Oracle CX Marketing (formerly Oracle Marketing Cloud) is a solution designed to enable marketers to plan and execute automated marketing campaigns via email, display search, video advertising, and mobile while delivering a personalized customer experience for their prospects.
$2,000
per month
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Companies use Interaction Studio to tailor interactions with customers and prospects to increase loyalty, engagement, and conversions. Using real-time cross-channel personalization and machine learning capabilities, Interaction Studio adds to Marketing Cloud’s robust customer data, audience segmentation, and engagement platform.
A duration of one and a half years is enough for us to recognize the capabilities of a tool and in my opinion, this one is just a great tool to manage marketing campaigns of even massive-sized firms. Its marketing automation tool and its way of managing campaign and the way it executes digital initiatives is enough to get an inkling of its abilities. Less favorable for the people who want to have something at a cheap price and are more dependent on the reports as its reports have nothing much in detail.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is particularly well suited for automated marketing that includes multiple touch points like email, SMS, etc., where we need to automatically send triggered messages to customers based on their behavior or recommend products by sending personalized messages. It is a great tool that allows us to easily create and manage campaigns and to track and analyze customer behavior in order to optimize the campaign.
Evergage plays nicely with most code frameworks and has been very stable. The only situation in which we could not (yet) find a way to use Evergage is in conjunction with Handlebars.js templates.
Enterprise-level data security considerations are well-handled by Evergage. Trust me... as a top-level PCI compliant company that builds travel loyalty solutions for major US banks, we have no greater concern than data security.
"No flicker" synchronous integration is a VERY important feature Evergage offers -- I'm unsure if any other competitors offer the same as I think Evergage has a patent on this. So when the webpage loads, users don't see the original page contents flash before being replaced with personalized/alternate contents.
The powerful user interface is easy-to-use and comes in two flavors: a more traditional CMS-style "admin" view and an on-page WYSIWYG view.
Test use cases in the browser prior to going live.
It's easy to build and measure A/B/n tests, either as rule-based tests, or as % split testing.
I love the ability to create user segments based on "sentence-style" logic structures that incorporates actions, KPIs, even third-party data.
Evergage is built to accommodate everyone from non-technical users to coders. Use the WYSIWYG editor to bring things to life, build complex front-end use cases with Javascript/JQuery, or use the API for control from the server side.
Integration options outside of auto-syncs. I am currently having an issue trying to find an adapter to use with Eloqua to API into our data warehouse but keep the functionality on the Eloqua side.
To provide more transparency and visual details of the syncs (integrations of outside data) from any other system that is feeding Eloqua, like what is being updated or changed, better explanations of errors, drill down to newly created records.
Custom Objects - Need to have a way to create CDOs outside of just form submissions and uploading of lists, like if you needed to import a file nightly to feed that CDO data but automate the import and make sure it maps to a contact record.
Import of data from a file on SFTP - There is no way to filter or create logic to control what is being fed into Eloqua. Currently, that manipulation has to be done by the IT side first. Less flexibility.
Better auditing capabilities within the canvas. meaning, sometimes if something is changed or not working the problem may not necessarily show up in immediately, the pattern could take a while to present itself. For example, the feeders into the program. If there is a problem, I don't know that maybe contacts are not entering the program until we do reporting that month and realize there was a lull of contacts going through. Then we have a whole month of missed records or other potential data issues. When you get do large and your Eloqua machine is very robust, the harder it is to see everything
Be able to add more than 250 custom contact records. That definitely inhibits my organization in how we need to use that record.
Some of the reporting functionality could use some work, but they are making vast improvements.
The catalog user interface for available promotable items could benefit from the ability to customize the viewable columns and add filtering.
The amount of time that Evergage considers a user's session to be active could be increased. I find myself having to log back into the tool multiple times throughout the day, as I will leave the tool to check emails and during that time, I get logged out.
We have been able to automate so many marketing processes with Eloqua over the past 5 years that the only direction would be to adopt the latest and greatest features Eloqua adds. The alternative would be to go back to the marketing stone-age and start over again. And we would rather move forward with increased automation and efficiency.
When you first engage with Evergage you have to make a choice on how you're going to use and deploy their product. Are you going to use it for, as is my case, an "in-app" deployment for your SaaS application or for your public facing website. We elected to use it for "in-app" first so we could build knowledge and have a measure of churn reduction. We've done well enough that we're developing a strategy for use on our public facing website now for better lead building and qualification. We're about to double our engagement with Evergage essentially. Evergage has been incredibly responsive. They use great customer service tools and eventually gave us our own account manager. As an IT person, once setup, I intentionally worked to remove myself from the product as a support means so our customer service people are working directly with Evergage and great things are happening. Evergage has just been constantly improving for the better.
Personally, I find it quite easy to use. But for those members of our team who have little or no testing experience, it's been a bit more difficult. There's also training required for development teams in order to have your campaigns coded and set up in the most efficient way. Our developers have been able to do basic and intermediate tests with no difficulty, and they find the interface itself quite intuitive... it's just the extremely complex tests that require a bit more understanding.
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.
There are occasional complaints about slowness to refresh a screen or build a report. However, this is as much a factor of network access speeds as the system itself, since often the complaints occur when someone is accessing on a wireless network.
Evergage is quick loading and very responsive. We always have concerns about page load time and the integration of Evergage with our websites has never once caused any issue in this regard.
We found that we often were telling support people how the system worked. Because we were on E9 that created a lot of support issues as well since few people on the support team seemed to know how E9 worked. That was mostly okay except when we had major system issues (like SSO preventing us from logging in after an update), it became really hard to get answers that weren't vague. It was always the issues that had the highest visibility within the organization (like with Sales) that seemed to take forever to resolve and didn't have a clear escalation path. When Oracle switched Eloqua over to the Oracle support portal it just got worse
It would be a full 10 except for a couple of times when it took over a week to get a response. Otherwise they are very responsive, very knowledgeable and very helpful. They really have a great team overall, not just support but even account reps are always eager to help and provide ideas and best practices.
They offer very basic classes which are required for master certification.
After having been through it, I would not consider anyone with a master certification any more qualified, unlike Salesforce.com certification which is a more difficult thing to acquire. For example, one of the classes towards certification was around social media. I would have expected examples of how to incorporate into campaigns in the product, with a demo and hands-on test. Instead, it was a powerpoint slideshow that went on way too long and covered really basic stuff like “what is Facebook, what is Twitter”
Training program is not very well established. There is very little documentations. More often than not it's in-person training. I wish there were more video tutorials so that somebody can learn the system quickly. Their documentation is very much like an RFP. Long and very technichal. They should definitly improve on this area.
Ok, so, this sounds like it could be horrible because it was all remote, but we loved it... the Adobe training environment was easy to use, and the trainers were engaging. It was simple to switch back and forth between the meeting and the hands-on exercises in their training instances. We took the fundamentals training early in our implementation-- before the consultants came onsite-- and I know this made a big difference in our implementation, because we were able to ask informed questions throughout
I give it a 10 because the only issue we had was a result of not following the guidance we were given. Maxymiser provided a customized implementation guide for each site where we were adding the code. On our site implementations when we followed that guide to the letter, it was extremely fast and easy and has worked very well.
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.
It was quite complex to generate segments with Adobe analytics and I wasn’t personally satisfied with the overall performance of Adobe Analytics and wasn’t enough flexible in any way. So we decided to switch to something else better than Adobe Analytics and is available in the market at a cheap rate and we ended up doing our research for the most suitable tool at Oracle Infinity and we don’t regret our decision.
Appcues - I like them. Very easy to use, which is the one main advantage they have over Evergage. That said their simplicity means the tool is limited in what it can do compared to Evergage. Plus Evergage's data logging capabilities in addition to messaging make it more useful for my needs.
Eloqua is definitely good for larger companies that have 100,000+ contacts and complex marketing workflows and data. Personalization is fairly robust with Eloqua for larger campaigns with smart content and features. Scaling across channels is also seamless - as the platform has great options for non-email channels like SMS, Direct Mail, Chat, etc.
We are able to use it to help our clients scale through testing
We have been able to measure the impact of our events and sales events so we can determine which events to continue in the future and determine future investment
Launch a new brand out of Eloqua and measure awareness
Positive: allows better functionality without hiring or diverting a whole team of developers, which would be extremely costly.
Positive: fits into our existing campaign structure neatly without needing a complicated separate process.
Positive: support has been excellent and responsive, quickly aiding and resolving problems.
Negative: can be too powerful, leading to campaigns that break if they are not thoroughly checked before deployment. Also, can become a crutch acting as merely a content management system when it's segmentation capabilities are not understood or explored.
