Acoustic Campaign vs. Campaign Monitor by Marigold

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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.N/A
Campaign Monitor by Marigold
Score 7.4 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Campaign Monitor by Marigold enables users to create, send, and optimize email marketing campaigns.
$11
per month
Pricing
Acoustic CampaignCampaign Monitor by Marigold
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Lite
$9
per month
Essentials
$19
per month
Premier
$149
per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Acoustic CampaignCampaign Monitor by Marigold
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoYes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Acoustic CampaignCampaign Monitor by Marigold
Considered Both Products
Acoustic Campaign
Chose Acoustic Campaign
I've used Campaign Monitor, which also seems to be fairly clunky. While not a direct competitor, Infusionsoft was likely the most user-friendly experience I've had, however it lacked the control and uses that Silverpop has.
Campaign Monitor by Marigold
Chose Campaign Monitor by Marigold
Again, this platform is best used when combined with other platforms. Businesses and/or agencies that have a separate template builder or dedicated designer will likely have a better experience with this platform.
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Acoustic CampaignCampaign Monitor by Marigold
Email & Online Marketing
Comparison of Email & Online Marketing features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
7.0
10 Ratings
11% below category average
Campaign Monitor by Marigold
8.0
24 Ratings
2% below category average
WYSIWYG email editor4.010 Ratings8.09 Ratings
Dynamic content8.07 Ratings7.122 Ratings
Ability to test dynamic content7.58 Ratings8.01 Ratings
Landing pages5.18 Ratings00 Ratings
A/B testing7.010 Ratings7.122 Ratings
Mobile optimization6.97 Ratings00 Ratings
Email deliverability reporting8.010 Ratings10.01 Ratings
List management8.09 Ratings00 Ratings
Triggered drip sequences8.08 Ratings00 Ratings
Lead Management
Comparison of Lead Management features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
7.4
8 Ratings
4% below category average
Campaign Monitor by Marigold
-
Ratings
Lead nurturing automation6.18 Ratings00 Ratings
Lead scoring and grading7.97 Ratings00 Ratings
Data quality management8.07 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated sales alerts and tasks7.54 Ratings00 Ratings
Campaign Management
Comparison of Campaign Management features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
7.0
8 Ratings
9% below category average
Campaign Monitor by Marigold
-
Ratings
Calendaring6.58 Ratings00 Ratings
Event/webinar marketing7.44 Ratings00 Ratings
Social Media Marketing
Comparison of Social Media Marketing features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
6.3
5 Ratings
17% below category average
Campaign Monitor by Marigold
-
Ratings
Social sharing and campaigns6.54 Ratings00 Ratings
Social profile integration6.25 Ratings00 Ratings
Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
4.5
10 Ratings
50% below category average
Campaign Monitor by Marigold
10.0
1 Ratings
24% above category average
Dashboards4.210 Ratings00 Ratings
Standard reports4.210 Ratings10.01 Ratings
Custom reports5.18 Ratings00 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
5.7
10 Ratings
28% below category average
Campaign Monitor by Marigold
-
Ratings
API5.29 Ratings00 Ratings
Role-based workflow & approvals6.04 Ratings00 Ratings
Customizability5.95 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with Salesforce.com4.38 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM5.03 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with SugarCRM8.02 Ratings00 Ratings
Pre-Send Testing
Comparison of Pre-Send Testing features of Product A and Product B
Acoustic Campaign
-
Ratings
Campaign Monitor by Marigold
7.4
4 Ratings
14% below category average
Spam Testing00 Ratings7.44 Ratings
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Acoustic CampaignCampaign Monitor by Marigold
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User Ratings
Acoustic CampaignCampaign Monitor by Marigold
Likelihood to Recommend
4.1
(40 ratings)
7.0
(26 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
5.5
(30 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Usability
8.0
(6 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Availability
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Performance
7.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
5.9
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Online Training
9.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
7.4
(4 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Acoustic CampaignCampaign Monitor by Marigold
Likelihood to Recommend
Acoustic
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.
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Marigold
Campaign Monitor is undoubtedly one of the best software for managing email marketing campaigns; it is a robust platform and can be adapted to any company. If you are not a developer and don't know any code, it has many pre-made templates to use. I highly recommend Campaign Monitor; it is perfect, does what needs to be done, and is very easy to use.
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Pros
Acoustic
  • 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.
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Marigold
  • Campaign Monitor’s support is great. They have a great help page built out to help answer all your questions, and if you do have a question or issue that needs extra support, their support team responds within a couple hours to help resolve the issue.
  • The email builder is very clean and easy to use. It makes A/B testing, personalization, and dynamic content easy to implement.
  • I appreciate the insights reporting that Campaign Monitor provides. We use that regularly for our quarterly reporting to track list growth, as well as campaign performance from a high level.
  • The automation is very straight forward and has truly transformed our marketing. The learning curve is pretty low, so my entire team knows how to use it to create and edit automated email journeys.
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Cons
Acoustic
  • 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.
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Marigold
  • Managing different subscriptions requires some thinking and setup with custom fields/lists/segments. It's not really 'out of the box' to set up.
  • The WYSIWYG editor is pretty locked down, which makes it idiot-proof, but would be great to have a little more control over padding, line height, kerning, etc.
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Likelihood to Renew
Acoustic
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.
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Marigold
No answers on this topic
Usability
Acoustic
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.
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Marigold
The templates, while useful, are very locked down, This makes it very usable from a novice's standpoint, but also very inflexible from a designer's standpoint. Creating several version of the email campaign and using A/B testing was a powerful and easy-to-use feature, and the system also provides the option of automating the sending of emails once an A/B testing criteria is reached
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Reliability and Availability
Acoustic
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.
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Marigold
No answers on this topic
Performance
Acoustic
The throttle time for sending emails would vary depending on how many other campaigns were going out that day, which I found inconsistent
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Marigold
No answers on this topic
Support Rating
Acoustic
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
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Marigold
No answers on this topic
Online Training
Acoustic
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.
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Marigold
No answers on this topic
Implementation Rating
Acoustic
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.
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Marigold
No answers on this topic
Alternatives Considered
Acoustic
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.
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Marigold
The ability to track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns in real-time is what makes Campaign Monitor interesting to use. All the vital features that we need to run professionally designed email campaigns that look wonderful on any device so that we boost our business are included in this platform.
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Return on Investment
Acoustic
  • 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.
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Marigold
  • Because it's easy to use, we can design and send out newsletters easily and quickly, spending little time.
  • It's a great tool for aggregating all of the things our organization is up to and making sure people are aware of them.
  • Sometimes I wonder how many emails are sent to the Spam folder, but there are great tools to see how many opens you get.
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ScreenShots

Acoustic Campaign Screenshots

Screenshot of Digital marketingScreenshot of Journey design