Mapp Digital vs. Vero Cloud

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

Vero tends to play nice with companies that have their websites as the primary source of truth. This allows them to send as many events as they need and develop more complex workflows that introduce conditionality into Vero emails. However, for those that rely more on Salesforce, it might have more limited applications. The product is fairly easy to use, so it's easy for multiple people on the team to pick it up and do what they need for their respective groups. On the other hand, creating email templates will require some knowledge of HTML/CSS, unless those are copied from another source. That would require another product of course that provides more robust layout editing features and templates.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Email template editor allowed our developers to design emails to looks like beautiful marketing emails or basic personal emails.
• The Vero API allowed our developers to connect triggers and events from our visitors to kick start campaigns.
• Campaign flows were fairly easy to create and define.

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.

• While Vero offers some WYSIWYG editing, it's on the limited side, as it mostly allows you to edit copy, but not necessarily the layout.
• The UI/UX has improved dramatically over the course of the last few years, but it can still lag from time to time and experience sluggishness.
• While reliability is really good, it does have lapses from time to time that will introduce delays into emails being sent out. Once or twice, the system went completely down for a period of time.

Incentivized

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vero's price tag is far more attractive but for what you will find to be clear and obvious reasons. Vero has no CRM unlike HubSpot and Infusionsoft. Vero also has limited tracking unlike the seemingly endless possibilities offered from HubSpot which as we all know comes with at a significant cost, often not feasible by a small startup company.

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.

• The overall costs of using Vero have been much lower than using two comparable products that handle transactional emails and newsletters, respectively. MailChimp has relatively recently integrated their Mandrill product for transactional emails, so that's worth looking at as well.
• Using a single product for many things lowers the learning curve, as team members only have to learn one product well, rather than several.
• While infrequent, Vero's outages have impacted our operations at times. If absolute reliability is crucial to your business, then you may have to find a larger provider with a more robust infrastructure. As mentioned, though, it hasn't been a big problem for us.

Incentivized