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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MessageGears
Score 9.9 out of 10
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MessageGears is a hybrid email marketing service built around deliverability, actionable customer data, and audience segmentation and targeting.
Overall Braze is a massive step up from our previous provider, and we've just scratched the surface of what's possible. So I know it can unlock a lot of channels and use cases for us that we were not able to deliver before. But I will say it's a steep learning curve, and not all components are intuitive, such as report builders, I'd like to see the outcome of the report I'm trying to build as I make it, so I know it's producing what I wanted
MessageGears can be a solid, inexpensive email solution and you can be able to send millions of emails per year. In 2020, we delivered over 235 million emails at a fraction of what that would cost with any other email service provider. We worked with MessageGears on a custom solution with our database.
Flexible multi-channel campaign setup, whether for one-off sends or customer journeys. We have a lot of different ways we can control the setup of any individual campaign, enabling sophisticated use cases.
User-friendly UI makes it enjoyable for the teams working on the platform daily.
Good customer segmentation abilities are essential, especially if you're fully utilizing some of Braze's key features, such as native purchase events and catalogs.
Our CRM team does a lot of template tweaking on a regular basis, so they don’t want us to duplicate emails, in particular otherwise they might break. I wish there was an easy way to move over copy from one email template into another with the click of a button.
When sending push notifications we always use the same copy for Android and iOS users- it would be nice to have one input for copy instead of copy/pasting content from the Android field into the iOS field
The email templates do not allow Grammarly to apply edit suggestions to copy, which is unfortunate because I rely on Grammarly to ensure my copy is written well without error. Currently we have to copy/paste the content into a Google doc to make sure the copy is written well
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
I would argue that Braze is not particularly easy-to-use. It doesn't behave like traditional CRMs (and even bills itself as a CEP, to further this distinction). Once you understand Braze's ecosystem, it's very straightforward and user friendly, but I would say there is a steep early learning curve and Braze's educational resources leave a lot to be desired.
Our situation is unique so I believe we are working on a semi-outdated UI which needs a tune up / version upgrade. Similarly, our custom connection means that we do not have access to the full feature set so I've never experienced MessageGears' best functionality
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
MessageGears support is always quick to respond when we have an issue, which is rare. Gail has been our main rep and she has been great. We don't have many issues so luckily, we don't need to lean on their customer support team much. That said, it would be beneficial to hear from upper management more.
Braze and Iterable stood out as the best two customer engagement tools for us, but the level of support and out-of-the-box features offered by Braze pipped them slightly ahead of the competition. Overall, they showed the tool as the best solution we needed, specifically to our requirements.
MessageGears doesn't come close to Salesforce Marketing Cloud. We chose MessageGears based on how data was accessed. We never really got a good preview of how the system works or what was available, so we didn't know everything that it was lacking until we started using it.
Positive: A growth hacking experiment was proven successful in nudging users who abandoned their cart after checking out with a product/service and leaving their chart or 24 hours.
Positive: A growth hacking experiment was proven successful in nudging users whose credit card failed when trying to upgrade to a paid account.
Negative: With the plethora of teams (disciplines / business units / markets) with access to braze, it's easy to accidentally over-nurture users.
