Hull CDP, from MessageBird vs. Zaius (discontinued)

Hull is definitely the leading CDP for the small to mid-sized business in which the marketing team wants or needs to have a fair amount of autonomy from engineering, or when it's unrealistic or cost-prohibitive to use internal engineering resources to maintain the marketing database. It's also a great choice for companies who are trying to bring newer and smaller best-of-breed elements into place in their marketing--enabling you to sync customer data records to CTAs/ Chat scenarios/ Email Service Providers, or any type of 3rd party campaign tools. It's probably not the best fit for companies trying to stay in a larger Marketing Cloud Ecosystem, e.g. Adobe/ Oracle.

Incentivized

Optimizely Data Platform is a great tool for teams who look to use open-source tools over tools with white glove service. You do get a dedicated customer success manager and access to their (almost) 24/7 support team via chat, but the real benefits of the platform stand to be unlocked by teams who enjoy getting their hands dirty.

Incentivized

• Slack integration - we revolve around slack as our central comm hub and having our customer information surfaceable is just gold.
• Making back-end data easy to read and digest - there is a lot of data that gets generated by our customers and it's impossible to sift through without Hull consolidating that information for us.
• Customer support - we have only had a couple issues in the many months using Hull and it's always been a quick resolution. They use Slack to support BTW which I love.

Incentivized

• It's relatively simple to use
• Segment building is quick and can be easily customized with field data
• Chat support is generally fast to respond

Incentivized

• Needs a deduplication engine
• Needs to be able to perform bulk and automated data cleansing (unified data is messy)
• Needs to integrate with more tools
• Needs to be able to be tailored to different use cases, such as a retail/ecommerce use case, with RFM metrics

Incentivized

• Automation of data from other platforms such as our ERP.
• The approval process needs work. I should be able to flag fields that have issues and give users feedback if a product is rejected.

Incentivized

There's so much that needs to be improved and it seems like not much has happened since Optimizely first took over. When Optimizely did take over, they reduced the UX of campaign reporting.

Incentivized

• Creating reports can be difficult and they aren't very visual.
• There is not much control you can have with your imported product catalog. Product filters can be difficult to use.
• Manually importing customers is a more difficult process from when I was using Mailchimp 10 years ago.
• Figuring out how to inject a module onto a page is difficult.
• Figuring out how to get off an email blacklist is near impossible even with ip warming. Very little help here.

Incentivized

Positive - Onboarding was quick and easy. Positive - Access to a Zaius data analyst has been wonderful. Negative - I don't know who our CSM is if we even have one.

Incentivized

We have a home built CRM. From start to finish our implementation was a nightmare loaded with problems that destroyed my initial trust with the platform.

Incentivized

We had initially identified Segment as a solution due to the number of integrations they supported. The problem is that with Segment we would have still had to build and maintain a database along with query tools. Overall Hull emerged as a better starting point for us

Incentivized

Oh my goodness, there were many, including:

• Klaviyo
• Salesforce Email Marketing Cloud
• Bronto
• Marapost (the worst experience we ever had. We used them for the longest year on earth).
• Silverpop (IBM)
• I forgot their name but they are based in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania.
• Exact Target
• Active Campaign
• Get Response
• Drip
• SendInBlue
• And more I cannot remember. We spent over six months looking at everything.

Incentivized

• Positive: No longer asking engineering for customer activity data
• Positive: Allowing additional data integrations for where our customer activity data can be seen

Incentivized

• We hit record numbers this year in regards to sales which is attributed to the launch of our new e-commerce website.

Incentivized