Persado vs. VWO

Persado is an excellent tool for a small marketing team seeking to "work smarter, not harder." The tool itself is simple to use and generates instant results, all while learning and reporting at a deeper level than a human on a marketing team could. We have been able to reach the right eyes within our audience at the right time, improving open rates and generating more revenue from our promotional emails.

Incentivized

It works better for either small or big companies because small companies can start with the free plan which is very decent and has everything they need. Also for big companies who get the best paid plans they get a lot of premium functionalities, the insight module, outstanding reports. But for medium size companies who can only afford the basic paid plan, it may not be the best tool as it is very limited. For example, they cannot analize a/b tests for new and ruturning visitors, neither based on the users device category.

Incentivized

• They know way more than me on how to create effective subject lines that actually get people to open. We have solid creative and cool emails, but without the hook, it means nothing. Persado is that hook. (Side note, they are also customizable so if your company has specific guidelines/tone, you can set those parameters.)
• The analytics are amazing! It's so cool to see the responses to various emotions ebb and flow over time. We have a few that consistently perform well (and some that consistently underperform, which makes sense for them to), and a few others that seem to react to the season somehow. How would I know this on my own? (That's right, I wouldn't.)
• Creating these subject lines and exporting them to Listrak (our ESP) is insanely quick and easy. It takes more time for me to set up the split test in our ESP than it does to set up the subject lines in Persado.

Incentivized

• VWO is pretty easy to implement on websites and doesn't require a heavy technology lift
• The VWO interface is pretty intuitive and let's non-technical users make variants for testing
• The VWO reporting dashboard is excellent for determining statistical significance and understanding whether differences in conversion rates are meaningful or not

Incentivized

• Not so much a con, but area for improvement: an option to have reports generated automatically and sent to me weekly or similar. It would automate my learning and understanding of how the tool is working.
• When we write control subject lines that include emojis, I have to go outside of Persado to find the emoji I want to use, copy, and come back to Persado. However there is a button to add emojis to the Persado generated subject lines.
• Since Persado integrates with our ESP, Bronto, we'd really like to see more to the connection such as sharing conversion and revenue data.

Incentivized

• The user interface within VWO does take a bit of time to get used to, especially as it pertains to switching back and forth between tests. When running multiple experiments on a site at a time, a clear and succinct dashboard for everything in one place would be helpful (as opposed to needing to switch between A/B, multivariate, etc).

Incentivized

It's great value and we think we've ironed out all the major teething troubles. However, if we experience any more bugs or problems that significantly slow us down then we're seriously considering switching to Optimizely, which I haven't personally tested but have heard great things about from my CRO peers

I gave Visual Website Optimizer a rating of 8 because it is overall a great product to use. Setting up and keeping track of various tests is easy and straight forward. The only reason why this product is not rated higher is because the support documents online leave a lot of room for improvement.

I have not experienced an application error or unplanned outage with VWO.

Incentivized

VWO doesn't appear to slow down our website at all, though some customers with adblockers like UBlock Origin have been known to not see entire pages if VWO is making changes to the page at a macro level (background, font, etc). This is rare though.

Incentivized

While their online document support is lacking a simple email to their support team will almost always get responded to the next day. It has however taken more than one email to explain the problem to the support team till they understood the problem. The solution I was given also only half fixed the problem the rest I figured out on my own.

Training was good, just limited to the onboarding process. They walked through all of the steps it takes to get started in VWO and each of the modules, along with giving us ideas for starting our first test. I feel like it could be better if there was a guided process within the VWO program to continue to educate you along the way, and a way to turn that off for experienced users.

Incentivized

Overall, the implementation of VWO is straightforward. If you've got a straightforward way of deploying code to all of your test pages, either a good CMS or a TMS, then implementation should be a breeze. There is no tweaking to be done to the code itself, and once deployed it has the flexibility to cope with different VWO modules (tracking, conversion analysis, session analysis) without modification.

Incentivized

Phrasee wasn't an option to select, but we did evaluate them after hearing about them at a digital marketing summit. I liked what they were doing and the emails they were sending, but the pricing structure was outrageous! There was a 0% chance our CFO would approve the budget. To add salt to the wound, they also charged outrageously for a trial period. Ugh - as much as I wanted it, there was no way I could justify the ROI. Enter Persado. I got an email from a sales rep which accompanied a resource. I got excited but hesitated. I then saw they offered a free 14-day trial. Wait - what?? Free?! Yes. Wendy gave me the grand tour and holy cannoli I was immediately impressed with the results of our very first send. And it's only gotten better. Sorry Phrasee, I'm with Persado now.

Incentivized

There are significant differences in each platform when it comes to Optimizely and vwo. From a functionality and performance perspective they each have their pros and cons. It is important to go through the feature sets of each and ensure the solution you select will work specifically with your business objectives and conversion rate optimization goals

Incentivized

The product seems infinitely scalable for our needs (small business) and we've never had any issue with loading VWO-edited elements. I will say, though, that online customers with ad blockers have been known to not see certain VWO elements as their third-party scripts are disabled.

Incentivized

• Granted these numbers are driven by a number of other factors as well, our email marketing program has grown by 44% and 35% in the last 2 years respectively. More email opens from Persado subject lines has certainly contributed to this growth.
• Open rate improvement of 11% between control subjects and Persado subjects.
• Click rate improvement of 27% between control subjects and Persado subjects.

Incentivized

• The ability to offer a CRO service is greatly enhanced by VWO, as it allows us to run tests for clients
• The editor means to some extent we don't need much developer resource to run the tests, lowering costs of doing so

Incentivized