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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Demandbase One
Score 8.3 out of 10
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Demandbase One is a a go-to-market platform that unites sales and marketing teams around rich, reliable Account Intelligence, activated wherever customers are interact with: in advertising, account-based experience (ABX), sales, and across systems. This helps users spot opportunities earlier, engage more intelligently, and close deals faster.
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.
Demandbase is a must have at our company. From an advertising standpoint it has allowed us to scale our ABM strategies and exceed benchmarks in our display ads. Our sales users are spending less time researching accounts and more time selling as Demandbase makes it easy for them to get alerted when accounts are showing intent and engagement with our business. I'm looking forward to the release of the multiple account journey product update, which will allow us to see how accounts are engaging with our other product areas and where we are missing the mark with engaging with those accounts who may be showing buyer signals with a particular GTM
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.
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.
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 expect to see good success in creating personalized experiences using Demandbase. This has allowed us to create industry specific visitor site experience as well as account specific site experience. This is expected to lead to higher conversion on the site. Therefore, we are very much likely to continue to use it.
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.
Demandbase does have a learning curve, but once you get into it, the platform becomes very easy to use overall. I had a couple of sessions with our reps to have training sessions. After I was established, the only time I need help is with updates to the platform.
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
I don't deal a whole lot with the customer support, focused more on the use of it but from my experience, it's been fine. They've replied to my issues in a timely manner, never more than a day. The advertising team might be another story but I can't speak directly to that.
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.
The consultant did a fantastic job in integrating Demandbase with Adobe Insight so we could leverage it to full potential. We also customized the industry groups specific to our company.
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.
Demandbase had a higher account match rate for our known and unknown accounts. We also leverage in-platform advertising a lot for our targeted account approach and Demandbase has an exceptional platform for this use case. The most impactful difference was the relationship we have with our account team and how they continually ensure our success.
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.
Demandbase has helped me close business by focusing my lead generation efforts on companies that I know are interested in my services or use products that I consult on
At Salesforce.com, I used Demandbase to alert sales about companies that are "actively" looking at our products, which led to faster close times and increased revenues
