Likelihood to Recommend 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.
Read full review VanillaSoft is well suited for any marketing operations or sales operations team looking for a tool to help them efficiently reach prospects and engage with them through a streamlined method. This can be a great way to manage that engagement, measure it, and keep track of various aspects of prospects.
Read full review Pros 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 Our employees love it - very user friendly, easy to grasp, very little down time to learn it. They feel very confident immediately. Great technical support - I can get solutions to customer problems that make our company look more responsive to our clients. Our clients appreciate our solving their problems immediately. Because of the real time analytics - we can address immediate issues with marketing campaigns to make our client's personnel look great to their superiors. Because of all the functionality - we can provide a turnkey approach from a small company with big company capabilities. Read full review Cons 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 It really needs an "undo" button. I can't tell you how many times I was typing notes etc and hit a wrong button and all was gone so I had to start over. This may be the way we have it set up....we have term codes which are how the callers terminate a call they were on. They finish the call, then type notes in the notepad section of what happened, then they terminate the call. But there are times that I need to go onto a record and just leave a note but don't need to terminate it as anything. If there is a way to do that, it would make my life a lot easier. Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Read full review We have no reason not to renew. VanillaSoft has been the best CRM (for us) that we have ever used. The value is great, we love the system, and it's easy to get assistance from VanillaSoft team when needed. Our team is so used to the calling and admin functions there is no desire to change.
Read full review Usability 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.
Read full review The entire system is set up so perfectly. It makes training callers much quicker, and admin tools are so easy to navigate when you get used to using it. Also, if there is ever something I cannot figure out, I can get support from VanillaSoft very quickly to resolve and get my task accomplished.
Read full review Reliability and Availability 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.
Read full review It is very rare that we have system issues. Maybe a handful of times over the years, we had to contact support about being unable to access. It was always a quick response from the VanillaSoft team, and they would clearly explain the issue and usually give time frame on fixing, or have it fixed immediately.
Read full review Performance The throttle time for sending emails would vary depending on how many other campaigns were going out that day, which I found inconsistent
Read full review I work on all aspects for VanillaSoft for our company. The pages overall do load very quickly. Reports are amazing, I can get quick report, customized reports, and anything I may need to present to client in very little time. It has made my job so much simpler. As far as I know, integration goes smoothly as well.
Read full review Support Rating 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
Read full review Response time was acceptable for the relatively few problems any of our users may have encountered. Fortunately, such occasions were rare.
Read full review In-Person Training It was very helpful and informative. The learning of the tool is something anyone can do, as the setup is so well thought out.
Read full review Online Training 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.
Read full review It was very thorough. VanillaSoft team did not rush us. They explained the various functions clearly and were open to any and all questions we had as we began to learn the system. Also, once training completed, if we encountered anything we could not figure out, the support team was fantastic in helping us out.
Read full review Implementation Rating 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.
Read full review Our implementation was very easy.
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review VanillaSoft stacks up against
Microsoft Power BI very well by allowing the data visualization in a more effective way, Power BI has positioned itself as one of the more robust and intuitive tools for business intelligence and data presentation. VanillaSoft and
Microsoft Power BI are a great bundle for the report and analytics team.
Read full review Scalability VanillaSoft has been great. The flexibility of the system is wonderful. The scalable software options are impressive as well. I would strongly support VanillaSoft's capabilities in this area. You really can do just about anything to get the setup and or integrations you may desire for your company needs.
Read full review Return on Investment 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 Ability to contact more clients each day. The ability to save my correspondence and notes on each interaction allowing for the appearance to the customer that I am very engaged when we are speaking. Increased sales from the calendar setting and saving my notes. Read full review ScreenShots Acoustic Campaign Screenshots