Bluecore vs. Twilio Segment

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

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Triggered emails
• Audience segmentation
• Integration with Facebook and Adwords

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Embedded functionality for social media live preview
• Heat maps don't always show up
• More flexibility in navigation bar, can get uneven in proportion

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

• We've seen increased ROI through product personalization purchasing
• We've been able to individualize our campaigns based on highest category affinity
• We've seen engagement with our automated campaigns to help figure out exactly what blocks to include in these messages.

Incentivized

• 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.