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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Mailigen
Score 7.1 out of 10
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Mailigen is a web based integrated marketing provider offering email, mobile and social marketing. In the SaaS platform, you can gather subscribers, prepare, send or schedule email campaigns and receive real time reports. One can leverage statistics for behavioral segmentation and lifecycle email marketing. Mailigen offers several integration points including online surveys that you can use to segment your audience and send personalized emails.
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.
Mailigen is great for designing and scheduling campaigns that do not require expert knowledge in the field. Creating specific lists, segmentation, & scheduling campaigns are very straightforward and user-friendly. Do not use Mailigen for email marketing blasts! If you are unable to provide documented evidence that the user 'Opt-in' to receive your campaigns, then expect the campaign to be flagged or contacted by your Mailigen Account Manager. You must comply with the CAN-SPAM Act ... no ifs, ands, or buts!
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.
Mail deliverability. MailiGen gets the mail delivered. We have our own data centre hosting and servers but struggled to get our bulk mails reliably delivered. Since we switched to MailiGen delivery rates have more than tripled.
Template editor and tools. There is a rich assortment of tools for preparation of mailers. They are easy to use and we often train customers is a single 2 hour session.
Mail List security and manageability. Cloud based mail lists are important best practices for some of our corporate customers, who often store mail address lists in Excel. These lists get lost, damaged and stolen. The MailiGen list management tools centralize list storage and provide tools for segmentation, importing and exporting.
Stats!! The mail campaign stats that MailiGen provides are world class. They are simple to understand and rich in depth. Our customers love the stats.
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.
Segment creating could be more functional and may include statistics from previous mails. Time to time I need to use more advanced functions like "send information to people who clicked on link A".
It does not allow the user to choose mobile/tablet friendly templates. I'd like to decide myself.
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 are satisfied with this cooperation and we don't see why we should change email marketing service provider at this point. Excellent service and rapid new feature development keeps us very satisfied.
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.
Although it is easy to use for basic users and people with no experience in e-mail marketing, but for more advanced users it still lacks functionality - really advanced filtering - on it's web interface. However everything is possible once you use API.
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
Although time to time I send a support ticket, but more frequently I use the live support option on their website. I get instant feedback and feel that my problem is addressed immediately.
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.
Mailigen falls short to Listrak due to Listrak's far superior contact, conversion, and message analytics. Some features are unavailable or not easily integrated with the Mailigen platform compared to its competition, but features such as model acquisition & shopping cart abandonment are available. The ability to integrate such features into your website may be easier when using a competitors platform, but easy usability comes with a price. Extra perks such Coupon managers & etc. are useful features that allow you to generate Barcodes & QR codes, as well as track various data analytics when implementing this feature. Small items as such are what Mailigen lacks in comparison to its competitors, but their price point kicks the rest out of the water if you can live without some of the bells and whistles.
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.
