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

During high-volume communication times such as Black Friday and the holidays, Optimizely Data Platform's ability to allow us to seamlessly target (or exclude) certain audiences has enabled us to effectively interact with our customers without overdoing things. However, we would like to have the ability to send auto-order updates during peak volume times, as this would alleviate pressure on our customer service department.

Incentivized

• Unmatched insight into the customer journey when they come into contact with our business.
• The ability for it to break down data in a way that allows us to analyse customer engagement.
• It efficiently integrates with my current softwares eg Shopify.

Incentivized

• UI/UX - The platform is extremely fluid and intuitive.
• Setup - It has a speedy integration with our Shopify platform.
• Insightful - Building segments is easy and gives us the information we need to make proper business decisions.

Incentivized

• Potentially, it could "warn" the developers/product about areas in our code that are not covered by events (and let us decide if it's "be design" or we missed it).
• It's difficult to get accumulated history data exported out in order to analyze it.
• There's no easy way to compare data from 2 sources (our main target is to compare the same events between our test environment and prod environment).

Incentivized

• They finally have gotten on-site recommendations, hooray! I wish it happened sooner, and it is still early in its development, so I would say some things take longer than I would hope to do. But who does not feel that way about everyone? The key here is it gets done, and they keep improving things, which I love.
• I would like there to be more opportunities to use it outside of eCommerce. I would love to use it for content-specific sites, but honestly, that is not what it was built for, so I will shut up about that now.

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

Segment is not really suitable for most websites that have more than 10k MTU - If you run a semi-popular website, there are many tools out there that will do basic web analytics, like Google Analytics. Google Analytics provides simple resources for tracking user growth, demographics, and conversion rates of websites, which is more suitable for companies that are looking for simpler analytics data.

Incentivized

Optimizely Data Platform has a friendlier interface than most and feels more custom. If we have an idea we would like to implement, we know that it's possible to do so with ODP - it may take a bit of time and it might not be the most intuitive implementation, but it is possible. With other platforms, there is less room for creativity, and many ideas that you may come up with will, unfortunately just not be possible to implement.

Incentivized

• Event tracking lets you take ownership of your own data, which in part makes it easy to craft metrics and do deep dives to see how your product is working. This has a huge ROI, because without metrics you're basically flying blind.
• You can also use Segment's event tracking to fuel your experimentation and AB testing strategies. AB testing is the best way to ship features in a tech product with confidence that you're making a positive impact.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized