SAP Emarsys vs. Optimizely Commerce Connect

Emarsys is well suited for any company with an established list of contacts and an interest in email marketing. It's easy to manage, scalable, and has plenty of customization features to make your emails your own. If you're ever stuck, the responsive customer service team will help you out. I recommend Emarsys for medium to large size companies.

Incentivized

Our experience may be unique because we opted for an Optimizely team to implement our website/console set-up and connection to our PIM and ERP. The experience may have been different with a 3rd party or it may not have. That said, we have been live with our primary website for almost 2 years and I still do not consider it was ever "done". We have been going back and forth on functionality issues and bugs since launch. I have low confidence that changes made the previous day will 100% be online the next - so my team rechecks the work they did the previous day to ensure everything is online. The addition of a second channel and enhancement requests have compounded the issues. I feel this product would work fine with singular or less complex market SKU offerings.

Incentivized

• It has the ability to reach maximum market chains.
• It helps to keep our customer’s data confidential in any means.
• It encourages one-to-one customer engagement which has helped us developing more trust in our customers.
• It is targeting the required and interested audience for the organization.

Incentivized

• Episerver has a robust discount engine. This engine, combined with "visitor groups" allow our marketing department to categorize customers and offer a variety of discounts to targeted customers at specific times.
• Episerver has a full-featured, storefront experience that can handle everything you might want for an e-commerce website.
• Episerver offers A/B testing that can be helpful for trying out new content ideas and tracking the results.

Incentivized

• The email and content builder is significantly worse than other email marketing platforms I've used
• Emails campaigns cannot be used in more than one automation flow
• Amount of emails collected and being sent for smart insight are inaccurate
• I've rarely completed a task without some type of user interface error
• Customer service mostly directs you to help center on website
• You have to pay extra for training
• You have to pay extra for reporting in which the system cannot provide
• Lengthy contract with a high price tag

• Support. Episerver used to have direct support and access to the tech team to discuss and resolve issues. The new support portal is not enough for developer needs.
• Quality Assurance. We find issues in the Episerver code that should have been resolved in QA before release.
• Sales. Episervers sells the framework as a solution while showing Alloy. While it helps Episerver sell more, it puts the implementation partner into trouble as the client thinks they bought the solution. Episerver does not provide a solution. It provides a framework that you can build a solution on.

Incentivized

We have no intention of changing Emarsys

Incentivized

Really want to be able to spend more time and resources on rolling out new things with Episerver but at the moment we seem to be fixing alot of issues and pain points with the way our system was setup.

Incentivized

The administrative interface is largely intuitive and relatively easy to use. The complexity of business needs and ability to customize can affect this (i.e. you have to set up and develop with the user in mind), but the basic structure is largely solid. There are some areas of redundancy (such as Commerce Manager overlapping with other administrative areas) that can sometimes cause confusion or offer some functions in one place, whereas other related functions are managed on a completely different page.

Incentivized

We had an incredible team at Episerver Supporting us with the go live, reviewing our integration, and pushing our integration partner to deliver a quality product

Incentivized

Fully understand what is OOTB feature of the platform before proceeding to develop. Then implement a customization of key features once you can prove they are working as OOTB to make them more user friendly and productive for the business. Eg pre order and e gift card

Incentivized

Emarsys is the email specialist service giver for our whole association. We use it to send custom and mass messages to our clients across three distinct business divisions. Email advertising is one of our greatest income driving channels due to focusing on limitations from deals regions. We can arrive at our clients through email with pertinent data and advancements, all driving income for the business. I have not used any other product marketing automation services.

Incentivized

Optimizely Commerce Connect offers a very wide range of features for admin users. There is less a need for an IT specialist or programmer to be involved when changes need to be made.

Incentivized

• From proficient and fast information assortment and converging to changing crude data into significant experiences, Emarsys gives you an answer that allows you to associate with your clients at an extremely close to home level and utilize that to additionally develop your business.
• Reliable and giving cost effective services.

Incentivized

• Positive: We have a usable website - better than what we had before and we are seeing a constant increase in adoption.
• Positive: Counter associates are using the website to help customers.
• Negative: Too much time being spent QCing previous work.

Incentivized