Acoustic Campaign (formerly IBM Watson Campaign Automation) vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio

• 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.

Read full review

• Sends client confirmations when they subscribe to a newsletter, sign up for a conference, or place an order with our company (SourceMedia). We don't have to hire an agency to send these for us.
• Manages newsletter subscriptions and allows us to deploy on specific dates/times.
• Helps us discover and manage the correct audience base per newsletter, and automates the distributions so we don't have to do it manually.

Read full review

• 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.

Read full review

• Deliverability reports - before sending emails they are checked for known issues and deliverability performance. The SFMC offering is ok but could be better. There additional software that can be purchased which should be included as part of the offering
• SF should make it easier to integrate other clouds i.e commerce cloud and service cloud. The implementation of commerce cloud has improved but I still feel there is a way to go

Read full review

• 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.

Read full review

• Better execution/monitoring - when multiple steps are involved, IMH is great at dashboarding.
• Facilitates exploratory campaigns - it is great at instilling confidence when you're trying a new facet of a campaign, due to the process transparency.
• Cloud - can be a double-edged sword. Allows for on the go access, but isn't truly mobile-friendly, and can sometimes sputter. But certainly will improve with time.

Read full review