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.
N/A
Intuit Mailchimp
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Mailchimp is an email marketing and marketing automation platform. Beyond just tracking how campaigns perform, Mailchimp takes it a step further by analyzing data from over half a billion emails to show why campaigns perform, driving informed decisions.
$0
per month
Springbot
Score 6.0 out of 10
N/A
Springbot aims to bring all the marketing capabilities large retailers have to small businesses at a fraction of the cost. Through Springbot, online stores will be able to leverage automated marketing on channels such as email, SMS, social and online ads. Business owners and marketers who find themselves wearing many hats can still send the right message at the right time with confidence. With an all-in-one marketing automation platform designed with ease of use in mind, business…
$199
for up to 5,000 subscribers (includes email marketing, social hub, reporting and dashboards, signup forms, automations, account management, support and onboarding. See website for additional package options.
Pricing
Acoustic Campaign
Intuit Mailchimp
Springbot
Editions & Modules
No answers on this topic
Free
$0
Essentials
starts at $13
per month
Standard
starts at $20
per month
Premium
starts at $350
per month
Platform Base Package
$199/month
for up to 5,000 subscribers (includes email marketing, social hub, reporting and dashboards, signup forms, automations, account management, support and onboarding. See website for additional package options.
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Acoustic Campaign
Intuit Mailchimp
Springbot
Free Trial
No
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
—
—
See website for pricing calculator for additional pricing options.
MailChimp is a little more intuitive and easier to navigate (not as many steps), but lacks the database management, scoring and landing pages of Silverpop. Silverpop is a more robust system for data capture.
I've used Campaign Monitor, which also seems to be fairly clunky. While not a direct competitor, Infusionsoft was likely the most user-friendly experience I've had, however it lacked the control and uses that Silverpop has.
Mailchimp is the most cost effective solution. The ease of use, the look of the emails, the options Mailchimp gives you, and the price of it all. There is no reason you should go with iContact or Constant Contact when Mailchimp is an option. They are just too easy to use and …
Disaster save your money there are other options out there. We were never able to get off the ground. Due to them being so unflexible, we did not implement anything.
Verified User
C-Level Executive
Chose Springbot
Springbot's account management team is excellent to work with - they understand my business and my goals, and partner with me to achieve on those growth goals - from traffic, to subscribers and revenue.
Verified User
C-Level Executive
Chose Springbot
Springbit is more expensive, more complicated and delivered less.
We are looking at using Tealium to segment our customers now, something we had hoped Springbot would allow us to do. Tealium allows us to segment and send to any channel and any ESP. Springbot would allow us to create segments based on a few demographic, product and purchase …
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.
For any E-commerce related needs, like you need to see a list of customers who have added products to cart but did not purchase, this can be done really easily, but if your e-commerce provider provides integration, then it is best suited. Most of the systems in the Market provide out-of-the-box integration. Their API is also very easy it can be integrated to any language. You can integrate it into your custom developed system and use the features, like adding customers to specific lists. Also, if your lists become really big, then their system can get a bit slow to respond via API, so you might need a strategy for how you are gonna fetch the data using API.
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.
Mailchimp allows you to manage your mailing list really well. You can subscribe people, unsubscribe people manage the mailing list directly into segments, and what not.
Mailchimp has features where you can create campaigns based on your mailing lists and send out newsletters to your subscribers based on a multitude of parameters that you can setup. Such as send email daily, weekly, monthly and they also have event based mails that you can send out.
Mailchimp also has a feature where you can design your emails. The look and aesthetics are very important when sending emails to your subscribers and all those needs are addressed here.
The demographic data was great. I could see how many males vs. females, ages, income, married, with or without children. It gave me a good idea of who my customers were.
Using their tracking URLs in all of our campaigns allowed us to get a better idea of what exactly was driving revenue.
Not only could I see top performing products, which I can do within Magento, I could also see top selling categories and colors.
I can pull a Coupon Usage report our of Magento, but Springbot gave me additional info like AOV and ROI on those codes.
Springbot also gave me a lot of info about our abandoned carts. It shows us which products are most abandoned along with views, conversion rates, etc.
Springbot gave us an Instagram Shop page that allowed us to curate social shares and then tie them to products on our site.
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.
After our purchase, I let spring or know that I was currently too busy to implement the system and to put things on hold. They ignored this request and kept charging us a monthly fee without using any of their systems. I have only logged in once. Nothing has been set up. They can see that from their side.
After multiple emails back and forth their out was in the user agreement. I never asked for my money back only credit so I can regroup and when I have time get on to implant the systems. They tell me they don't do that.
They don't care about any of the customer's needs. They only care about charging you that monthly fee. Terrible bus plan. With enough bad feedback, they will suffer from such a narrow plan.
I wish we had actual information about the cons using the system. Unfortunately I was not given the opportunity to do unless I wanted to keep paying while not using the system.
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've had Mailchimp for about ten years, I want to say. I started with the company about four years ago, and I don't see us ever diverting to another source. It's easy for us to use, and we have all our clients already built into the database. I imagine we'll use them for as long as we have the company.
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.
The interface is a bit complicated, and I need to spend some time to learn new functions and understanding how it works. I don't like working with email templates because of the limited customization options. However, functions like AI for generating emails, segmentation, and analytics still work well and are very useful.
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.
I have, in the 4+ years that I've used Mailchimp, never seen an issue that restricted the use of their software/tools. I don't know of a single time when they're system crashed or went down. I could be wrong, but I honestly haven't experienced any issues with outages, errors or unplanned downtime
I haven't noticed any slow speeds from Mailchimp or their tools. I think the landing pages load quickly and look nice. The email reports and editing operates smoothly and doesn't take time to load. Additionally, when I use Mailchimp in conjunction with Zapier + Hubspot I don't notice any drag between any of these tools
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
Website tools were easy to use and understand so a novice can easily meet or exceed their client's expectations! Loved that we were able to totally customize so that the e-mail we created conveyed our client's overall messaging consistent with their branding! Client love that we can provide turnkey services to support their sales and marketing teams!
We have raved about Springbot's support because they always get back with us so quickly. Our rep, Jared has been phenomenal in helping us, always being available to chat with us and explaining some of the metrics with us so we can better understand. He completely handles our ads, checks on them, and lets us know when to update and why.
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.
It's pretty easy to get up and running! There's a slight learning curve on a few things, but once you find where everything is located, you can import your list and send your first email. It really makes our clients feel great to see how quickly they can get that first email out.
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 don't think they are comparable; we use Google Ads to put our website at the top of the list when someone googles certain words. We use meta business to manage our social media. Google aims to gain customers, while Mailchimp is used to interact with both existing and new customers.
Mailchimp over the years I've used it has grown in leaps and bounds. They have added so many additional features than were previously available. They are truly an all-in-one marketing platform now. If you're a small operation and just want to add email to your marketing efforts, they're there for you. If you're a larger operation and want to start sending postcard advertisements, they can do that. If you'd good with that and want to kick up your marketing by going social, you can do that on their platform. They are truly able to be as small as you need, but also get quite large in whatever it is you'd like to do through their system.
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.
One of my retail web store clients was sending out email specials and notices about once a month. After clicking the send button, we would watch Google Analytics and the current site users would light up immediately. Often, the current site visitors would pop up to 20, 30 or more after the email was sent. On a normal day, seeing 1 or 2 online users would be OK.
Pretty much in all cases, we could see an uptick in positive activity after sending out a Intuit Mailchimp email to a list.
Springbot gave us a better idea of who our customer was. We just launched in January 2015 having been B2B previously. So we weren't really sure who we were marketing to.
I only paid $200/month for the service so I didn't waste a ton of money trying it out. They have a 30 day cancellation policy so I wasn't stuck in a year long contract.
It was a let down because I had such high hopes of everything it would allow me to do and see with one platform. Give them a couple more years and I think they will work out the kinks.
