Acoustic Campaign vs. WiseStamp

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 still receive emails from people with a simple "sent from iPhone or sent from iPad" with little to no signature built-in. While I know not everyone is adept or even interested in changing mobile/tablet settings, WiseStamp makes it easy to have a more official-looking signature, in my opinion. Just because you reply to me via a smartphone or tablet, I expect the same level of professionalism. Plus, I don't need to know what device you use to reply or initiate an email, as poor spelling or grammar are essential. Including a photo, especially with many transactions being one in which you never see the person face-to-face, adds a more human element that is really missing. Studies show that ads including a photo of a person will get greater views. I think the same goes for email signature files. My goal is that regardless if I email someone from my laptop, smartphone, or tablet, they should not know as their transactional experience with me should appear to be precisely the same.

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.

• Very user-friendly. Loved the simplicity and quick ability to set up.
• Had lots of themes / designs to choose from and had offered the ability to link social accounts for the most popular current socials.
• Extremely affordable already, but we also had a promo code which made it even cheaper.

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.

• In my opinion, animations are glitchy
• Forced to use built-in templates or pay extra to have them simply copy a signature you create elsewhere. No options to actually build out a signature template to your own specifications.
• I think it is over priced
• Doesn't work with "New Outlook" and only certain versions of Classic Outlook.

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.

I love it... Wouldn't use anything else

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.

It is pretty easy to use but the initial setup takes awhile to get right - some of the templates that you can use do not always work for what I had in mind - but overall and once through the initial phase it is super easy to use.

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

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

I actually haven't tried the above, but this form wouldn't let me advance without answering. I built my own signature in Gmail. It would have been fine except embedding video is really tough. I was willing to sacrifice being able to showcase books in order to show my TEDx talk link.

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.

• I have increased my calendar bookings from outreach emails by more than 200%
• It makes it easier for people to schedule time with me when multiple people are involved as they can see my availability by clicking the link.
• I have had customers that have not used me for a period of time book time out of the blue by going back to one of my old emails and seeing the scheduling link there
• I use the banner tool whenever there is a promotion or to promote some of my sponsor brands to my clients without them even realising they are getting "adverts"

Incentivized