Iterable vs Braze: Side-by-side comparison
Utilizing data-driven communication is a crucial way to effectively engage customers through personalized & captivating messages, delivered through the right channel at the right moment. To achieve this, a Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) can be indispensable, empowering you to segment your audiences, initiate tailored campaigns, and leverage your data efficiently. As you evaluate CEPs, the two prominent platforms recommended by us would be Iterable & Braze.
In this blog, we will explore the distinctions between the two platforms, thoroughly evaluating aspects such as features, pricing, & customer support. The choice of CEP that suits your needs will ultimately rely on your specific context and business type. Nevertheless, we will offer recommendations on which CEP would be more suitable in different circumstances.
What is a Customer Engagement Platform?
A customer engagement platform is software that enables companies to effectively oversee, analyze, & enhance the entire customer journey. Through automated delivery of personalized messages across various devices and platforms, this technology facilitates seamless communication with customers. These powerful tools enable brands to harness insights derived from first-party data to consolidate their customer data into a unified platform, leading to the delivery of highly personalized experiences for their customers. This leads your company to foster enduring loyalty from your customers. This software has the potential to transform each interaction into a long-term relationship, thereby minimizing customer turnover.
This personalization is determined by various factors, including:
a. The device utilized by your customers.
b. Their purchase history.
c. The status of a support ticket.
d. Their social media activity.
and so on…
Main Features of a Customer Engagement Platform
A CEP that encompasses the following essential bases or features has the potential to significantly enhance customer satisfaction, engagement, & retention, ultimately leading to improved profitability. Therefore, let’s explore some of the notable features that you can anticipate encountering in customer engagement tools.
1. Segmentation of Database
Customer engagement platforms offer highly sophisticated capabilities for segmenting your customer database. Each day, as you accumulate a vast amount of customer information through different platforms, your CEP enables you to effectively utilize that data. With advanced segmentation, you can identify trends and promptly take appropriate actions. Moreover, this level of segmentation empowers you to deliver hyper-personalized customer communications, but we will delve deeper into this aspect shortly.
2. Knowledge Base
The majority of customer engagement platforms offer a dedicated area where you can create and expand your own repository of informative articles. These resources empower customers to proactively seek answers to their queries, eliminating the need to directly approach and wait for your support team. By simply entering a keyword related to their challenge in the search bar, customers can access a comprehensive list of relevant articles sourced from the knowledge base.
3. AI Chat & Live Support
An AI-enabled CEP equipped with live chat and bot functionality plays a crucial role in filtering out customers who can easily solve their queries with relevant resources in the knowledge base, rather than engaging with the support team (where the bot seamlessly guides them to the appropriate destination). Additionally, it expedites the process of understanding the customer’s core issue before they reach out to a support representative (if the query exceeds the chatbot’s capabilities). This capability is truly transformative since CEPs can offer a combination of human and chatbot support, significantly accelerating response times. More often than not, customers are unable to discern the difference or simply do not mind, as long as their questions are promptly answered.
4. Streamlined Ticket Management Processes
Support ticketing forms the fundamental aspect of any customer support platform, serving as the central hub where your support team addresses intricate queries. An ineffective ticketing system, on the other hand, is highly likely to result in customer attrition, as it fails to efficiently resolve issues.
However, what sets CEP ticketing systems apart is the ability for customers to initiate support tickets directly through conversation windows or chat boxes embedded in your website, app, and other platforms. Ticket numbers are automatically assigned in the background, relieving customers from the need to keep track of them. Moreover, queries are labelled, organized, and given priority within a shared inbox that is accessed by multiple teams in your company. As a result, when a customer is transferred to different support team members, it does not disrupt the continuity of the conversation, and there is no need for customers to restate their queries. The support team has access to all the necessary information to seamlessly continue the conversation from where it was left off. In fact, most customers will not even perceive the transition taking place.
5. Personalised Marketing
CEPs retain comprehensive records of every interaction a customer has with your company, encompassing their most engaged emails, purchased products, attended events, and viewed web pages. By monitoring this data, you gain the ability to send hyper-personalized marketing communications that directly address the challenges customers are facing or engage with them on topics aligned with their demonstrated interests. Additionally, you can leverage this information to deliver push notifications, informing customers about feature enhancements in areas of your product that you know they utilize extensively. Furthermore, you have the opportunity to conduct A/B testing on your messaging throughout all platforms. This enables you to gain invaluable insights into the preferences of different customer segments regarding the manner, location, and timing of communication.
6. Smooth integration with third-party platforms
In order for a customer engagement platform to effectively fulfil its role, it is essential for it to seamlessly integrate with your existing technology stack. This ensures that the flow of information into and out of your CEP occurs automatically, leaving no room for oversight. A reputable CEP will possess robust native integrations with other platforms.
Top 5 Examples of Customer Engagement Platforms
In a constantly evolving and highly competitive business landscape, where other factors remain relatively equal, customer engagement can emerge as the decisive element for the success of your business. Presented below is a carefully curated list of customer engagement platforms that can provide your business with this often-overlooked advantage:
1. Iterable
Iterable is a versatile marketing platform that facilitates the creation of personalized & dynamic emails. Its user-friendly reporting tool allows for easy navigation and utilization. Additionally, Iterable boasts an exceptional customer support system. Should you have any inquiries or require assistance with its implementation, the Iterable team readily offers their expertise and addresses your questions.
However, one limitation of this platform is that its A/B testing process is not as comprehensive or user-friendly. Choosing two different templates within the A/B tool is not a straightforward task, as it requires redesigning the same template, resulting in a time-consuming process. It appears that the only way to conduct A/B testing with two different campaigns is by setting up a workflow.
Still, this product is highly beneficial for marketers and seamlessly integrates new tools into the marketing toolkit. Iterable consistently enhances its platform through regular updates, focusing on usability, and continually improving its range of product offerings.
2. Braze
Braze proves to be highly effective in the realm of engagement and lifecycle marketing. It offers an extensive range of features and enables the execution of intricate trigger-based experiments across multiple channels, which is truly remarkable. What sets Braze apart is its accessibility to non-developers, facilitating seamless collaboration with marketing partners. The built-in analytics provided by Braze is genuinely user-friendly right from the start, although navigating their interface may initially pose some challenges. However, extensive documentation is readily available to guide users through the process. Furthermore, the customer service team is accommodating and willing to schedule conversations to assist users in exploring the features that capture their interest. Braze simplifies omnichannel communications by providing a streamlined solution for both email and push marketing, resulting in cost savings. The user-friendly interface of Braze further enhances efficiency and simplifies your tasks.
3. CleverTap
CleverTap provides comprehensive user data, encompassing crash reports, analytics, and user experience information, conveniently accessible for your analysis. This enables you to gain deeper user insights and implement meaningful enhancements for real users. Setting up CleverTap is a straightforward process with seamless integrations. The dashboard user interface is intuitive, visually appealing, and well-crafted. It offers non-developers easy access, allowing them to navigate the interface effortlessly and stay informed about project progress and current challenges. However, one drawback of this platform is that crash analytics can be somewhat elusive, potentially leading to wasted time in the process of pinpointing the cause of a crash. While the majority of the data provided is valuable, interpreting it effectively requires a developer who possesses the necessary expertise to identify the key insights.
4. MoEngage
MoEngage boasts an aesthetically pleasing and well-structured user interface, featuring a professional colour scheme. Constructing dashboards, channels, and campaigns is a seamless process, thanks to its straightforward and self-explanatory approach. The technical support team at MoEngage is highly competent, professional, and knowledgeable, providing round-the-clock assistance whenever needed. The standout feature of MoEngage is its ability to facilitate user journey development, event-based tracking, and user segmentation without necessitating any programming expertise. However, the only minor drawback of this product is the challenging and time-consuming process of importing users and creating personalized segments. Additionally, there is a limitation on the number of members that can be imported simultaneously.
Iterable vs Blaze: Feature Comparison
When searching for the appropriate Customer Engagement Platform (CDP) for your requirements, it is crucial to take into account the distinctions between Iterable and Braze, despite their similarities in functionality in various crucial aspects.
Multi-channel automation & workflows
Both Braze and Iterable provide multi-channel messaging capabilities, encompassing email, SMS, push notifications, & basic in-app messaging.
However, Iterable sets itself apart by offering an API that enables event-triggered campaigns across multiple channels, facilitated by a user-friendly workflow editor. On the other hand, Braze’s capabilities are limited to one-off messages, making it more challenging to create a comprehensive customer journey. Notably, Braze’s advanced multi-channel automation feature, Canvas Flow, is exclusively available to users on an annual plan.
Analytics & Reports
Iterable offers a range of features for campaign analytics, including the ability to export analytics data, customize the dashboard, schedule sends with a calendar feature, & generate custom reports. Notably, Iterable also provides web and SEO analytics, which are not offered by Braze.
In contrast, Braze provides an analytics dashboard and the ability to generate custom reports, allowing users to track key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to their campaigns. Additionally, Braze offers an optional add-on feature that allows the export of limited data, enabling integration with business intelligence (BI) or analytics platforms for more advanced analytics capabilities.
Personalisation
Overall, Iterable excels in leveraging personalization compared to Braze. Iterable sets itself apart from Braze through its “catalogue” feature, which enables the generation of content in real time that can be delivered dynamically to customers based on their behaviour patterns.
On the other hand, Braze also allows for campaign personalization by including user-specific information, such as the user’s name, in messages, but its personalization capabilities are limited in comparison.
Anonymous users
Some marketers find it frustrating that Iterable lacks the capability to track anonymous users and events. This limitation can result in gaps in data, as marketers are unable to link anonymous behaviour to specific customers once their identities are revealed.
In contrast, Braze addresses this issue by capturing anonymous user data. However, brands should be mindful that incorporating this data may incur additional costs based on Braze’s pricing structure. Another challenge is that anonymous users maintain a separate ID within the platform even after their identification, leading to duplicate IDs.
A/B Testing
Iterable provides a comprehensive A/B testing feature called Experiments, enabling you to conduct rigorous iterations. It allows you to test various elements within a single channel and even compare different channels for specific messages.
On the other hand, Braze offers support for both A/B testing and multivariate testing, which goes beyond the capabilities of Iterable. Braze also incorporates AI-assisted testing options. However, some users of Braze find the A/B testing metrics to be overwhelming and face challenges in deriving actionable insights from the data.
Pricing of Iterable vs Braze
Both Iterable and Braze do not provide pricing information on their websites.
When it comes to Iterable, their pricing tends to be higher, and users often encounter extra charges for fundamental features like events, API calls, attribute additions, sending messages, & data storage. The monthly starting cost is $500, and unfortunately, there is no choice for a free trial to assess the platform before investing.
As for Braze, their pricing is decided by data consumption. They offer custom pricing without a free trial and are relatively more cost-effective compared to Iterable.
Still not sure about the best Customer Engagement Platform that will help your Company to reach the next level? Talk to our CEP Expert for getting clarity on this!