SessionM vs. Twilio Segment

SessionM is ideal for enterprise restaurants, brands, and organizations to build and drive loyal behaviors via technology platforms. They've built their system via robust APIs integrations, but are now diving into a white label app system that allows smaller brands (100 units+) to utilize their incredible technology in their own brand, as opposed to just bigger players. They're the best at what they do.

Incentivized

Best suited: - Merging emails coming from: Facebook leads forms, Unbounce or landing pages forms, Google forms, any other kind of lead generation tool and bundling all that information together for a single user "profile". - Passing events generated in multiple applications by the same user (product selected in web, product discarded in cart, etc) and delivering those events into other applications (like a CRM) Less appropriate: - Reading/updating data directly from segment from a frontend application

Incentivized

• Using data science to determine guest tendencies and actions: their system is incredibly smart and tracks historical actions to guess/estimate future actions, and creating programs to influence those actions.
• Integrated communication platforms to speak to all of our guests within various tactics—email, push notifications, text messages, in-app messages, etc.
• Loyalty management & CRM: creating and managing a program that runs consistently across the system.

Incentivized

• Multi-platform. Segment has easy integrations in many different web, backend, and app platforms/frameworks. We use the Segment SDK in Android and iOS as well as our node.js backend.
• Segment is fairly affordable for early-stage companies that are trying out different analytics software. The "developer" plan is free and is suitable for most companies with products that have a small user base.
• The UI is great! It is extremely intuitive and easy-to-learn, and this made it take very little time to integrate this software into our analytics and marketing workflows.

Incentivized

• Some improvement could be made on their integrations process with all platforms (olo, monkey media, etc.).

Incentivized

• More and richer sources. For example, MailChimp is a source but the data you get from MailChimp is quite limited. I ended up writing my own scripts to take better advantage of MailChimp's API because Segment's integration was lacking.
• Better examples on how to set up event tracking. Pageview tracking is easy enough, but it would be nice if they had a sample app and corresponding code for it and showed you, via Git commits, how to add various kinds of events.

Incentivized

Over the period it took us to set up, we kept going back to their enablement team to help us with the setup, and they were always ready and were very helpful in the entire process. Even with their documentation, they took the time out to help us work through the process. We've never had a message/email unanswered for more than an hour on working days.

Incentivized

SessionM was light years ahead of Fishbowl, in the data science tendency assumptions that are built into the system, plus they don't offer an app for your brand to use. You'd have to employ a 3rd vendor to manage that. It's also important to note that SessionM sees ALL guests and POS content in the system, not just loyalty identified transactions.

Incentivized

We chose Twilio Segment for the good API integration and node resources, I would use Ontraport again, particularly if I didn't have the requirements for API and development/platform integration. Certainly the set up and management is easy and seamless with both the API and the user interface to use depending on circumstances and requirements.

Incentivized

• Our work with SessionM has been so incredibly impactful to our brand loyal guests, and the value they bring to our brand. For example, our loyal guests are worth $100+ more than our non-loyalty guests.

Incentivized

• Segment has enabled us to get a full view of our front end activity, join it to our back-end activity, and get full visibility into our funnels and user activity.
• Segment lets us send events to ad tools with a full audit trail so all the numbers line up.
• Segment also brings data from other sources into our data warehouse, saving our data engineering time from building commodity connectors.