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.
$199
per month
Snowflake
Score 9.0 out of 10
N/A
The Snowflake Cloud Data Platform is the eponymous data warehouse with, from the company in San Mateo, a cloud and SQL based DW that aims to allow users to unify, integrate, analyze, and share previously siloed data in secure, governed, and compliant ways. With it, users can securely access the Data Cloud to share live data with customers and business partners, and connect with other organizations doing business as data consumers, data providers, and data service providers.
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.
I am over our HR data, and we use Workday for our HR management system. I have a script in place that runs reports on Workday and saves the results as CSVs. I can then use stages in Snowflake to insert these CSVs into Snowflake, then I can insert or truncate and replace these staged tables into a final schema. Then once these are in a schema I can reference them and build out my data models. In addition to ingesting CSVs, Snowflake has the ability to write a CSV file to our Amazon S3 bucket. Ingesting these CSVs, transforming the data, then delivering it to a destination would've involved so much more coding than my current process if we were on any other platform.
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.
Snowflake scales appropriately allowing you to manage expense for peak and off peak times for pulling and data retrieval and data centric processing jobs
Snowflake offers a marketplace solution that allows you to sell and subscribe to different data sources
Snowflake manages concurrency better in our trials than other premium competitors
Snowflake has little to no setup and ramp up time
Snowflake offers online training for various employee types
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.
This tool is very much technical and proper knowledge is required, so mostly you have to hire an IT team.
I wish if various videos could be available for basic quires like its initiation, then I think it would act as a guideline and would help the beginners a lot.
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.
SnowFlake is very cost effective and we also like the fact we can stop, start and spin up additional processing engines as we need to. We also like the fact that it's easy to connect our SQL IDEs to Snowflake and write our queries in the environment that we are used to
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.
The interface is similar to other SQL query systems I've used and is fairly easy to use. My only complaint is the syntax issues. Another thing is that the error messages are not always the easiest thing to understand, especially when you incorporate temp tables. Some of that is to be expected with any new database.
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.
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.
We have had terrific experiences with Snowflake support. They have drilled into queries and given us tremendous detail and helpful answers. In one case they even figured out how a particular product was interacting with Snowflake, via its queries, and gave us detail to go back to that product's vendor because the Snowflake support team identified a fault in its operation. We got it solved without lots of back-and-forth or finger-pointing because the Snowflake team gave such detailed information.
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.
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.
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.
I have had the experience of using one more database management system at my previous workplace. What Snowflake provides is better user-friendly consoles, suggestions while writing a query, ease of access to connect to various BI platforms to analyze, [and a] more robust system to store a large amount of data. All these functionalities give the better edge to Snowflake.
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.
Positive impact: we use Snowflake to track our subscription and payment charges, which we use for internal and investor reporting
Positive impact: 3 times faster query speed compared to Treasure Data means that answers to stakeholders can be delivered quicker by analysts
Positive impact: recommender systems now source their data from Snowflake rather than Spark clusters, improving development speed, and no longer require maintainence of Spark clusters.
