BlueConic vs. Zaius (discontinued)

BlueConic works well as a central customer database and for building detailed customer profiles. If you want to learn how customers are engaging with your brand and then act on that data, BlueConic is the perfect choice.

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

• First Party Data Collection
• First Party Data Targeting
• First Party Data Analysis

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

• The software was a bit glitchy at times and the beta products were launched a little too prematurely. I didn't feel like it was tested thoroughly and caused headaches at times.
• Qualifying the product was and is still probably hard for them. They could easily be confused as testing software (which it works well for) but their go-to-market is personalization... which I don't believe is their strength. It's more like a "real-time Ecomm optimization".
• Their connections with other providers was left a little more desirable. Would love to have seen them have more connections into CRM that the 4-5 they offered.

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

I think without a bit of training and knowledge it would be hard to walk right into a role or a task inside of BlueConic - it is kind of hard to comprehend everything that is available and all of the options. The language inside of BlueConic is also very different than other things in the industry, so it was hard to understand what it would line up with.

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

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

BlueConic is more lightweight and allows for more unique experiences at the same time. Again - this isn't meant to perfect the core UX of your site, but sit on top to deliver unique experiences to control offer management and close rates.

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

• Too early to tell. Will report back in a month. If all goes to plan though, massive. We hope subs make up the vast majority of revenues by 2020, which will be powered by BC.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized