7Sheep is a marketing automation tool that concentrates on delivering features for what they consider 7 key components of marketing automation software: contact storage, form building, automation triggers, e-mail and text message campaigns, prospect tracking, integration and translation interface.
$0
Above 10 users
Acoustic Campaign
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Acoustic Campaign (formerly IBM Watson Campaign Automation) is a scalable, SaaS-based, cross-channel, digital marketing platform providing digital marketers the ability to implement and manage email, mobile, social, and lead management campaign processes.
I use 7Sheep for marketing as a sales person. This works well for me as a single user. I do not think I could use the software together with my colleagues. Although we could have separated lists the access rights might not fit our use case. It has a strong marketing focus and cannot replace a full CRM system.
Silverpop is a powerful and comprehensive tool for digital marketers, and is apprprioate for companies of varying sizes, as well as both B2B and B2C models. It's particularly well-suited for companies with large, accurate customer databases and the ability to track customer actions on their websites to use as marketing automation triggers.
When preparing an event, 7Sheep takes care of pretty much everything you need to select, inform, and register participants, as well as prepare materials for the events, such as name badges and signature lists.
We also use 7Sheep for reporting on communications activities.
7Sheep allows you to build simple or complex forms and questionnaires which we use both for events and independent surveys.
The drag and drop HTML editor makes things look good without a lot of extra effort.
Automated Messages - we currently have over 70 automated messages going out on any particular day through feeds and API calls that we pass to Silverpop. We rely on these automated messages to communicate to our customers and can rely on Silverpop to always be up and running to get these messages out.
Robust query building - We can target customers easily based on a combination of demographic profile data, as well as email and site behavior and purchase behavior, allowing us to finely segment our audience
Deep dive reporting - the UI reporting, as well as the available reports to download through the API give us tremendous insight into how our subscribers are responding to email.
I know that they are working on a simpler way to send a test e-mail to yourself. This will streamline my activities as well and I look forward to that system change (which was suggested by a client. I have also suggested improvements which have been implemented.)
I miss an easy unsubscribe feature (like you get in MailChimp). Overall, 7Sheep's system is more flexible (good) but that does make it more complex to split up (not so good).
Setting up the SPF record in our DNS system was flexible and easy but for DKIM integration we had to contact the 7Sheep support. They do not check or show the necessary records in the tool. Customer service was great, though, so not a very big problem, just a bit of a nuisance.
Data syncing and errors - Silverpop does not do a great job of getting data to sync regularly with our CRM (Salesforce.com). The data had to flow back and forth several times before being added to campaigns and in some instances, it took days to update leads! Also, failed lead syncs get stuck in an alert list but it does not notify you otherwise that a lead failed the sync.
Design issues - we use custom HTML to build emails and landing pages, and we were unable to render background images on our campaigns. Also, once you toggle between design and source (code) view to make edits, it often broke the code and threw off the design.
Administrator alerts - when sync fails altogether between systems, there is no email alert sent to the system admin (me/my team) so we at times have found that we have gone 18 hours until we stumble across the fact that the system sync has failed.
Reporting - it is not very comprehensive and we had difficulty generating the level of reporting that we need to have.
Support - there are a few gems in the support team who know what they're doing, but largely calling support is a lesson in frustration.
Product bug fixes - in two instances, my open support tickets were identified as product bugs. One related to incorrect cookie tracking which was causing our leads not to be scoring properly. They determined that this wasn't critical enough to build into their product fix road map. This is core to an automation system working properly.
The tool serves our needs and we like the user interface. The few times we contacted support they were super helpful and responsive. When we asked for more integrations they confirmed the integrations we need (e.g. Hipchat) for the near future.
SilverPop is a great marketing tool that integrates with Salesforce to provide customers and employees a great buying and selling experience. The software takes some very difficult tasks and makes them easy to accomplish. With proper setup and management, Silverpop gives you the tools to gain insight into the productiveness of campaigns.
This is a little bit difficult to rate because Silverpop is gradually updating its interface to improve usability all around. I know users are able to do their job with minimal assistance. However, some of the interface is dated, and the Programs interface, while functional, has a bit of a learning curve.
While several of the other reviews have mentioned poor performance in this department, we have only had one situation where the system was down (although it was down for several hours). Silverpop segments its clients on different servers, and I know that the problem we experienced only occurred on our specific server (maybe other servers have had their own problems?) but our service has been reliable otherwise.
With both chat and email support I have always had enough ways to get through to them! Their support is good, honest and most importantly supportive. They helped us set up and start using the tool when we got stuck. Moving from Mailchimp where there were some semantic lessons to learn and they took the time to help us get used to 7Sheep
The Salesforce Integration support team is fantastic. I'd give them greater than a 10 if possible. The rest of the support team can be extremely frustrating to work with. Too often they try to blame something obscure and refuse to escalate or look into the issue. And on occasion when you find system glitches they don't seem to care about fixing them
The online trainings are very detailed (for the most part) and really walk through the entire system. They are a little dry, but they are usually broken up into segments to allow you to skip to the parts you need.
Based on recommendations from Silverpop we made some implementation decisions that we later regretted pretty substantially. In hindsight we should have started a pilot implementation earlier so we could learn and then start over. The big issue for us was that Silverpop recommended a non-keyed database, or at least a database that doesn't use email address as primary key. This is resulted in a large number of duplicate email addresses so that the end user is forced to unsubscribe multiple times to stop receiving emails.
I've mostly used survey monkey and google forms and doodle for small inexpensive jobs - anything more sophisticated always seemed to cost more than the actual fee I charge. 7sheep does everything they do, but it automates a lot of the processing, for a cost which is affordable and makes me more efficient - as I can use my subscription for different clients.
We evaluated alternate providers less than a year into our IBM Watson Campaign contract because the system was so clunky to use (and we wanted a system that would include or better integrate with our SMS provider). Bluecore and Klaviyo were the front runners at the time, and we came close to moving forward with Bluecore. The pricing model and overall the cost of Bluecore was much higher than IBM for us though, and the timing of this was right when the IBM to Acoustic changes took place. We decided to give Acoustic a shot and are optimistic it will be enough to keep us on board once all the dust settles, though I find it unlikely we will renew with Acoustic when our contract is up again. My main email specialist is a Klaviyo expert and finds that platform very easy to use in comparison-- it might be a better fit for a team of our size.
With the translation support we have translated forms into Spanish for our producers and this has been a really positive benefit for them as a partner.
I am able to monitor interest in different products very easily and so re-target particular varieties to specific regions.
Text message campaigns mean that we can directly engage: especially for physical meetings, tasting reminders and so forth.
we have not experienced any currently but moving to lead automation and lead scoring could change that.
i'm not sure how increased employee efficiency would ever be a benefit b/c lead importing and visibility, along with setting up email templates is quite cumbersome.
