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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Epsilon PeopleCloud
Score 8.0 out of 10
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Epsilon PeopleCloud (formerly the Agility platform with Agility Harmony) is an enterprise-level email marketing and cross-channel campaign management platform competing with Responsys, Cheetah Mail, ExactTarget, etc. The vendor has a strong international presence with staff in 14 countries.
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
Appropriate for large organizations who want customization in their emails. The tool - while intuitive if you have previous background - is hefty and large in scope of capabilities. It's great for organizations who have multiple users and shows the name of person who last made changes. The reporting is really good - but may be a bit overwhelming for organizations who don't need a lot of detailed information
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.
The tool could be improved to "remember" where you last left off (specific user). Having to constantly retrace steps if you get logged out is annoying.
Hitting the "back" arrow sends you back to a main section, when it should send you back to where you previously were.
It would be nice to see performance reports available within the campaign itself, as well as within the reporting section.
Ability to NOT be able to change anything in a campaign after it has launched. This has happened multiple times. We usually copy a previous campaign to start a new one but often, we end up changing content on the version we are copying from -- this is very annoying and dangerous.
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.
While both Epsilon Agility Harmony and Oracle Responsys are great for larger organizations that send a lot of emails, I think Epsilon Agility Harmony is more robust than Responsys and is easier to use. It is significantly more complex than HubSpot and requires previous knowledge of using an email tool that has content blocks and or dynamic content.
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
