Acoustic Campaign vs. MailerLite vs. Sitecore Send

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 didn't have much luck when testing other similar tools and since we tested with free plan, we couldn't commit to something else if we couldn't get basic stuff fixed. That's when we switched to MailerLite, and their support was great and super helpful all the way (during our free plan, especially). Plus, they're super budget-friendly for startups, so I highly recommend.

Incentivized

UI presented by this application is not only unique but also important to implement for further creation. Hence a proven and tested application for tracing the developments at all places to check the capability of the developmental process. It’s a powerful email marketing tool and helps to maintain the client’s relationship with full support.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Offers a user-friendly interface, making it simple to create beautiful forms, group subscribers, and automate emails.
• Includes email automation workflows in their free plan - the only provider I know of that doesn't charge you after one month or hit you with "transaction fees".
• Excellent video tutorial library so you can learn email marketing as a beginner without feeling overwhelmed.

• Moosend is the best application to trace the business development and to create ideas through email marketing
• This tool is helpful in the atomization of developments on a certain level
• It promotes business opportunities in the market with innovation and ideas

Incentivized

• 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.

• EVERYONE should be allowed to at least use the AI bot chat feature. This doesn't take a person and is such basic customer service that it should be offered at all levels.
• It would be nice if MailerLite worked better with AddEvent icons
• When emailing support it took days to get a response (after an agent escalated the issue). Some concerns are more urgent and email support shouldn't mean bad support.

• If you have more than 1000 subscribers you will be required to upgrade to the Pro plan.
• Free plan users have limited customer support.

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.

Mailerlite is awesome and it does everything I need and then some. They're always innovating and adding new features, and their team is flippin' amazing. Can't see myself ever switching. They may not have everything, but looking at how well their team works, they'll get there for sure and I'm willing to wait.

Incentivized

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.

I find it very easy to use, intuitive with a clean interface and drag and drop functionality where that adds value. It's quite configurable for our brand and the template and duplication options are very useful as we reuse a lot of content.

Pretty straight forward but it takes sometime to get used to. Not exactly like WordPress or other open source cms but it gets the job done

Incentivized

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

Whenever I contact Support, either via email or through online chat, I always get a speedy response that gives me the answer I need. The AI Agent on the online chat is excellent and has helped me so much on numerous occasions.

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

MailerLite has similar features to the tools mentioned above. The main advantage is that it is very complete in its free version. This is ideal for those who are starting out and want to try a complete email marketing platform.

Incentivized

Moosend is known as more of an industry standard than BuzzStream (which is a more budget tool), and it shows. BuzzStream has clearly cut corners in areas of usability and general UI, where Moosend, on the other hand, seems to have done it right from the beginning. Moosend is so much less clunky than the other tools we evaluated.

Incentivized

• 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.

• Gives us the ability to track the popularity of content in our email as well as who has read the content.
• The customizable layout gives us the opportunity to be creative and have our culture shine through our company communication.
• The ability to see who has un-subscribed helps our HR department to see who isn't receiving important company information so we can ask them to re-subscribe.
• Helps our company to be more transparent and communicate more effectively.

Incentivized

• Moosend is quite affordable (500,000 emails for $500), so it's easy to see an ROI. It only takes a few recipients converting to make a campaign worth the spend.

Incentivized