Omeda

Once fully implemented it was fairly easy to roll out campaigns to our websites, email, etc.

The Form Builder is the platform with the hardest learning curve for me. With that said Omeda has made large strides in making this more user friendly.

The overall feature set is impressive. From list management to the built-in Customer Data Platform and the email marketing / sending platform to creating customized journeys for readers that push content depending on action to Social Media, web sites and additional email sends.

Combining all of these features really helps when having to look at all the different platforms out there that can provide each of these services separately... makes the decision to purchase that much easier knowing that its under one roof.

There's always a need for iteration when software is involved. User interface oddities here and there come to mind, however, these oddities can be overcome just by learning the software and understanding why things are the way they are.

Can it be improved? Absolutely! Omeda constantly pushes out new builds throughout the year that address things and are open to putting your requests into the build sequence.

The ability to have one centralized location where we can store vast amounts of demographic, firmographic and behavioral data that we can activate instantly via email or off-platform in social and search is paramount to our business. Additionally, Omeda's previous management of our print fulfillment eased the integration of our magazine subscribers into our known audience.

Omeda gives us the ability to handle all the key elements of our business. We can deploy our editorial products and track engagement. We can conduct audience development campaigns using Odyssey, personalizations, and standalone campaigns. We can provide continually refreshed audiences to activate on other platforms like Google and Facebook. Lastly, the sheer amount of data Omeda is able to store gives us access to insights on our audience we've never had until now.

The UI of accessing standard reports does not compare to that available from many competitors. It is cumbersome to pull reports and often involves complex queries in Audience Builder. Outputs often need to go into another piece of software for visualization or manipulation.

Additionally, while we know you are a customer-centric database, it has been challenging for us to get basic information on subscriber growth and attrition. We feel that with so Omeda having so many publisher clients we can't be alone in this request. Anyone managing a newsletter or digital subscription product needs to know how many subscribers they are adding or losing on a regular basis.

Lastly, while we have heard that improvements are on the horizon for Dragon Forms, their sole benefit right now is the immediacy of information passthrough into Omeda. Their UI and ability to be customized lags behind other free options and frequently forces the question of whether user experience or CDP convenience is more important on a project.

Ever look at your operations team and ask yourself why does it take so long to get things done? Ever ask, why are things so hard and then look at your tech stack with the volume of systems and shake your head and say, oh, that's why. Well that was the boat we were in. We removed 3 systems: Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Tealium and an audience system called Knowledge Marketing. We consolidated everything into a single technology stack on the Omeda platform. Our audience database members grew by 37%. We had 56% efficiency in email operations which is staggering for a small team. And we had 100% redeployment of our database and development IT resources allocated to true development projects to grow our business. Guess what folks, that's what I call true growth, scale and efficiency in operations.

When you consolidate systems, you obviously are removing a best in breed system that has tremendous power because that applications core existence was built for a single job. So we did trade off on some functionality in the area of CDP and on the audience platform. However, I go back to the over whelming increase in operation efficiency within the email department. Our email deployment team is small. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud tool, if you have used is it before is a large beast. To many clicks, hops, jumps from screen to screen. Complicated and time consuming. The email team sets up and deploys emails in a fraction of the time it takes. And with the audience database being directly integrated in real time with the email platform, the job is seamless and the reporting is tremendous. 360 degree, non-stop view of the customer. So there will always be a tradeoff on some functionality. I can live with that to gain efficiency, scale and better visibility into the data.

Their query and customer data platform tools are powerful and relatively easy to use. Their support team is great at helping you learn and use the software.

Their form builder is powerful but complex and you'll probably need help from their team or an experienced HTML/CSS person on your team if you go the self-service method. Luckily they help with initial setup and integration and can build all the forms to your specs if you need to.