Acoustic Campaign vs. LeadSquared

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.

Leadsquared is well suited for small to medium-sized enterprises where the team is small and you have a lot of areas to explore. Every team can have their suites/ accounts customised accordingly. I am not sure if I can compare it for bigger enterprises but I feel this best of best to get your work done more efficiently.

• 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.

• Call history is recorded like dialed calls, connected calls, total talktime in a daily, weekly, monthly, yearly, and on a custom basis.
• The activity history of both customers, and employees are shown clearly, which help us a lot in understanding the interest of the customer, and their communication history with the organization.
• Daily attendance history and man-days management can be done.
• Sales performance and their values are mapped clearly.

• 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.

• LeadSquared is a little bit expensive compared to other slimmer products, so they need to think about it.
• Sometimes LeadSquared gets stuck when I use it to run a large campaign, I would like them to improve this.
• LeadSquared creates a problem in slow internet connections, so I guess this is also an improvement area for them.

Incentivized

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.

It is an excellent value for money solution and is fulfilling all our needs quite efficiently. They keep working on the product and each month sees an update allowing for a bug free experience and faster incorporation of newer tools. I see no reason why I would not like to renew the subscription for this fabulous product.

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.

Having talked about all other things in detail in my previous responses, this question I feel is redundant but then I will highlight the points again - Easy to Use - Flexible - Robust System - Ever-evolving - Support & Service - Integrations with third party tools & technologies - LMS - Data Management & Reports - Landing Page Options

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 throttle time for sending emails would vary depending on how many other campaigns were going out that day, which I found inconsistent

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

Great to work with and also Easy to work with Do not just listen to the problem but provide upfront solutions Always available and are ready to support on holidays Considerate of user's knowledge and always ready to explain the smallest / dumbest doubt a user can ask Always available to help with the internal tasks as well like creating automations, drip creations etc

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.

Incentivized

I looked closely at Infusionsoft. While the nurturing/decision tree tool of Infusionsoft was far more sophisticated, the many negative reviews of Infusionsoft lead me to look elsewhere. Leadsquared had very positive reviews and aggressive pricing. It has less features, but the features they have were the ones I wanted to focus on.

• 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.

• Leads Management has become very easy.
• Automated Lead Nurturing helps reduce a lot of manual work.
• A lot of our time goes into creating custom reports. Making the reporting feature more flexible and robust will help in saving a lot of time and energy.