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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Iterable
Score 8.5 out of 10
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Iterable is a growth marketing and user engagement platform. It is designed for B2C markets and supports all types of marketing campaigns (blast, lifecycle, transactional) across all messaging channels (email, web, mobile push notifications, SMS).
Iterable has a clean easy to use, user interface similar to Emarsys in that it’s very easy to use, but Iterable has a lot more capabilities than Emarsys. Iterable has many of the same functionalities as Salesforce except Salesforce is super expensive and has a terrible user …
Iterable has more list management, segmenting, automation, and campaign building capabilities than the other 3 products we evaluated. Iterable makes it very easy to build emails that are mobile optimized.
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.
Iterable is great for email marketers that are not advanced/technical in emails. They made it very simple to create emails and run campaigns. Everything about Iterable is very easy - from creating emails with drag and drop functionality, segmenting and creating send lists, and even setting up a journey. The only downside with Iterable is that it's mainly meant for larger companies. There are better platforms if you're using email in a very simple way.
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.
It makes designing and deploying great looking emails easy with their drag-and-drop technology and framework.
Iterable allows for great customization and time-saving with the use of their handlebar snippets. This has revolutionized how we are able to monetize our editorial audiences using clear logic that helps us get the most for each of our conversion efforts.
The various ways that you can run and view reports is incredibly helpful, and easy to customize. This means we can find most of the data we want and need across our various departments with their differing goals without having to piecemeal together crazy solutions or waste time reinventing the wheel.
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.
Some of Iterable's user interface in Journey is a little confusing. This is a personal preference.
Their image uploading is very basic - but they are working on releasing a new version soon.
It's difficult to look up a specific contact by only being able to search their email. I wish I could search by name without having to use segmentation
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.
Iterable is there like 99.9% of the time. However, when it goes down, it grinds us to a halt. Most of the time, outages are an hour or less, but if that's at a peak time, it can be a nightmare. That said, when the worst does happen, there are frequent updates and an easy situation tracker that give you an estimate of how much longer you'll have to wait for the issue to be resolved.
The API is super quick. The UI can be a little sluggish depending on what you're loading, but overall Iterable performs great. Iterable appears to do a good job of making processes async so that one action isn't blocking another.
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've never experienced any issues with Iterable. As I and my colleagues have learnt the system and it's features, response to questions and advice from our account manager is always quick. Kevin knows the product well, and with the few tricky questions has hasn't been able to answer he's been quick to get back to us.
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.
The visualization tools in iterable for creating journeys are so much easier to use and adjust than in Marketo, Mailgun, or Mailjet. We have better performance metrics tracking in particular than in Mailjet or Marketo. It is also easier to see where we have made mistakes in emails and to adjust the code visually than in any of the other platforms
We've never run into any issues with volume. Iterable is always able to handle everything we throw at it. We utilize webhooks and emails. Both perform very well. Webhooks actually perform too quickly and downstream systems need to be able to handle the volume throughput that Iterable can send.
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.
This is a hard thing to qualify with the short amount of time we have had on the platform and with the changes that have occurred since onboarding. iOS 15 was released, so we are learning new ways of measuring the ROI.
The ease of integration with other tools has helped us begin to break into more personalized emails for our customers. We have really only scratched the surface and have so much farther to go!
