Qubit, now from Coveo (acquired October 2021) uses visitor history data to understand different user segments and serve personalized messages to segments using JavaScript. It is available as either a managed or self-service model. Data is collected using Qubit's own Universal Variable data model, or by integrating the user's existing model via our API. It combines quantitative data with qualitative visitor feedback to give Qubit users the ability to detect areas for optimization.
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Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Marketing Cloud is an AI-powered, cloud-based digital marketing platform within the Salesforce Customer 360 ecosystem. Marketers can segment their audience, deliver personalized messages, track campaign performance, engage leads and accounts, and optimize strategies based on real-time insights.
Coveo Qubit is a very helpful platform mainly for organizations that need to provide a solid business model before carrying out any implementation or new functionality. In addition, it is a very good tool to generate changes and show different content to different types of clients, with their personalization and segmentation criteria.It is ideal for simultaneous testing and customization, only one of these activities individually is not recommended.
I rated this a seven because I love Salesforce, and it is excellent on the sales side. However, the marketing side has some pros and cons. It is terrific for keeping track of lead, customer, and dealer information, but it is not easy to automate workflows, integrate other software, or create well-designed emails. It is also straightforward to generate reports, which is very helpful in keeping track of lead progression to better market those leads and turn them into customers.
Qubit platform uses solid testing algorithms and delivers reliable reporting and analytics of testing campaigns. The dashboard section is easy to use and provides a good high level overview of the core campaign metric performances.
On-boarding and implementation of Qubit technology was painless and well handed throughout the entire process even with more complicated platforms.
Turn-around time for development and testing of campaigns is extremely fast. This enables the business to have a much higher throughput of tests and allows for quick validation of ideas rather than having to wait for months before a test is ready to go live on production site.
While they do work very closely with us, especially our success manager, more involvement on a technical level or a dedicated engineer, would be a great advantage. We develop a lot of experiences in house and, like all companies that dev in house, we have our own way of working. A dedicated engineer that got to know us better as well and understood how we work could only help. Sometimes, a few errors can get through QA due to this.
Qubit is currently providing resources and support we do not have internally. Our relationship managers are exceptional and I feel well informed and well supported by their team. The tool is nice, but our contacts from the company are the real reason to maintain our relationship. They work hard for clarity and continue to help us push for additional opportunities.
As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch
Very simple user interface, built on top of advanced functionality, makes the platform easy to use. The team at Qubit are also very open to feedback and introduce new and useful features fairly often. On the reporting side, the inbuilt dashboard reports are good for a top-level view of test results, and Qubit have made a lot of their output data available should you wish to run your own analysis
You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.
I would say that the Qubit account managers are always available for any request. We have a lot of different promotions that could always do with last minute optimizing or changes and Qubit can be relied on to get this changes up and running in an impressive amount of time, so that we don't need to patch live or wait for the next IT sprint. Invaluable to our business.
Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.
Technology is good for A/B testing and personalisation - allowing any team with a dedicated developer to create test relatively easily and to report/analyse them in a fair amount of details. Some advanced features, especially on the set up of test cells, are dearly missing. Unfortunately, new features are often not free of bugs... Also, support is sub-par, which means new features are realised without proper documentation, example or training (but of our Qubit counterparts and internally).
Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.
Qubit are supportive and flexible in providing support. They are happy working out of usual hours, even on weekends and if I have any doubts about the set up of an experience they’re quick to respond and willing to check my work. On particularly big revenue days they monitor our account and they’re quick to identify and problem solve any issues.
They are really responsive and more than not solve the problem or give you insight to how you can manage the solution yourself. I do find however sometimes a long delay on the more complex issues when they need to loop in other departments. but overall a good experience with support
The training was great, but would be great to have a script or PDF with some explanations of the qubit JS layer. Without the script you can just try to learn on your own, so the training is not as powerfull as it could be. On the other hand - would be great to have training related to reading statistics or personalisation.
The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.
Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.
Implementation couldn't be easier. All we needed to do was insert the tag. (easy) and set up the data layer. (dev required) This was pretty smooth in comparison to some of the other tools we use on our site, and was done in less than a day. Note : Data needs to be collected for a set period of time before you can accurately rely on the data that you are receiving. This is normal though with everyone else that we have used
From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.
At the time of taking the product, we found no comparable alternatives. Since then, the product has only grown from strength to strength, so it still does not have any comparable competitors that offer both the technical product and business knowledge that Qubit can. Google appear to offering a competing product which may be one to watch in future, and something for Qubit to keep an eye on
I think that all of the marketing platforms I have evaluated and used in the past serve different markets and purposes. Salesforce Marketing Cloud was more palatable to our team because of our existing tech stack where we had Salesforce CRM already deployed and in use. Compared to Marketo and Hubspot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a bit dated in terms of the UI/UX and the overall experience but still meets the needs of our organization. Mailchimp, however, isn't even playing in the same arena and is meant for small organizations and companies that don't have a need for a full fledged offering that SFMC brings to the table.
Our requirements change throughout the year like most E Commerce retailers. At Christmas and Peak we're dealing with around ten times the usual traffic on the site. Qubit had no problems with this at all, tests continued to fire, and stats were still reported accurately. I don't think that it is the most server intensive .js anyway, but we have seen no issues at all.
Prior to this, we had no solution and literally were doing things on paper in a world where technology is outpacing paper. Having this process optimized has made it easier for the sales and marketing people to change information. From the training perspective, it has allowed us to see holes in where we could create additional support training, so the ROI here has been a lot more than just the optimization of a process.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to more efficiently reach out to a higher number of prospects.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to nimbly communicate important messages in a timely fashion to facilitate conversion.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to track who is opening our messages so that we can stop sending to those not interested and focus on the most engaged audiences.
