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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Acoustic Campaign
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Acoustic Campaign
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Acoustic Campaign
Considered Both Products
Acoustic Campaign
Verified User
Director
Chose Acoustic Campaign
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 …
IBM Watson Campaign Automation is more of an enterprise product for large organizations where you're plugging into all kinds of systems and workflows tend to be slower.
Verified User
Manager
Chose Acoustic Campaign
Reviewed HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot and ActiveCampaign. Chose IBM Watson Campaign Automation due to their workflow capabilities. They can automate a process that requires a series of steps that typically require intervention by a several different users. Administrators can write …
It’s not the best tool to implement, it’s really difficult. Doesn’t have the best reporting tools, but integrates B2C and B2B and has a few good features and nice price.
I've used Campaign Monitor, which also seems to be fairly clunky. While not a direct competitor, Infusionsoft was likely the most user-friendly experience I've had, however it lacked the control and uses that Silverpop has.
I've used IBM Campaign and Apteco PeopleStage and find WCA significantly easier to get to grips with. Simplicity comes from the presentation of the data to the tool and an intuitive UI. IBM Campaign has significantly greater ease of access to and manipulation of ad hoc data …
I was not someone who got to choose the ESP our company was going to use; however I do find a lot of value in this product. It has enhanced my skills in email marketing x 100. I have learned how automation programs work, how to manipulate queries, learned how to build nice …
I've used ExactTarget and Right Now Technologies for email marketing in the past but it's been so long since I've used either service I don't know how they would compare anymore. I can say that I am happy enough with the service that Silverpop provides that I do not plan on …
Silverpop is a far more sophisticated and complex solution that can incorporate out of the box a great number of features. Since Silverpop was acquired by IBM the product features are added really fast and other solutions are incorporated to the product. Also, IBM can locally …
I really liked the ability to create multiple queries on lists imported. The integration with SFDC worked well for our organization. The reporting was okay, though I really liked the dashboard features. It made presenting high level information to management simple.
Two words: value and scalability. Compared to its competitors, Silverpop offers soup to nuts functionality, complete customer support and account management that is delivered at an unmatched value in the industry. The tool is also incredibly scalable in terms of automation, its …
I have used EmailLabs and evaluated ExactTarget during our selection process for SIlverpop. At the time, EmailLabs and Bronto didn't reliably offer the API integration that we were looking for (which probably could have changed in the last 4 years). ExactTarget and Silverpop …
Verified User
Executive
Chose Acoustic Campaign
We had evaluated Marketo at the time, but had chosen Silverpop instead. Some people compare Hubspot, but we consider that a different flavor of marketing automation--not apples to apples.
Eloqua and Marketo are both superior in pretty much every way. Constant Contact does not have near the feature set of any of these, but is very good at the small number things it does.
We selected Siverpop over Marketo based on price and the demonstration of SalesForce integration. Marketo were unable to demonstrate the degree of integration we were looking for, although I'm sure it does have the capability.
As an Email Service Provider, it blows Constant Contact and Thindata out of the water. But as a reporting tool, it's difficult to navigate and lacks metrics.
I wasn't involved in the tool selection process but inherited the system. I think that Pardot and Marketo are the leaders in the marketplace, followed closely by Eloqua. Hubspot is a nice option with good usability but I was concerned it would not scale for the global campaign …
MailChimp is a little more intuitive and easier to navigate (not as many steps), but lacks the database management, scoring and landing pages of Silverpop. Silverpop is a more robust system for data capture.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.