Likelihood to Recommend 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
Read full review Sailthu is perfectly suited, no matter what level of technical skill you have or support from an Engineering team. That said, it includes many advanced features which can only be fully utilized when integrated with custom webhooks and after receiving customer data sent via their APIs. There may be easier solutions out there for less technical users or for people wanting a simpler setup to begin with.
Read full review Pros 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. Read full review Personalization - one of the most important things you can utilize when emailing people. Segmentation - Sailthru makes it very easy to build an audience based off their criteria; there are so many different fields to choose from. We use this mostly for geo-targeting and engagement. Analytics - post-campaign analytics are very easy to look at, customize your view, and download as a csv to share with your team and company. Read full review Cons 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. Read full review Giving more practical examples of technical setups, sometimes the only way to understand it is to see it. Can't filter lists by date created or date modified, particularly needed when tracking down a specific list or looking to remove older lists. Can't set up automated data dumps to an email address, has to be sent via API. Jake Bodmer Senior Marketing Manager - Audience Growth & Retention
Read full review Likelihood to Renew 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.
Brent Banning Most recently Senior Client Services Manager & Client Services Team Leader
Read full review The biggest factor is that even after two months of trying to go through their credit processes and getting the right consideration for the real damages we had with the tool not being able to send campaigns for days, their sales staff is still not willing to work with us on it, making us do the switch away from them right now. We got extremely disappointed by trying to work with them through those issues.
Read full review Usability I think it is easy to use, if you don't have to do to complex selections.
Read full review Support Rating I didn't use the Unica support since it is with IBM, only before.
Read full review Their account management / sales staff doesn't seem to be taking the problems you experience very seriously - it took us 3 months and nudge emails to them every 2 weeks to ask for status updates (plus 6 different conversations with different people) to get a (very small credit) for a major issue, which in two months prohibited us from sending campaign emails for 2-3 days at a time.
Read full review Implementation Rating - 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
Read full review Alternatives Considered 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.
Read full review Sailthru provided a powerful, easy-to-use platform that was able to adjust to the needs we had at Dotdash. It was able to support the simple campaigns where we would send static creative to all recipients and the complex dynamic campaigns where we were customizing content. The scale and flexibility really made it a great platform for us to use.
Read full review Return on Investment It helps my clients drive their business which in turn, drives more profit for them. It helps my clients determine what works, and what doesn't work, in terms of their social marketing campaigns. It helps navigate proper budgeting through determining what clients' users respond to, and what they find unique. Read full review Sailthru has helped us build a welcome series that's much more effective than anything we had before. It's much easier to analyze transactional campaigns than our previous ESP. We're better able to run A/B tests and learn from the results -- all of which improves our email strategy. Read full review ScreenShots