Cordial Intelligent Messaging is an email marketing solution built around features such as triggered messaging, real-time data segmentation, and robust integrations.
N/A
eTrigue
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
eTrigue DemandCenter is a marketing automation and channel marketing-as-a-service platform. Its key features include CRM integration, email marketing, real-time lead alerts, A/B email testing, and litmus email visualization testing.
Cordial has multiple options to create a message: single campaign, automation, orchestration and sculpt templates, which are drag-and-drop type functionalities but each of these blocks are based on HTML content so a user needs to be technically savvy. I would avoid using HTML includes as it is not possible to see which include a customer received. The team is fabulous, they know the tool and are dedicated to the success of the business. They are quick to respond and provide feedback. Reporting and analytics are very manual if you are combining multiple days in a test.
The platform is most scalable-- works for small and large companies alike. Key for most of our clients is the little to no IT support required to implement and run the platform. I would definitely explore this when looking at a marketing automation platform beyond the "batch and blast" solutions. We've yet to have an issue working with our clients' sales and/or marketing teams to implement. And most of our clients work in the platform independent of the programs we run; are able to set up acampaign, upload lists and/or pull for CRM, and run reports on their own in very short turn.
Some of the tasks on the platform are still technical in nature and often requires the help of a developer or technical marketer. But I've witnessed great strides towards accessibility and ease of use for non-technical marketers over the past three years.
A lot of the templating must be built from scratch.
Deliverability insights (out of the box) could be expanded further.
I've never been too crazy about the reporting within DemandCenter. There is always a solution for any type of report I'm seeking, but it involves report designing (choosing data points dragging/dropping columns & rows) which is made difficult by the lack of descriptions & values for the data points. To their credit, they did release a new suite of simplified (and pretty) reports, dubbed "Marketing Effectiveness". Relegating the older, complicated (yet super-flexible) reports as "Business Analytics".
The UI will be a little unfamiliar at first. That is, where you think you should be clicking, you'll need to double-click or drag-and-drop. And I would say DemandCenter has always (and still does) have an issue with UI elements that are "windows within windows" or modal windows with scrolling. But, at least these UI components are consistent throughout the entire application - so once you're used to it, you can actually achieve some pretty impressive speeds.
One of DemandCenter's greatest features is being squished down to uselessness: Derived Data. As mentioned, I scrub our data on a regular basis, and this means filling/appending data, or extrapolating to fill missing data. DC released a feature called "Derived Data" that scours useful info from the prospect's IP address (mostly geographical info). Now, while you can create campaign & list conditions based on derived data, there is no easy way to simply extract that oh-so-valuable derived Country or State and have it map those values to the standard fields. Or at least let you export derived data. They have plans to fix this - but for now it's like dangling candy in front of a baby.
We have tried other systems and eTrigue is the easiest to use, easiest to train new people on, and most responsive support team we have ever experienced. They ask our input on new features they are developing, and have implemented some of our suggestions in their product rollouts. We get new features almost every month. We get live support without any cost, and they return our phone calls within an hour every time. They treat us like a true partner.
You will need to think about which users you want to have each role, and the features allowed in each role. You should watch the training videos before you get live training. It saved us several hours as they had already answered 90% of our questions.
Constant Contact offered now tracking, lead alerts. Marketo wasn't as flexible-- for example not easy to schedule campaigns in advance, to launch in the future. Also liked the interface and the DemandCenter lead alert format more than Marketo.
We get the upper hand on follow-up with return visitors... not by reverse DNS lookup or pattern match but by direct cookie validation. Inside sales productivity is boosted by 33% easy with eTrigue.
The alerts and data are lightning fast, giving marketing immediate feedback on campaign data and prospects.
