Silverpop Engage (Now Owned by IBM) Ratings & User Feedback
Silverpop was founded in 1999 as an email marketing platform and it remains better known as such today. Silverpop acquired its marketing automation capabilities through the acquisition of Vtrenz in 2007; these new capabilities were simply added to the existing Engage platform. In 2012 Silverpop acquired CoreMotives, a Marketing Automation solution that operates entirely within Microsoft Dynamics CRM. A high proportion of customers are B2C but Silverpop reports that they too are using sophisticated marketing automation features. IBM announced their acquisition of Silverpop on April 10th, 2014. The rumored purchase price is $270 million, or about 3x estimated 2013 revenue.
| Company status | Acquired by IBM |
|---|---|
| 2013 revenue estimate | $80m* |
| Growth 2011-2012 | 40%** |
| Customers | 2,000*** |
| Employees | 500*** |
Aggregate User Ratings on TrustRadius
Silverpop's scores are somewhat below the average, with the lowest scores for “likelihood to recommend” and “likelihood to renew” indicating some dissatisfaction.
| Silverpop Engage | Marketing Automation Average | |
|---|---|---|
| Likelihood to recommend | 6.7 | 8.4 |
| Likelihood to renew | 6.6 | 8.3 |
| Product usability | 6.3 | 8.3 |
| Performance and reliability | 7.3 | 8.8 |
| Support rating | 7.4 | 8.3 |
| Training satisfaction | 9.0 | 8.6 |
| Implementation satisfaction | 7.8 | 8.5 |
Summary of Review Feedback
| Strengths | Areas for Improvement |
|---|---|
| Email Marketing — Strong email capabilities reflect the product's legacy as an email marketing platform. | User Interface — User interface is dated and needs an upgrade. |
| Application Programming Interface (API) — API is generally considered effective. | Account Management — Although clients like having an account manager, client services is uneven. |
| Lead Scoring — Lead scoring module is relatively sophisticated. | Miscellaneous — Onboarding, email sending delays, reliability |
Excerpts from Interview with , VP Product Marketing
On differentiation: “Silverpop has a diverse client base with numerous industries and company sizes represented. The majority of our customers are B2C, but both our B2C and B2B customers take advantage of our marketing automation tools, such as personalization, landing pages, content marketing, web tracking programs and scoring. We were the first vendor in the space to meet the marketing automation needs of both B2B and B2C companies, and we have worked with our customers to help them take advantage of this shift in feature adoption. We expect others in the industry to follow our lead in this area.”
On competition: “We compete most often with Marketo, Eloqua and ExactTarget. In some cases customers want a tool that caters to ease of use and in other cases they are most interested in more sophisticated features. We are best suited for professional marketers and provide exceptional lead scoring, drag-and-drop campaign editing, personalization and behavior-based functionality.”
On user interface: “We have paid careful attention to feedback on our user interface and have tried to strike a balance between making it more intuitive and continuing to deliver sophisticated, behavior-based features. In 2013 we launched significant enhancements to our send experience and will be dedicating time to additional user experience enhancements in our major releases this year, as well.”