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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CleverTap
Score 7.9 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
CleverTap is a mobile marketing solution that helps marketers create differentiated customer engagement strategies that are designed to drive growth. The vendor’s value proposition is that thousands of brands continue to build valuable relationships with their customers using CleverTap’s Intelligent Mobile Marketing Platform, which provides actionable, real-time insights for building amazing customer experiences. According to the vendor, key features and…
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.
It is quite suited for all the SMS, emails, and other in-game campaigns, but wherein the delivery rate I personally feel it is less, and it has [a] limitation on 5 pins for the day for 1 user, it should be unlimited.
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.
User communication: it provides a single dashboard to help us reach out to our users via email, push, web push, SMS, in-app and now even WhatsApp. Not just that, we can set up various types of targeting, such as one-time, recurring, date/time based, etc.
Analytics: it offers various views and cuts to analyze the user data, be it in the form of trends, funnels, recency-frequency, user cohorts and segments, etc.
Tracking: it helps us track the impact of various paid and organic marketing channels, through which we can adjust spends and focus on the channels that make an impact.
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.
Customer service isn't that great [from my experience], most of the time the team is puzzled or will leave the client puzzled.
Price is very high with respect to the features available. MAU based pricing with a flawed sense of MAU calculation.
The way they calculate MAU is morally wrong. If a customer opens my email that I am sending via AWS, and they don't even come on my app, how can you consider them as active user?
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.
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.
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.
Edit: Clevertap added attribution tools to its features, making it possible to track your user acquisition sources. CleverTap is as complete as Localytics. It provides us good segmentation, analysis and engagement tools for a good competitive price. T̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶l̶y̶ ̶d̶o̶w̶n̶s̶i̶d̶e̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶C̶l̶e̶v̶e̶r̶t̶a̶p̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶ ̶n̶o̶t̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶a̶t̶t̶r̶i̶b̶u̶t̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶t̶o̶o̶l̶s̶,̶ ̶w̶h̶i̶l̶e̶ ̶L̶o̶c̶a̶l̶y̶t̶i̶c̶s̶ ̶d̶o̶e̶s̶. One other major advantage of Clevertap is its customer service. They are always standing by to promptly respond to any question you might have regarding its usability or its development. This kind of careful attention is really appreciated.
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.
Our additional revenues from additional in-site promotions during a festive sales jumped 40% after using Clevertap pop-ups that targeted people at the product & category level.
