Twilio Segment vs. Zaius (discontinued)

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

Optimizely Data Platform is a great tool for teams who look to use open-source tools over tools with white glove service. You do get a dedicated customer success manager and access to their (almost) 24/7 support team via chat, but the real benefits of the platform stand to be unlocked by teams who enjoy getting their hands dirty.

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

• It's relatively simple to use
• Segment building is quick and can be easily customized with field data
• Chat support is generally fast to respond

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

• Automation of data from other platforms such as our ERP.
• The approval process needs work. I should be able to flag fields that have issues and give users feedback if a product is rejected.

Incentivized

There's so much that needs to be improved and it seems like not much has happened since Optimizely first took over. When Optimizely did take over, they reduced the UX of campaign reporting.

Incentivized

• Creating reports can be difficult and they aren't very visual.
• There is not much control you can have with your imported product catalog. Product filters can be difficult to use.
• Manually importing customers is a more difficult process from when I was using Mailchimp 10 years ago.
• Figuring out how to inject a module onto a page is difficult.
• Figuring out how to get off an email blacklist is near impossible even with ip warming. Very little help here.

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

Positive - Onboarding was quick and easy. Positive - Access to a Zaius data analyst has been wonderful. Negative - I don't know who our CSM is if we even have one.

Incentivized

We have a home built CRM. From start to finish our implementation was a nightmare loaded with problems that destroyed my initial trust with the platform.

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

Oh my goodness, there were many, including:

• Klaviyo
• Salesforce Email Marketing Cloud
• Bronto
• Marapost (the worst experience we ever had. We used them for the longest year on earth).
• Silverpop (IBM)
• I forgot their name but they are based in the middle of nowhere Pennsylvania.
• Exact Target
• Active Campaign
• Get Response
• Drip
• SendInBlue
• And more I cannot remember. We spent over six months looking at everything.

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.

• We hit record numbers this year in regards to sales which is attributed to the launch of our new e-commerce website.

Incentivized