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…
N/A
Braze
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
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
While Braze is considered one of the better marketing automation platforms, it hasn't been a market leader in the e-commerce world. Again, based on what I've seen recently, enhancements in this area have been rolled out, but as a brand, we've yet to test these new features. If you're looking for a platform that allows you to set up and activate campaigns for multi-brand businesses/products, then Braze is for you. The drag and drop template builder and A/B testing functionality is easy enough for anyone to learn and use.
The ability to send push notifications to a seed list like how we can for email would be great. Just so we can confirm everything is going out correctly in the instances where are marketing team doesn't fit the criteria for a certain message.
Being able to archive segment extensions if the campaigns that are using them have been stopped or archived for over a certain number of days. This isn't a real issue, just a small quality of life improvement for those that like having things as clean as possible. 🙂
A global suppression list. Again, this isn't a big deal to add, it's just the only other thing that came to mind.
We are on a mission for an omnichannel experience for our customers and are already making good progress with Braze able to fully support and optimise this
Creating emails and editing the existing journey can be a tedious task when we want to do it on the same canvas. When emails need to be developed using emails from another canvas, it can be somewhat challenging. Other email marketing platforms offer a separate section for emails, which is particularly beneficial. Indeed, Braze offers good functionality for creating and testing mobile-friendly emails in one place. The provided segmentation options are also helpful.
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.
I wasn't part of the decision-making process for selecting Braze, since I joined the company after Braze was already "integrated" with our company. I'd still say that Braze would me my 1st choice compared to other tools that I used in the past.
Our customer experience is much more cohesive- it allows multiple departments to run numerous campaigns at the same time without them conflicting with one another which is great- saves contributors a lot of unnecessary back and forth
Better tracking- we are able to pivot away from campaign styles faster using Braze tracking as it is faster and more reliable
Reduced execution time- our team has gotten back dozens of hours of time because of the streamlined execution process and user-friendly interface. This has provided us with more time to think creatively and focus on the bigger picture
We are able to run more complex campaigns in order to target customers across more stages of the shopping and browsing experience
