Evergage Extends Website Functionality without More Dev Overhead
March 08, 2016

Evergage Extends Website Functionality without More Dev Overhead

David Fallon | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

Evergage Free,Evergage Pro

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio

Evergage is a unique product that is being used mainly in marketing automation and web personalization, but also short-term content management and online content testing. In the marketing department, it is used primarily as a channel to distribute marketing campaign content to our website, such as banners, infobars and popups. But, Evergage's software can segment users in real-time based on a variety of factors, so we also use it to target specific offers to segments of our users. In addition, the Evergage WYSIWYG setup allows non-technical marketers to build content for our websites and test content versions against each other. Often, a content test will lead to an element our web developers can prioritize adding to our websites based on how effective Evergage showed the content to be. For instance, after extensively testing infobars through Evergage, we determined they are an effective marketing medium and so we had them built into our website architecture for more extensive use. Finally, Evergage's add on products such as Promote allow us to easily provide web content in real time that would be very difficult to build into our site, such as "trending now" or "recommended favorites" bars on our site.
  • Data gathering and provision. At the last Evergage conference in Boston, presenters made a point of saying that Evergage doesn't want to gather the information but restrict its use to within the Evergage platform; rather, they want it to provide that data for other SaaS platforms to consume and use. This is a powerful distinction, because not only is Evergage a product providing its own capabilities, but it can also help power the capabilities of platforms like email service providers, remarketing programs and analytics programs.
  • Extension of web capabilities outside of a release structure. So, if you want short-term content added to a site that would take weeks for developers to release, Evergage can fill the gap by allowing marketers to build and deploy web campaigns as needed.
  • WYSIWYG and on-page editing browser extension. This can make the complicated process of building a campaign easier for those less-code-friendly marketers. It's not perfect, and knowing even rudimentary HTML/CSS/javascript code would definitely enhance what you can do with Evergage, it is still highly usable without this knowledge and can allow marketers to do technical campaigns without a ton of technical background.
  • Proofing and quality control. Possibly because of all of the capabilities of Evergage, it is easy to accidentally deploy things that break in a website. Marketers are usually very quality-conscious, but those without a development background may not know all the things that can go wrong on a website when they accidentally redefined a CSS class, for instance. Testing a campaign is complicated and requires a split between testing creative and testing the rules that drive the appearance on the website, because if you add the rules and creative together proofers often can't see the content because they violate the rules.
  • Some parts of the product are still being rolled out and bugtested. Fortunately, Evergage's technical support is highly responsive and, when a bug is identified they fix it or provide a workaround quickly. But, as the product is growing we come across bugs occasionally that need someone to troubleshoot and resolve.
  • WYSIWYG limitations. While the WYSIWYG is great, it can also be a crutch that leads to problems. Often, when a non-code-technical person builds a campaign with the WYSIWYG, it produces complicated, repetitive and wasteful code. Then, when a coder needs to expand the campaign, they end up wading through this code trying to make sense of it and clean it up. Sometimes, starting off with code would be easier, but Evergage's automatic indenting and code "helper" software can get in the way as well, inserting spaces where they don't belong or throwing unnecessary errors.
  • 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.
Young/small companies can especially leverage Evergage to expand their web capabilities without a ton of in-house resources. Evergage can also help a developing site seem more "fresh" and cutting edge by giving it capabilities that are currently only available on the big-brand company sites because they have the resources to develop them. For instance, Evergage products can mimic the recommendation engines of large retail sites, or it can provide cool animations or surveys, or it can make elements of the page appear and disappear depending on a person's behavior. With this, even an extremely small startup or non-web savvy company can look as cutting edge as their largest competitors.