Constant Contact vs. Mapp Digital vs. Oracle Social Cloud (legacy)

Constant Contact is an excellent tool for sending out flyers and newsletters. However, I feel the content's appearance is typically all the same. When I receive an email from Constant Contact, I can immediately identify it - the templates usually all look the same. When sending out communications with images, it is easy to use Constant Contact and link webpages. However, the email layout is always vertical and can get very lengthy. I prefer a more flip-book approach with options to flip the page.

Incentivized

During our use of MAPP Digital, it is deserving to say that the product helped us to overcome the main challenges we faced in our business at the time. As a preliminary user I have struggled much with hosting manual campaigns on remarketing etc. But with the Mapp digital software hosting marketing campaigns became a complete automated process with supervision. This feature offered by Mapp made a huge decrease in my daily workload and I'm more than grateful for it.

Incentivized

If you are looking to manage multiple social channels and quickly schedule posts it's a great tool. Not the best tool if you're looking to provide real time or near real time support and feedback to customers who are in the moment.

Incentivized

• Market segmentation is great: my main segmentation is by region because that's how our sales team is divided.
• Lists: making customized email lists is easy and intuitive; the custom fields allow some flexibility in case our fields don't exactly line up with Constant Contact's.
• Campaigns: creating campaigns is quick and simple. I especially appreciate the 'resend to non-openers' option. I am constantly using this feature.
• Subject line generator: I like using the recommended subject lines. I'm able to plug in their recommended ideas, or sometimes, this feature helps me generate my own ideas.

• BlueHornet's WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) interface for creating emails is easier to use than many platforms. Users appreciate this. BlueHornet makes it super simple to create a version specific for mobile devices.
• I am a big fan of the custom data segmentation tools built into BlueHornet. They are powerful and easy to use. Many other ESPs, including a number of the top rated ones, do not have such powerful, easy to use segmentation tools. This matters. It helps a user send more relevant emails.
• BlueHornet makes sharing to social networks simple. In this day and age, forwarding to a friend is dead. Sharing to social networks is essential. Having this be easy to do is very important.

• The ability to schedule months of content at a time and view it across a calendar.
• The approval process - you can set up teams to create, edit, publish, approve etc.
• The content and apps module allows you to create modules which can be displayed on your Facebook page under the tabs section. You can create interactive modules for your customers to view.

Incentivized

• It would be nice if we had more customizable options for emails - like moving around pictures and text boxes, rather than a set spot for everything to go.
• I would like it if multiple people could work on a document at one time. So if I'm in charge of graphics, I can get those updated while someone else is entering content, etc.

Incentivized

• It would be nice to see the API's functionality introduced into the web client.
• The reporting tools for transactional messages is different than the rest of the system. This promotes difficulty with getting accurate reporting in the web client, outside of an API call.
• The custom fields are different for transactional messages, which introduces times when human error may flub the fields because they aren't contiguous throughout the product.

• Videos posted to Facebook via SRM have to be clicked to run instead of running automatically.
• No ability to boost posts or ads from SRM.
• Due to privacy restrictions of various social streams, unable to listen to 'people'; can only listen to business pages.
• Not able to publish the same post at the same hour across time zones. So, if you want to publish a post at 8 am EST and 8 am PST, you have to do 2 separate posts. Otherwise your 8 am EST will post at 5 am PST.

Incentivized

There is no doubt that we are going to renew Constant Contact. We have not just invested a lot of time in learning and creating a great looking product but we have developed a strong database of information that allows us to track how we are doing for each newsletter. This supports our goals of creating products that residents desire and are excited to receive.

Although BlueHornet offers helpful testing capabilities, the ESP is a bit outdated. There is a lot of room for aesthetics improvement as they are not appealing. The reporting tool is usually broken, and reporting either no, or wrong metrics. If this ESP were to update their design, as well as fix the reporting tool, I think this platform would be much better.

Our personal support finally came back at the end of our contract, but their product just could not offer what the competition offered. Social media is moving fast, and you need to work with companies that understand that and are at the forefront of trends, you can't get stuck with a company that is standing still.

There is always room for improvement. I don't know how they test their systems, but they should invite not-so computer savvy people to test it. If I, as an expert have problems, they need to think like the technophobe. Since I've used Constant Contact in the past as part of my former employment, I have not viewed any of the tutorials and just jumped in to work on my client's newsletter. With that said, I found some areas easy and some a bit cumbersome

There were three tabs used to navigate throughout the system called, "publish," "engage," and, "measure." These three tabs made the site very user friendly and all features easy to find

Within a few hours you should be able to get up to speed to do the basics. I find it very intuitive

Incentivized

No major problems in sending out the email campaigns and accessing the analytics

Incentivized

The system seemed quite slow sometimes. Specifically, there was sometimes a delay in sends if it was during a high traffic period. There were time-outs when uploading new code for an email, and a lag in reporting analytics which was sometimes as long as 72 hours

They rolled out new feature requests quite frequently and always kept our team up to speed on what they were changing/adding to the system

I think the overall support for Constant Contact has always been incredible; I have nothing negative to say. Our customer support representative was attentive, easy to understand, and very knowledgeable. I never felt like I wasn't a priority of his and my issues, while very small, were fixed in a very short time frame.

Sometimes it was hard to get an initial response but after we started CCing more people, it became a lot better!

The personalized support of a single individual who gets to know your business and your needs is priceless. They will assist with anything from a technical glitch to a campaign strategy that has worked for other companies

Incentivized

They made sure to go through anything and everything that we wanted

Vitrue's training was limited online and not very in-depth, but the the platform is overall very easy to use and doesn't necessarily need a large amount of training.

Implementation is very easy for someone who wants to send out the “batch and blast” type newsletters. If you want to use their templates with no customizations, the product works fine. However, the more customizations you get into involving link color, etc, that’s where things can get tricky for someone who may not be familiar with coding

I wasn't there when they first got it, but when I got there there were only a few people that knew a little bit about it. There was A LOT that we didn't know. Then BlueHornet came and had some workshops and we learned a lot that we didn't even know existed. They were doing a lot of things wrong before BlueHornet came and showed up more about the tool

Constant Contact is much more intuitive for people who are not tech-savvy. Also, while sendgrid offered more options in it's drag and drop interface, it displayed differently across different email clients, which made it very cumbersome to use. It also took much longer to upload contact lists and it was harder to manage existing contacts. Performance in sendgrid was much slower as well, and the Preview feature was quite buggy. Our team initially chose sendgrid because of the integration options that it's API offered, but we ultimately switched to Constant Contact because it was much easier to build campaigns and better suited our requirements.

We were able to thoroughly evaluate the program for Mapp Digital thanks to the free trial's availability. Comparing the two products' graphical user interfaces, it's evident that Mapp Digital comes out on top. Mapp Digital's excellent customer service was another reason for our decision to work with the company.

Incentivized

I have used one other enterprise level application; it was comparable to SRM. We moved away from the first application because our parent company uses many other Oracle applications, not because we were 'unhappy' with the application we had at the time. Having said that, SRM does everything we need from it; in fact, there are features we aren't fully leveraging at this point. I especially find Engage, Content and Apps and Publish particularly useful. This is the kind of platform that is very robust; you get out of it what you have the time and resources for

Incentivized

Very reliable in sending email campaigns and controlling the recipients so that no contact is sent the same email more than once, even if they are on a resent list

Incentivized

• I have had nothing but positive impacts from using Constant Contact.
• The church is large, and there are many subgroups and axillary groups within the church. Setting up specific groups based on responsibility, interest, member goals, and service needs allows me to send information quickly, saving valuable time for other tasks.
• Constant Contact allows leadership to stay personally engaged with the members I work with, without over-taxing my time. It feels so seamless.

Incentivized

• BlueHornet has been a good entry-level platform. We have successfully launched scores of clients with limited email marketing experience onto this platform. Because it is easy to use, we have spent minimal effort needing to help these clients with problems.
• It is easy to migrate clients on or off BlueHornet, depending upon their needs. This is helpful because it allows our clients to be on exactly the right platform. Some platforms make it difficult to migrate off, essentially trapping clients on a platform that no longer meets their needs or business objectives.
• I wish BlueHornet were keeping pace with technology advancements in the industry. The gap between the biggest ESPs and competitors like BlueHornet seems to be growing.

• Audience. Before SRM, we had 1,000 Likes on Facebook. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, our Likes have grown to 20,000.
• Frequency. Before SRM, we posted once a week on Facebook & Twitter. In 1 1/2 years using SRM, we now post 54 times a month, or about twice a day on weekdays.
• Internal acceptance. Before SRM, social was considered "a hobby" by senior management. Now, social marketing is a key part of the strategy of every product launch. That is due to the hard work of our social marketing manager, of course, but her efforts were amplified by SRM.

Incentivized