What do you like best about Adobe Journey Optimizer?
We have several IPs, so theoretically we should be able to send high volumes without worrying about deliverability.
We're an Adobe company now using several products, so theoretically there's a benefit to bundling. We'll revise this review if we find it.
We like pointing out AJO's flaws to the Cyber and IT teams that forced us into AJO when our last ESP was perfect for our needs. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
What do you dislike about Adobe Journey Optimizer?
We're still having deliverability issues despite the fact that:
- We're the 6th largest bank in the U.S. with a superb sender reputation.
- We've successfully IP warmed with Adobe's help
- We're throttling emails slowly
Test emails to our own company inbox deliver about 60% of the time and we should be whitelisted.
Basic ESP features (in other ESPs) require help from Adobe software engineers and our own internal MarTech partners. Features are not intuitive to marketers or junior email managers.
Throttling is a huge hassle because AJO doesn't have an out-of-the-box throttling feature. You have to build a complicated program with a bunch of splits to send 250K p/h.
We have about 50 different types of emails with 50 different From Names. We can only use 10 From Names because their UI has a glitch whereby the dropdown box only shows 10.
AJO literally changes HTML code and restructures it which often breaks the template (lose BG colors, breaks table wrappers, breaks 3-column module, etc. Litmus renders the email perfectly across all clients. If I send the email in our old ESP it renders perfectly across the board. But AJO requires “web-ready” HTML, which is not what is required by other MAP/ESP tools and not even a best practice for email development. AJO appears to be the culmination of web developers getting together to make an email product. This is breaking about 30% of our email templates, causing added troubleshooting and delays.
We can't pause or edit live journeys, a FT we had in our last two platforms. You can only stop a live journey, clone it, revise and then start the new journey. Migrating clients midway through the old journey into the new clone is nearly impossible.
The program is massive and therefore runs extremely slow, especially in the afternoon EST time. We get time-outs, things don't save, loss of work and time. We're having to do extra (unnecessary) measures (e.g. lists that auto-delete after a time) to keep the database super lean. This supposedly helps, but we just started in AJO and already getting timeouts. Once we have a hundred programs and things running concurrently, it'll only get worse.
This review is scratching the surface. We have an ever increasing doc several pages long listing out all the glitches, poor functionality, and risks. We expect burnout, churn, and significant revenue loss due to the many delays.
According to a previous direct report, Intuit recently left AJO. They had a very similar experience. Unfortunately, we were too far deep into onboarding and implementation to heed his warning. Now we're likely stuck for a few years so Cyber and IT can try to prove that the platform is worthy of the exorbitant cost. Review collected by and hosted on G2.com.
