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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Lead Liaison
Score 9.1 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Lead Liaison is a cloud-based sales and marketing automation solution. This solution provides equal focus to sales support with solutions such as a hot-lead dashboard, Buy Signals and a live ticker alert of businesses on the customer's website.
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.
I think Lead Liaison could work well for new companies without an existing tech stack as you can also use it as your CRM. For a more mature company, especially one with multiple existing platform, I do not think it is worth switching, as all of the features will likely seem inferior to alternative specialist tools, many of which are cheaper, better supported and better integrated
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 form customization is perfect. Very easy to use.
The insight we get from the form's (GPS) data is nice as we do not have to mandate fields anymore.
The ability to pass thru a lot of data on the back end works for our process. The internal receiver (customer service or sales reps) of the form data knows exactly what campaign the lead came from, what clinical specialty is tied to the prospect and what product is of interest. All seamlessly.
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.
Why move from a product that is help grown the speed on Marketing ROI? We see that the dashboards, flexibility and tracking are meeting and exceeding the business needs we had outlined. The support they provide is consistent, available and responsive. They will work with you until your issue is resolved.
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.
One item you did not ask, but should be in around customer support. They do a great job of working with you, training and ongoing questions. Lead Liaison is always available and easy to get answers. The dashboards are great to gain business trends. The social media management is easy and a great way to ensure content is being tracked. The ability to gain tracking code for additional tactics. Our team enjoys the easy access and useability. We work with our clients to make sure they have a tool that we can use to scale for their needs. Lead Liaison makes it easy for us to help clients understand that Marketing ROI is closer to their finger tips than ever before.
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
Lead Liaison has tremendous support. I''ve never gone more than a hour or so without a response. They are quick to understand my request, review the options for solution and deliver the best option with the best outcome. Also, the good part is that I don't need support all the time because the product is so easy.
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.
Any issue with the adoption of the product were on our end. I wish we had the band width to run faster so we can know more faster. Our team enjoys the dashboards and ease of using the product. I know our clients are appreciating the results of the information as well.
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.
I have not used any other product than Lead Liasion. I just recently started using this product and was not aware of the other options. Either way I am looking forward to seeing how far I am able to succeed using Lead Liasion and will continue to use this platform in the future.
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.
Deepen the relationship with existing clients AND increase the amount of revenue from clients as this is an added service in addition to our online marketing services.