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 AWeber is an excellent email marketing solution for small to mid-sized businesses, especially those that are just starting with email marketing campaigns. AWeber is also good for bloggers. But it's not perfect for an affiliate marketer who wants to make a landing page on AWeber. Businesses that require advanced segmentation options may need to consider other email marketing platforms.
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 List building: AWeber makes it easy to grow opt-in subscribers through customizable signup forms as well an integration with tools like Sumo and Hustle Pro. List segmentation: with a little more information about each subscriber, it's easy to create custom segmented lists based on different criteria. Deliverability: AWeber enforces opt-in rules to keep spammers out of its system and improve deliverability rates for reputable users. We rarely have issues with our messages from AWeber being routed to spam folders. Double opt-in: AWeber makes it easy to set up double opt-in to make extra certain you have a high-quality mailing list. 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 Aweber would be even better if it had the ability to host landing pages. I have to use a tool like landingpages.net to do this if I don't want to create the landing pages as part of my client's website. If I manage their site, it isn't a problem, but it keeps me from using Aweber for clients who manage their own sites or dont' have one. Aweber would greatly benefit from a more robust reseller program. Firms like mine have multiple clients and, with each client needing an individual Aweber account, it would be nice to have access to margin so that we could resell the services. Along the lines of a reseller program, it would be great of Aweber allowed resellers to white label the interface and administrate multiple accounts from one agency account. 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 AWeber is easy and intuitive for me use. I really like the simplicity and the structure of the work flow as it saves me time. AWeber also integrates with all the other programs, systems and gateways that I use on a daily basis (WordPress, Paypal, LeadPages, Facebook and more) and if I have any questions or have trouble the AWeber customer service technicians are very helpful.
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 See previous answers ... the design / customization interface could be more intuitive and elegant .. for example, for me it has been difficult to easily figure out how to place pictures / images to the right, left or center of text.
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 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 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 I have always received prompt phone or live chat support that has resolved my issues on the first call in a competent, knowledgeable and friendly manner. By contrast MailChimp offers no live chat or phone support; they only offer email support and the response time for MailChimp is slow by comparison to AWeber.
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 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 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 We often use
Canva to design our content and then export it as an image to upload into Aweber, as Aweber designs and limitations are too much of a hindrance to our needs.
Canva is a brilliant tool for marketing and saves you a lot of time being able to adapt or change an existing template you create.
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 Aweber delivers my email fast and reliably, never had a problem tech support could not handle (by the way, their support is great!) Since I have been with Aweber for so many years, I have an unlimited plan for a very affordable rate Aweber may not be a sexy as some of the new kids on the block, but it is a solid offering you should consider when choosing an autoresponder Read full review ScreenShots Acoustic Campaign Screenshots