Likelihood to Recommend A duration of one and a half years is enough for us to recognize the capabilities of a tool and in my opinion, this one is just a great tool to manage marketing campaigns of even massive-sized firms. Its marketing automation tool and its way of managing campaign and the way it executes digital initiatives is enough to get an inkling of its abilities. Less favorable for the people who want to have something at a cheap price and are more dependent on the reports as its reports have nothing much in detail.
Read full review If you don't care where your campaigns are running, if you don't care about your clients then feel free to do business with them. I would not recommend them to other agencies or business if they have a lot of particular advertisers and clients that they work with. It is too much work for them. If you want to do a self-service model with Simpli.fi, then I could recommend working with them. As long as I don't have to deal with their customer service daily, and my company has the control of the campaigns, I can feel more comfortable working with them. But even still, there are a lot of red flags that have been raised over the last few years and I am skeptical.
Read full review Pros We can look for the behavior of our clients on our website and mobile application using the analytics it provides. It is highly customizable. It presents data in a form that is easily understandable and reports are highly beneficial for us. Analytics in the form of graphs. Read full review Simpli.fi's Geo-Fencing capabilities are top notch! The ability to include an unlimited number of geo-fences within a campaign is invaluable, as is the ability to measure the effectiveness of a geo-fencing campaign in driving foot traffic to our clients' physical locations. Our organization appreciates the knowledge, experience and responsiveness of Simpli.fi's customer support staff. One of the things Simpli.fi does particularly well is the education of its users and re-sellers. From monthly webinars, to its Bullseye learning courses, they have a way to make the complex understandable to even the most green digital sellers! Read full review Cons Integration options outside of auto-syncs. I am currently having an issue trying to find an adapter to use with Eloqua to API into our data warehouse but keep the functionality on the Eloqua side. To provide more transparency and visual details of the syncs (integrations of outside data) from any other system that is feeding Eloqua, like what is being updated or changed, better explanations of errors, drill down to newly created records. Custom Objects - Need to have a way to create CDOs outside of just form submissions and uploading of lists, like if you needed to import a file nightly to feed that CDO data but automate the import and make sure it maps to a contact record. Import of data from a file on SFTP - There is no way to filter or create logic to control what is being fed into Eloqua. Currently, that manipulation has to be done by the IT side first. Less flexibility. Better auditing capabilities within the canvas. meaning, sometimes if something is changed or not working the problem may not necessarily show up in immediately, the pattern could take a while to present itself. For example, the feeders into the program. If there is a problem, I don't know that maybe contacts are not entering the program until we do reporting that month and realize there was a lull of contacts going through. Then we have a whole month of missed records or other potential data issues. When you get do large and your Eloqua machine is very robust, the harder it is to see everything Be able to add more than 250 custom contact records. That definitely inhibits my organization in how we need to use that record. Read full review The approaches are not easily understood by our sales reps. The reporting platform is pretty basic. The new platform is still in beta version. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have been able to automate so many marketing processes with Eloqua over the past 5 years that the only direction would be to adopt the latest and greatest features Eloqua adds. The alternative would be to go back to the marketing stone-age and start over again. And we would rather move forward with increased automation and efficiency.
Read full review Usability Personally, I find it quite easy to use. But for those members of our team who have little or no testing experience, it's been a bit more difficult. There's also training required for development teams in order to have your campaigns coded and set up in the most efficient way. Our developers have been able to do basic and intermediate tests with no difficulty, and they find the interface itself quite intuitive... it's just the extremely complex tests that require a bit more understanding.
Read full review Reliability and Availability No one has experienced any problems with availablity.
Read full review Performance There are occasional complaints about slowness to refresh a screen or build a report. However, this is as much a factor of network access speeds as the system itself, since often the complaints occur when someone is accessing on a wireless network.
Read full review Support Rating We found that we often were telling support people how the system worked. Because we were on E9 that created a lot of support issues as well since few people on the support team seemed to know how E9 worked. That was mostly okay except when we had major system issues (like SSO preventing us from logging in after an update), it became really hard to get answers that weren't vague. It was always the issues that had the highest visibility within the organization (like with Sales) that seemed to take forever to resolve and didn't have a clear escalation path. When Oracle switched Eloqua over to the Oracle support portal it just got worse
Read full review In-Person Training They offer very basic classes which are required for master certification. After having been through it, I would not consider anyone with a master certification any more qualified, unlike Salesforce.com certification which is a more difficult thing to acquire. For example, one of the classes towards certification was around social media. I would have expected examples of how to incorporate into campaigns in the product, with a demo and hands-on test. Instead, it was a powerpoint slideshow that went on way too long and covered really basic stuff like “what is Facebook, what is Twitter”
Read full review Online Training Ok, so, this sounds like it could be horrible because it was all remote, but we loved it... the Adobe training environment was easy to use, and the trainers were engaging. It was simple to switch back and forth between the meeting and the hands-on exercises in their training instances. We took the fundamentals training early in our implementation-- before the consultants came onsite-- and I know this made a big difference in our implementation, because we were able to ask informed questions throughout
Read full review Implementation Rating I give it a 10 because the only issue we had was a result of not following the guidance we were given. Maxymiser provided a customized implementation guide for each site where we were adding the code. On our site implementations when we followed that guide to the letter, it was extremely fast and easy and has worked very well.
Read full review Alternatives Considered It was quite complex to generate segments with Adobe
analytics and I wasn’t personally satisfied with the overall performance of
Adobe Analytics and wasn’t enough flexible in any way. So we decided to switch
to something else better than
Adobe Analytics and is available in the market at
a cheap rate and we ended up doing our research for the most suitable tool at
Oracle Infinity and we don’t regret our decision.
Read full review We have done a lot of research on many other vendors that offer the same or even more as Simpli.fi and have found a great fit for our business. There are many other options out there for programmatic buying! My advice to you is do your research. Don't just jump into bed with one without knowing all of the facts. Ask questions. Do some digging. And NEVER take anything they say at face value. They are there to sell you the product and if you move forward, you will for sure be disappointed
Read full review Scalability Eloqua is definitely good for larger companies that have 100,000+ contacts and complex marketing workflows and data. Personalization is fairly robust with Eloqua for larger campaigns with smart content and features. Scaling across channels is also seamless - as the platform has great options for non-email channels like SMS, Direct Mail, Chat, etc.
Read full review Return on Investment We are able to use it to help our clients scale through testing We have been able to measure the impact of our events and sales events so we can determine which events to continue in the future and determine future investment Launch a new brand out of Eloqua and measure awareness Read full review We have been able to leverage Simpli.fi's geo-fencing tools to pry business away from larger competitors. The lack of a customer-facing dashboard is a weakness. Simpli.fi's low barrier of entry has allowed us to scale at our pace without the threat of being cut off in the face of high minimum spends. Read full review ScreenShots Oracle Marketing Screenshots