Acoustic Campaign vs. Net-Results

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.

Net-Results is very well-suited for small, medium and large businesses. They seem to be more advanced than what a typical enterprise level implementation would require. When selecting a marketing automation provider make it a point to find out the level of integration with Salesforce and other marketing technologies. Do they have pre-built automation modules or does it require building from the ground up? Also ask questions regarding its specific capabilities ... for example: is it a marketing automation provider? is it a CRM provider? etc

• 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.

• Automated emails in a drip campaign that Sales can remove people from.
• Lead scoring and alerts that go right to the lead owner.
• Weekly reports to each Sales person with their hottest lead.
• Very finely tuned segments that can be used for alerts, emails, and scheduled reports.
• Integration with Salesforce. The Sales team can basically trigger their own emails.

• 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.

• Forms: Would love to have dependent fields, also ability to see all data a user entered without having to create a custom field for every form.
• Campaign branching: Criteria need to be selected one at a time, which can be very time-consuming.

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.

Net-Results does what we need and is straightforward to use. Their team has been very responsive to our requests and great to work with.

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.

Net Results is pretty easy to use and understand. I wouldn't say that it is the best in comparison to MailChimp's drag and drop email builder, but Net Results do so much more than MailChimp that it is hard to even compare the two. Overall Net Results has good usability

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

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

We've used ClickDimensions and Marketo. We felt that ClickDimensions was more limited as far as creating effective email campaigns and not as easy to use. It also is completely native to Dynamics CRM, which can be a positive and a negative. Marketo was the previous solution we owned, we are much happier with Net-Results. It's easier to use, not as complex and there is much better communication from their support team. When looking at a new solution we also looked at Act-On and Hubspot. Act-On probably would've been our second choice, but it didn't have as modern of a feel and wasn't quite as easy to use. Hubspot didn't really fit our business. It was very focused on SEO and blog posts. It didn't have the features we needed from a marketing standpoint

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.

• Stronger re-engagement rates - The buy cycle for our product can be very long. Net-Results helps us keep in touch with prospects that may have gone cold.
• Better asset utilization - Net-Results helps us drive continuous utilization of our assets.
• Efficiency - The automation Net-Results has provided means we can focus on other tasks, like creating new assets or building new partnerships.