacking experiment was proven successful in nudging users who abandoned their cart after checking out with a product/service and leaving their chart or 24 hours.
Positive: A growth hacking experiment was proven successful in nudging users whose credit card failed when trying to upgrade to a paid account.
Negative: With the plethora of teams (disciplines / business units / markets) with access to braze, it's easy to accidentally over-nurture users.
