Adobe acquired Neolane in July 2013 and later re-named the product Adobe Campaign. Adobe Campaign provides both marketing automation and marketing resource management functionality such as spend & financial management, workflow, and asset management.
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HCL Unica
Score 7.7 out of 10
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HCL Unica (acquired by HCL Technologies from IBM in late 2018) is a suite of enterprise marketing management tools including marketing automation with cross-channel campaign management, budgeting and forecasting, project workflow management, asset management, brand management and spend management.
This tool was very powerful and seemed very easy to use for our direct mail capabilities, but wasn't adapted to email. However, as the market grew to involve more personalized expectations we needed to integrate other tools to handle email capabilities and it no longer seemed …
Adobe is a tough competitor, and it's fair to say that you can get the same quality of service from Adobe. Speaking as an Adobe fanboy, it's easy to say that I'm biased – however, from a price standpoint, IBM is cheaper, and you get the same results. I will say that IBM doesn't …
Against all the other applications, IBM EMM stands head and shoulders above the others, in terms of sophistication & diverse capabilities - with Neolane being the closest.
Most recently Senior Client Services Manager & Client Services Team Leader
Chose HCL Unica
It's been a market leader within this space for over 10 years, it has a high ability to execute time and time again. Against it's competitors it has been tried and proven to been robust but flexible within reason to allow adaptations that will not break the system. Can be …
Our marketing infrastructure has been streamlined by Adobe Campaign. It enables our marketing team to design personalized email marketing that can be automatically sent to each client. It has a safe database that manages our customer's data and we can easily refer to it when we require customer information. It is simple to use and can easily monitor all marketing channels at a lower cost.
I think it is wel suited for a business with a lot of one on one relations in the database. For example a supermarket that sells products to a client and gives a reduction on that product. It is nice if the selection process is not to complex and does not involve to many calculations. It is also nice if it is very clear what you want to follow up. In our environment we have lots of many-to-many relations. for example one product is held by more then one client. And that client might have more of those products with other clients. These kind of situation demands for a lot of calculations with derived fields(*), and there things go far too slow. Unica is probably not such a good solution for us, because our environment is too complex, and so is to process of creating the selection, we often have to change things in the selection flows. Because of the complexity it is difficult to see what the flow is exactly doing afterwoods, it also takes to much time to modify existing campaigns. The interface is not handy to work with, if you have long lists of variables, of tables or derived fields(*) you have to scroll through trough them, you can not really search them or reorder them. You can not drag and drop fields or other objects like derived fields in the flow, what would be easy if you have to make frequent changes to the proces flow. When you copy objects something the content of the object changes because the links with other objects or lost. (*) derived field: field to calculate something
If we already have a list of subscribers to whom we want to send private newsletters about certain updates in our products and services, it is very easy to import them into the platform through text document formats, or directly from cloud platforms that have allowed us to save their information
It integrates very well with platforms oriented to the development of help desk operations, as in the case of Zendesk, where we store all the information of the customers that communicate with us to improve their user experience through technical assistance, and to have a better feedback with them.
Adobe Campaign allows us to create our own forms that can be added to the company's page, so that depending on the type of potential customer that is accessing them, we can show personalized information that is of interest to them as customers, and thus ensure more business.
Ability to translate Multiple SQL queries into a very easy to use visual GUI.
Provides the ability to pre-define segments, run them once in off hours, store them in their own system tables for quick youth and a significant reduction in CPU utilization on the database.
It’s use of Reusable objects. Including user variables to pre-define calculations one time, macros that you can create and pass values to parameterize the SQL code And the creation of templates to easily replicate work.
It’s ability to bring in external data on the fly that can very easily be mapped into any flowchart.
It’s flexibility and creating UNIX script via triggers to automate sending of files to multiple vendors with different FTP sites
It’s flexibility in the output layouts that it can create.
We have had problems with the usability of their platform. When we communicate with the integrated technical support via e-mail, it takes hours to respond.
On the other hand, the application does not allow us to multitask, your platform becomes very slow.
Also, it is a bit complicated to adapt to using the application completely.
Greater integration of real time (Interact) capabilities with outbound channels, in particular IBM eMessage Email & SMS delivery.
Additional outbound channels to be integrated into eMessage, including Facebook Fanpage & Twitter DM broadcasts. At the moment these are possible only through custom additional integration.
Support for additional marketing database technology, e.g. MySQL, Exasol, ParAccel, WX2.
Provision of database technology with software purchase, as Web technology (IBM WebSphere Express) is supplied for free, but no database is supplied - since IBM also market DB2, which is a supported technology it seems a shame.
Once you go for Neolane you are a bit stuck with it, so we will most likely stay with Neolane. Cost of investment and training are the main factors at work here. We havesimply have invested too much in the product to stop using it after 2 years. That said, my score of 8 does not imply that the product is worthy of getting an 8 but reflects our willingness to renew. Given that upgrading to a new version will cost again a substantial sum, we most likely will keep using the current version we are on which is 6X.
There are three main factors to renew a licence: 1) Cost to migrate to another platform would be rather expensive and time consuming, plus the requirement of retraining employees to use a new tool 2) It has been proven time and time again that it is a market leader in the space (10 years +) 3) It can be built upon, with the addition of additional IBM EMM modules - despite theories it does have very strong digital capabilities.
I believe that many applications have some flaws but many in general are very efficient in what they do and among all these, I believe that Adobe Campaign offers great features compared to others and is also a very robust and stable platform. We can use data in a very advanced way to get as much management as possible over the entire flow.
I wished they have standard technical support based in Sydney, Australia and they made it easy for us to access that support. A lot of the complex technical support questions have to be coursed through Adobe consultants, who charge a premium. And sometimes the answers to some technical questions are not very straightforward. In the end, we contracted a local Adobe Campaign technical partner.
- We had to rebuild a part of the datamart afterwards to tighten up and simplify the selection process. But as it was too time consuming to rebuild all the existing campaigns, we no run campaigns on different versions of the datamart. - The response tracking of the campaigns never worked out well, it was impossible to implement a direct response where there is a link between the lead and the response in our operational process
As earlier stated, it is really about the customizability. We used and still do use the other platforms mentioned. But our clients on Adobe Campaign needed a more sophisticated solution. We would be able to achieve the same outcomes on a different tool, but the difference is they would require much more regular and manual attention.
The contact history and the response history are so powerful. You can track whatever you want to help the call center to push relevant offers to our customer. In addition, predictive models can be built, with patience, in IBM Campaign. If you have some complaints from the call center about any campaigns, you can easily validate it into the contact or response history.
The licensing terms after purchasing this platform are manageable. The set price is relatively low as compared to that of similar products and there is a guarantee in Returns on Investment after the agreed period of time. We are able to manage the billing frequency without any failure due to the stability and positive performance of this platform in marketing campaigns.
