Braze is a customer engagement platform that enables relevant and memorable experiences between consumers and brands. With Braze, global brands can ingest and process customer data in real time, orchestrate and optimize contextually relevant, cross-channel marketing campaigns.
N/A
iContact Pro Select
Score 6.4 out of 10
N/A
iContact Pro Select (formerly Outmarket) includes email marketing, landing pages, social media management, press outreach, and analytics. The software was originally Vocus Marketing Suite, and then was known as Outmarket. It was acquired by Cision
Braze is a fantastic tool if you're looking to build a large number of CRM journeys using complex canvas structures and maximising use of customer data to segment and personalise. There are numerous tools to ensure each channel is maximising impact and engagement. Braze offers great features for testing, managing message frequency and control groups and using dynamic attributes and liquid code. If you're looking to limit your use to single-send campaigns with no or few automations, I don't think this is the right tool. From my experience, many Braze users also use external tools for analytics rather than Braze's native analytics.
If you use PRWeb already and are looking for a tool that integrates well with that program and offers additional functionality with email and social media then Vocus is great. If you don't use PRWeb or prefer an email tool with more functionality and ease of use, Vocus is not the best choice.
Canvas feature has been really good for creating customer journey paths and long-term messaging campaigns.
They have been addressing feature requests to continue to improve the Canvas feature. One of the simplest but most-handy features is allowing Delay steps wait for a very specific date on a calendar -- so you can plan seasonal campaigns or when you have evergreen-style drip campaigns it allows for avoiding public holidays/etc.
The catalog feature provides a lot of use-cases and flexibility for personalizing comms or customizing comms for whitelabeled versions of our standard comms (for our B2B2C scenarios).
We use the catalog as a repository of our B2B2C brand info, messaging customization - it basically allows us to offer a whitelabeled configurable version of our optimized automated in-life comms in the branding of our b2b customers.
Social Media Listening e.g.: Recommendations, Identify influencers for a selected topic, based on actual influence, or number of reposts and/or references, rather than the number of followers.
Campaign Management - Landing Page and Web Form Templates
Email Marketing -Delivery Tracking and Spam Analysis
Enabling GIF/videos to be directly uploaded on to Braze's platform
Easier way of creating canvases; right now it is too complex for someone new who is starting off in the company to understand what things do and where things are
Ability to track duplicate user profiles within the entire audience segment
Automated deduplicating email addresses/phone numbers in each targeting segment; right now it's done manually after extracting csv files
Vocus can do a better job communicating with us. The representative made promises to us that I have not seen be fulfilled such as getting us national media hits through connections that he had.
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
Now that we have had the opportunity to try an enterprise wide marketing solution, I think we should look at other tools and programs that have greater flexibility and ease of use. If the tool does not happen to have PR Web then so be it. We may not see the cost savings with PR announcements but if the other tools have increased email functionality then we can part with more money on the PR side like we have in the past
It is an easy-to-understand platform, thanks to its design and accessibility. You can, for example, easily find any users and their data, check exact volumes of segments, follow the history of messages sent, and create reports. We can connect Braze with other platforms for analysis or email design (Snowflake, Hightouch, Stripo...).
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
It's really well explained, there are lots of documentation about all topics. When we want to perform in a specific area, there are always a dedicated path. For each new feature, there is always some videos explaining the purpose and the new functionalities. Also I used to do the certification which allows me to show my achievements in my business environment.
Braze is just the best one when it comes to aesthetics and usability, which matter when you're working every day, making complex or even simple changes to highly contextual campaigns for multiple stakeholders. Even without following tutorials, you just get it instantly and start crafting journeys very quickly. And they continue to keep adding new features at a rapid pace, so credit where it's due.
I've used MailChimp before to generate emails and found Vocus to be a better option because it is an overall suite providing the tools to create customizable emails as well as many other features including press releases, social media etc. Vocus is an all-in-one platform for marketing which makes things more efficient for the user by being able to handle all marketing through one outlet.
