Bluecore vs. Vero Cloud

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

Vero tends to play nice with companies that have their websites as the primary source of truth. This allows them to send as many events as they need and develop more complex workflows that introduce conditionality into Vero emails. However, for those that rely more on Salesforce, it might have more limited applications. The product is fairly easy to use, so it's easy for multiple people on the team to pick it up and do what they need for their respective groups. On the other hand, creating email templates will require some knowledge of HTML/CSS, unless those are copied from another source. That would require another product of course that provides more robust layout editing features and templates.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• Email template editor allowed our developers to design emails to looks like beautiful marketing emails or basic personal emails.
• The Vero API allowed our developers to connect triggers and events from our visitors to kick start campaigns.
• Campaign flows were fairly easy to create and define.

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

• While Vero offers some WYSIWYG editing, it's on the limited side, as it mostly allows you to edit copy, but not necessarily the layout.
• The UI/UX has improved dramatically over the course of the last few years, but it can still lag from time to time and experience sluggishness.
• While reliability is really good, it does have lapses from time to time that will introduce delays into emails being sent out. Once or twice, the system went completely down for a period of time.

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

Vero's price tag is far more attractive but for what you will find to be clear and obvious reasons. Vero has no CRM unlike HubSpot and Infusionsoft. Vero also has limited tracking unlike the seemingly endless possibilities offered from HubSpot which as we all know comes with at a significant cost, often not feasible by a small startup company.

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

• The overall costs of using Vero have been much lower than using two comparable products that handle transactional emails and newsletters, respectively. MailChimp has relatively recently integrated their Mandrill product for transactional emails, so that's worth looking at as well.
• Using a single product for many things lowers the learning curve, as team members only have to learn one product well, rather than several.
• While infrequent, Vero's outages have impacted our operations at times. If absolute reliability is crucial to your business, then you may have to find a larger provider with a more robust infrastructure. As mentioned, though, it hasn't been a big problem for us.

Incentivized