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.
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Bloomreach
Score 9.0 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Bloomreach personalizes the customer experience for brands around the world. Loomi AI, its agentic platform, understands customers in context — then tailors their experience in real time. Connected to applications at every touchpoint, Loomi AI brings personalization to life across email, web,…
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VerticalResponse
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
VerticalResponse is an email campaign management software and services platform from Deluxe. In addition to providing email marketing tools, VerticalResponse offers fully managed email marketing services from campaign launch and management to reporting and analysis.
$9
per month
Pricing
Acoustic Campaign
Bloomreach
VerticalResponse
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
No answers on this topic
Basic
$11.00
per month
Pro
$16.00
per month
Pro Plus
$196.00
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Acoustic Campaign
Bloomreach
VerticalResponse
Free Trial
No
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
Optional
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
Bloomreach pricing is quote-based. Bloomreach pricing is customized to the number of customers served, product catalog size, and the number of events executed – such as how many emails or SMS messages are sent.
I wasn't involved in the tool selection process but inherited the system. I think that Pardot and Marketo are the leaders in the marketplace, followed closely by Eloqua. Hubspot is a nice option with good usability but I was concerned it would not scale for the global campaign …
Bloomreach is the first true CDP that integrates all customer data that I have used, but previously I have used other CRM/email marketing tools as outlined above. We chose Bloomreach because of its ability to work with so much complex offline data, and the ability to create …
Better value, more flexibility in terms of campaign setup options, more options included in the basic package, better user interfaces, platform updates seem to happen with more frequency, customer service seems better, and there is always recognition if something doesn't go …
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.
One scenario Bloomreach is particularly suited for is omnichannel abandonment campaigns. We have scenarios that look whether a customer has been into one of our stores, and then if they are subscribed, we can send them more information about the products they have viewed. That wouldn't be possible without Bloomreach. Another scenario that Bloomreach is well suited for is price drop - we can alert users that an item they've viewed has dropped in price, and this has been a really successful campaign for us.
For businesses requiring advanced email marketing features like sophisticated automation, in-depth analytics, and extensive customization, VerticalResponse might fall short due to its limited featuresVerticalResponse is ideal for small businesses or freelancers who need a simple, straightforward email marketing tool. Its ease of use and basic features make it suitable for those without extensive technical expertise in email marketing
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.
The product recommendations engine allows for us to create a personalised experience for every customer across the 3m emails we send each month. This ensure that our customers remain connected to our brand.
The customer data platform attached to Bloomreach Composable Personalization Cloud provides an all-in-one solution for our business intelligence needs. Allowing up-to-date purchasing, behaviour, and engagement reporting from our email to website activity.
The ability to integrate with Meta and other paid ad formats allows for us to create a connected omnichannel experience for users, ensuring we are providing the right message, to the right person, at the right time, in the right place.
I love the ease of list builder because we often times have a lot of data to import. It would be simply impossible without this tool, considering the amount of customer data we have for any one given email.
We really enjoy the ease of use of the HTML wizard as well. It helps even a novice be able to make a beautiful and attention grabbing email.
The dashboard is functional and easy to find when you need with a quick search.
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 type face is small. Not sure if this is to avoid overwhelming the reader, but I could see this being an issue with vision-impaired people or people who don't see small print well.
Sometimes I find it takes multiple clicks to make one simple change. I wish there was a search field at the top of the screen that allowed me to jump directly to a client's entry to update it there.
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.
We are extremely satisfied with Bloomreach. It is a central and indispensable pillar of our personalization and data-driven marketing strategy. The platform provides us with unparalleled scalability across 27 countries and guarantees high availability and stable performance, even when working with an enormous volume of data.The fact that the platform is intuitive and allows a wide range of our teams (from CRM to UX) to work effectively with personalization significantly reduces our dependence on IT support and accelerates campaign deployment.Given the robustness of the architecture and the positive results we are generating across channels, renewing the contract is a logical step to ensure our future organic growth.
Product is easy for both technical and non-technical people to use. A cost effective solution for sending out large number of messages. We can manage unsubscribes by individual accounts, so we can have multiple multiple accounts combined to maximize our buying power on credits. Effective API for sending/receiving data makes tool a valuable asset.
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.
In my time working with Bloomreach Commerce Experience Cloud, I always liked to work with it. It is crucial that you get support from experts from the beginning to show you how to work with the vast amount of options and activities to choose from. The learning curve is also well-rounded because of its user-friendly interface and highly skilled customer support.
I truly love this product. We are moving to an all-in-one system next year and my greatest fear in doing so is how much I will miss this platform. Although we are excited for things ahead, I will always keep Vertical Response in my back pocket incase I don't love the new platform as much
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.
The platform is generally reliable - major outages are rare and most day-to-day campaign operations run without interruption. Where it dips: occasional slowdowns in the analytics dashboard during peak loads, and sometimes scenario executions get delayed without clear explanation. The real-time event processing is mostly solids. Overall uptime is strong - it is not something that keeps me up at night, but it is not flawless either.
Performance in Bloomreach Content is quite good but you need to be ready. Your implementation should follow all the good practices (avoid crazy patterns) and the environment setup should be the right one. With all that, Bloomreach's performance is quite solid. Our usage makes use of complex queries and most of them are really quick. Only when you need something really complex and you aggregate queries that should be separated you would get slower results (but then again, that is not a good practice for any platform).
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 project team consistently delivers excellent collaboration and is always available whenever assistance is needed. Their responsiveness and commitment make working together smooth and efficient. Bloomreach support, which is included for free in the platform, can also be quite useful, especially for quick clarifications. However, the quality and speed of their responses can sometimes vary, depending on the issue.
At Vertical Response the help desk associates are courteous, knowledgeable and helpful. You can tell they enjoy what they do. And clearly, they are well trained because most times, the first point of contact is able to resolve any issue you may have. There have been very few times where an associate has needed to get back to me or escalate me to a supervisor
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.
Basic functions and online help...we used what was needed, at the time, and will continue to explore other online trainings as our functional needs expand
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.
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.
Bloomreach is far superior than SFMC as that platform requires too much technical knowledge. Ometria is very good and I would say is quite similar to Bloomreach although I would say Ometria is a smaller company. Dotdigital is also very powerful but not more so than Bloomreach. This being said, Dotdigital and HubSpot does have telephone support which is amazing and something I would like to see from Bloomreach in future or at least shorter wait times for customer support live chat.
In addition to using Vertical Response personally I also manage email marketing for clients that already use Mailchimp, Robly and Constant Contact. While most of these platforms all offer similar features I choose Vertical Response first if the client does not have a platform in place. Typically I am also teaching the client how to use this tool and the Vertical Response visual interface is very easy for me to teach a client how to navigate and create their own campaigns.
there is an option of multiple projects per organisation, customers and assets can be copied across. Multiple sites can be managed in one project, different activities organized under initiatives. Splitting work into sensible units is therefore well possible. The billing is based on number of tracked and number of stored events, no package-based deals. It should therefore be well scalable from a small e-store to a large corporation.
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.
