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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Twilio SendGrid
Score 7.7 out of 10
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Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns provides users with segmentation, campaign editing, and deliverability. According to the vendor, Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns is trusted by over 80,000 customers globally, including Airbnb, Spotify and Uber. Twilio SendGrid Marketing Campaigns aims to help users by providing: MORE EFFICIENT EMAIL BUILDING The campaign building process is free from frustrating, rigid step-by-step wizards that slow users down. The vendor says…
Braze is the best to orchestrate omnichannel communication for apps. It is a powerful solution to segment the user base and triggers the right message at the right moment to the right user. If an app is your main channel, you have to choose a tool that was made with that in …
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
I think Sendgrid is a great tool for sending out emails of all types. I've primarily used it for transactional emails as we've had other solutions for marketing emails, but I'm sure it would do just a good job - there is a "Marketing" section within the app you can use. Sendgrid integrates really easily with the development frameworks I've used, such as Laravel and Lumen; I've also integrated it with Moodle with ease.
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.
Managing email lists / audiences is easy with features like groups and segments.
They provide pre-built email templates that are very easy to modify. It is also super easy to create new email templates with their drag-and-drop email builder.
Provides clear / easy-to-read analytics of email campaigns.
I can easily import large email contact lists all at once or add a user manually one-at-a-time, when needed.
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
Not necessarily their Email API but their email in general - they are currently in beta for automated email sequences but are still bare bones. Much more work is needed before it can be used mainstream and be able to convert everything to SendGrid.
Helping with warming up our dedicated IP for the best-sending score.
We seem to hit the promotions folder a decent amount (maybe the IP problem above) and even a lot of their emails hit my spam or promotions folder (whether they be transactional or marketing) which isn't a great sign when trusting an ESP.
Transactional email sequences would be a huge plus.
Now that Twilio owns SenGrid, having an integrated platform where you could see all our transactional emails together.
Better reporting and split reporting between transactional and marketing emails.
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.
It has the potential to be really cool. However, it feels as if it was created by developers for developers (and I work with developers, yet even for me the instrument was somewhat not easy to use - just read SendGrid's help manuals...) However, if you are into data and your way of thinking is more mathematical rather than lyrical, you'll enjoy this instrument
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
Twilio SendGrid Email API is everything we want it to be, and we have no reason to look for any other solution. Features and pricing match exactly what we need. As developers for SaaS products, Twilio SendGrid Email API provides a great service. I hope that they stay this way and don't inflate the service with too many marketing oriented features, because there are other tools for that and Twilio SendGrid Email API is a API for sending email first and foremost.
Braze fit our use-case. Every CRM/CEP has their positives and negatives and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. It's worth doing your due diligence on your current needs and assessing future needs as well. Sometimes scalability will be a priority and Braze will facilitate that, sometimes cost efficiency is a priority and perhaps that's better served by Klaviyo. Integration capability also matters and it's important your MarTech stack speaks to each other. Braze has a robust list of partners whereas other tools may require some middleware. It's worth doing your research when selecting your CRM/CEP because if you select incorrectly, you may be back at the drawing board within a year or two.
If given a choice between the two, I would pick Mandrill over SendGrid. Mandrill is slightly more expensive but the data & reports that you receive from it make the service worth it. Mandrill lets you export reports over a period of time, view the actual content of emails that you've dispatched and the customer support is way better. If you can bear the slightly higher cost, Mandrill would be a better choice.
