Optimizely Commerce Connect vs. OptinMonster

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

OptinMonster is a perfect tool for companies that want to convert website visitors that leave without providing any information. Having more email addresses gives you more prospects to sell your products and services. You can use OptinMonster campaigns to generate leads on blog pages that normally lack a call to action, or use them to capture abandoning visitors on important product or service pages. It is generally a pop-up software, so it can't necessarily replace any plugin or software that handles web forms.

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

• Lots of pre-designed campaigns to choose from that are fully customizable.
• Customizable CSS for each campaign is built in.

Incentivized

• 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

• Analytics is probably the area for the biggest improvement. Other than showing how the number of visitors, number of conversions, and conversion rate, there isn't much else to the native analytics. It would be nice to see campaign metrics side by side. Otherwise, you have to view one campaign at a time. In the history of conversions graph, it doesn't overlay website traffic or show how the conversion rate has changed over time.
• The only other area that may use improvement is their capable integrations. There are a few that are not provided, such as Kartra and Salesforce.

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

It is very well designed from both a UI and UX perspective. I've never been lost in the tool and building your rule sets is very easy—you'll have no problem hitting your target.

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

They are very responsive and helpful and courteous. They solve issues quickly. Aside from their tech support staff, they have a great knowledge base and OptinMonster University which has plenty of content about how to use OptinMonster to its full potential and learn digital marketing strategies and tactics. A complete package for sure.

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

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

We used to be Justuno customers but their editor kept overwriting a small bit of HTML that we needed written in a certain way to work with a plugin on our site. I contacted their support team who tried their best to help, but their tool just couldn't make it work. When I asked OptinMonster support if my code could be used as-is they confidently said yes. We haven't looked back!

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

• For several clients that we have implemented OptinMonster for, we have had a significant increase in leads, which keeps our clients happy and we retain the business.
• Campaigns are quick to set up, so it saves us significant time versus having to go to a web developer to build pop-ups or web forms. We can add something that goes "on top" of the website and turn it on and off with ease or change display rules to adjust how we want to use it.

Incentivized