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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ReachMail
Score 9.5 out of 10
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ReachMail focuses on assisting email marketers in achieving delivery success, and present their services a a guide in the ever-changing world of marketing and transactional email. ReachMail includes tools like optimized time-of-day sending, integrated list hygiene and expert support.
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.
The free Reachmail account (which I have used for several small organizations) is a good tool where there are limited or zero email marketing dollars, a contact audience of up to 5,000 subscribers, and a max of 15,000 monthly emails. The pricing levels are really reasonable for volume requirements, including custom plans for infrequent mailings. If there are constraints (time and/or design experience) that require a large choice of ready-made contemporary templates without graphic or font modifications, then this probably isn't a good email marketing tool.
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.
I have a $10 account, but customer support treat me like a princess. They even added a feature to one page to remedy a problem I was having with that page. They care about their customers.
ReachMail Features (or at least, these are the ones I know they have): WYSIWYG Email Editor, Template Management, Mobile Optimized Emails, Dynamic Content, Subscribe/Unsubscribe, Mailing List Management, Drip Campaigns, Auto-Responders, Image Library, A/B Testing, Customer Surveys, CAN SPAM Compliance, Reporting/Analytics.
These folks know what they’re doing. I can’t speak highly enough about ReachMail.
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
There are no batch report downloads. When I have multiple variations and waves in a campaign, I have to download reports individually. I'd like for a way to download one report of all sends during a certain time period, or given another set of parameters.
It would save a lot of time if we had the ability to upload multiple images or assets at once.
There's only a two-level "tree" of organization of lists and suppression lists. It would be great if we had the abililty to nest lists into better categories, rather than having to scroll through one giant list of suppressions or deployment lists. Something like a 2015 folder, then inside that a Business Unit folder, then inside that, a Campaign folder, etc. This would make things much easier to find.
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 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
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.
In my opinion, ReachMail is a good competitor to Mailchimp, probably has more features though and analytics to help organize information. There are also a lot more third party integrations that have helped us compared to other apps that we've tried before, but ReachMail has been the most useful, for me personally and my team
None. I signed up for a pay account so only had to spend a dollar for the first month. Even that was a waste as I simply can't send emails out with their forced unsubscribe header. If it was the typical CAN-SPAM footer it would be fine, but it just looks awful.
