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.
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Cordial
Score 9.9 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Cordial Intelligent Messaging is an email marketing solution built around features such as triggered messaging, real-time data segmentation, and robust integrations.
Cordial was not an intuitive platform like Braze is. We love Braze’s drag-and-drop feature when building emails, and it’s very quick and easy to use. I’ve had very little problems with this feature.
Utilizing Braze for user onboarding activation is ideal, for example when a new user signs up but hasn’t completed identity verification or added a payment method, Braze can send a series of nudges via email, SMS, and in-app messaging. Braze is not ideal for highly regulated financial communications. hese require stringent compliance and audit trails, which may be better handled through core banking systems or platforms built for financial record-keeping
Cordial has multiple options to create a message: single campaign, automation, orchestration and sculpt templates, which are drag-and-drop type functionalities but each of these blocks are based on HTML content so a user needs to be technically savvy. I would avoid using HTML includes as it is not possible to see which include a customer received. The team is fabulous, they know the tool and are dedicated to the success of the business. They are quick to respond and provide feedback. Reporting and analytics are very manual if you are combining multiple days in a test.
Action based entry methods - helps ensure certain messages only go out once a key action has happened (in our case loading an offer to a guest account).
Liquid - this gives the ability to send truly dynamic emails depending on the attributes present on a guest level. Making our messages extremely personalized.
Support - the Braze team is very supportive and bought into the partnership. From the dedicated support team, our CSM team, the engineering team, escalations team, and everyone else; they make it clear that they succeed if we succeed and their actions show it.
Reporting on specific links. It's hard to see how a single CTA performed vs overall engagement.
The view of live Canvases can be hard to digest with such long sections for each message step. I also need to click through a few times to see the actual creative, making it harder at a glance to remember which path was which.
Frequency capping rules. We assumed these could be more complex, such as having a hierarchy of delivery based on a tag, vs just a max volume per tag.
Some of the tasks on the platform are still technical in nature and often requires the help of a developer or technical marketer. But I've witnessed great strides towards accessibility and ease of use for non-technical marketers over the past three years.
A lot of the templating must be built from scratch.
Deliverability insights (out of the box) could be expanded further.
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
It's easy to use and understand. However, it's not perfect (the last set of UI/UX updates definitely improved this), and for Braze to be really 10 out of 10, an easier process to integrate Braze with data/website/apps would be needed -> right now, marketing is limited by what was set up initially, and moving this beyond MVP is extremely hard.
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
Braze is a much stronger deployment platform than Optimove (i.e., Optimail, Optimobile, Optitext). While Klaviyo may be deemed the "preferred" integration with Shopify, we feel confident that Braze will work perfectly well and will continue to enhance its integration with Shopify. It'd never be worth the pain of an ESP migration to move away from Braze for maybe only a few better features with Klaviyo.
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
