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Acoustic Campaign Reviews and Ratings

Rating: 6.1 out of 10
Score
6.1 out of 10

Community insights

TrustRadius Insights for Acoustic Campaign are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.

Pros

Toggle between HTML and Design views: Users have appreciated the ability to toggle between HTML and Design views for creating emails. This feature has been mentioned by several reviewers, making it easy to update photos and hyperlinks in emails.

Newly added features for test emails: Reviewers have mentioned that the newly added features for test emails have made it easier to ensure the accuracy of the email before sending it out. This improvement has been well-received by users, who find it valuable in preventing errors and mistakes.

Thorough examination process before sending: Users have commended the thorough examination process of the email before sending it, which helps prevent it from getting stuck in junk mail and ensures proper rendering on different platforms. Several reviewers have highlighted this aspect as a positive attribute of the product.

Reviews

40 Reviews

Hopeful that Acoustic will continue to improve and evolve from what IBM was

Rating: 4 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Acoustic to deploy multiple marketing emails to all our customers on a daily basis. We are always promoting new products and promotions, and email is one of the biggest drivers of traffic and sales for our e-commerce business.

Pros

  • Setting up complex email journeys.
  • Scoring models for contacts.

Cons

  • Currently no simple drag and drop email template editor.
  • Fragmented/not intuitive reporting-- You have to go to a few different places to piece together information.

Likelihood to Recommend

From my experience, Acoustic is a strong platform if you have a large team and very experienced and ideally tech-savvy members dedicated to email. For a smaller company, we have definitely had challenges with the platform's usability. We tried SMS with Acoustic and quickly migrated away from that, but continue to use them for email. We are happy with the direction Acoustic seems to be heading in since they transitioned away from IBM and the new account rep we got in the transition has made a world of a difference, but it remains to be seen how these new/promised changes and features will work in the application.

VU
Verified User
Director in Marketing (11-50 employees)
Vetted Review
Acoustic Campaign
1 year of experience

Powerful, but clunky and hasn't innovated fast enough

Rating: 5 out of 10

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Watson Campaign Automation was being used by two clients in two different ways. For one-off campaigns, simple email blasts, and more sophisticated cross-channel campaigns. And, to support the 'buyer journey' taking leads and engaging them to learn more about who they are and what they want, to be able to personalize communications and offers. Using data, both clients were able to offer a better brand experience as well as put the right products in front of their prospects.

Pros

  • Flexibility in using to data: databases (including relational databases), segmentation and powerful querying.
  • Personalization and conditional content for email as well as landing pages.
  • PURLs to extend personalization in direct mail.

Cons

  • The interface is clunky and heavy, resulting in a slow UX. This is particularly true with the email builder.
  • Processing of data (eg. returning a list of contacts for a query) is handled via 'Jobs', which means that it's not a dynamic process. Jobs need to start, crunch and end before you get a result.
  • Reporting

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM Watson Campaign Automation is a powerful platform but one that hasn't innovated as much as its competitors. It's well suited for those organizations that have already invested in IBM products. All other ones should have a look at other platforms that are more feature rich and have a more usable interface.

LL
Lawrence Ladomery
Marketing Manager in Marketing at Network Dynamics Pty Ltd (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Acoustic Campaign
5 years of experience

IBM Watson Campaign Automation Review

Rating: 6 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Watson Campaign Automation was used in our B2B Enterprise division. It was set up by our digital marketing team for global users. Works well for running automated email campaigns using trigger based elements. It allows for seamless marketing across mobile and other digital channels. Has strong lead management and scoring capabilities.

Pros

  • A/B testing
  • Customer journey building
  • Performance insights and reporting

Cons

  • Product documentation
  • AI-powered Watson Assistant
  • Email personalization

Likelihood to Recommend

Tracking performance of keywords and links in major search engines. IBM Watson Campaign Automation measures search rankings and performance. Improves page-level SEO with tools to diagnose and improve page performance. Integrates well with Google AdWords. It tracks which emails a prospect opens and clicks, what web-pages they visit, what keywords they use, even what they say on social networks.

VU
Verified User
Manager in Marketing (201-500 employees)
Vetted Review
Acoustic Campaign
4 years of experience

Nice integration between b2b and b2c

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I’m reselling the WCA to Zurich-Santander as the main marketing campaign manager.

Pros

  • Marketing campaign to customers
  • Sending the policy of insurance to customers to certify receipt

Cons

  • The main [area for] improvement would be the user interface..... it’s extremely hard to compare to Eloqua or Responsys
  • Reports !!! Please include Watson Analytics or something !!

Likelihood to Recommend

If you have to run campaigns into B2B and B2C it’s great .... because with others vendors you will need to buy two products. Also the send time optimization is a great feature that other vendors charge a lot for. The bad scenarios would be if there was a need to purchase a complete CX suite integration. Oracle's CX suite is more compete and integrated.

MC
Mariano Cento
Managing Director in Product Management at Biactiva (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Reseller
Acoustic Campaign
1 year of experience
View profile

Although there is a learning curve, mastering IBM WCA can prove beneficial for your email services.

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use IBM WCA for our main email marketing efforts. For our clients, we have about 10-20 clients within the platform across 2 services -- one full service, the other self-service. For full-service accounts, our agency runs email marketing efforts on behalf of the client from start to finish, while our self-service accounts run email for themselves with our analysts available to assist when needed. We also use IBM WCA for our agency's client-marketing.

Pros

  • Data integration / segmentation / list management -- the opportunities to segment and test data is second to none within WCA.
  • Reporting -- Silverpop has pretty much everything I need for reporting
  • Comprehensive -- Silverpop has virtually every tool I need for email marketing.

Cons

  • Template Builder -- Can be very buggy with certain chrome extensions (i.e. Grammarly), can be slow to refresh when making changes, no auto-save features, requires HTML knowledge.
  • Clunky UI/UX -- Overall, little time-saving features (Such as recognizing when you're in a folder and wanting to save a copy in that same folder or creating queries for people who don't open emails) seem to be overlooked.

Likelihood to Recommend

IBM WCA is great for anyone who is familiar with CSS/HTML or has the resources to have a CSS/HTML template builder outside of Silverpop. Those without that experience will find this platform to be extremely cumbersome and sometimes difficult to work with. Regardless, the features available in IBM WCA are worth the hassle.

BM
Brandon Mitchell
Paid Search (PPC) Analyst | Email Marketing Specialist in Marketing at Vizergy (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Acoustic Campaign
2 years of experience
View profile

If you're looking for an easy email platform, look no further!

Rating: 7 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Watson Campaign Automation is being used by our department to send emails to people who sign up on our websites to receive information about available and relevant education courses for them. Our clients are private colleges.

Pros

  • Very simple to use.
  • Very effective results.
  • Great user interface.

Cons

  • I struggle with the reporting at times. The reports UI can be easier to use and interpret.
  • The automation can get a tad tedious. It takes time to implement it.

Likelihood to Recommend

Easy to use, but reporting can be improved upon.

VU
Verified User
Manager in Marketing (501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
Acoustic Campaign
2 years of experience

Heaps of features straight out of the box; a great little tool!

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use IBM Watson Campaign Automation (WCA) ourselves as well as for reselling and offering implementation and best practice consultancy. It offers comprehensive integration options to CRM solutions such as Sugar and Salesforce, both with native integration and via a comprehensive suite of APIs, allowing us to automate and have an easy vision of our own marketing and lead generation activities.

Pros

  • Very easy to learn with extensive on-demand, self-paced e-Learning, a knowledge base to query other users' learnings and responsive 24/7 support via a portal.
  • Intuitive interface; work from left to right to join up data (contacts), email creative, campaign automation, reporting and integrated products.
  • Great automation capability: set up and automate the easy stuff quickly, allowing you to pay more attention to the hard stuff.
  • Easily import and personalise your HTML in the WYSIWYG editor, simple A/B/C/D testing process with automated execution to the winner and capacity for complex personalisation and dynamic emails creation.

Cons

  • My clients are crying out for a drag and drop email editor. While the WYSIWYG editor is fine, this would be a huge win for IBM!
  • The inbuilt reporting suite could do with an overhaul and to allow users to build more customised reports. Some elements of the reporting could do with better filtering options as well, or start with a filter rather than loading everything in the first instance.
  • Would be good to be able to make more assets portable between databases and have an 'asset import mapping' process to re-point/configure anything that doesn't match the original source.

Likelihood to Recommend

This is a great product and its top feature to me is how easy it is to get up and running with it. You can learn the basics easily via the on demand eLearning and quickly be automating simple email campaigns. So if you're a small team with limited IT resources, you can get up and running with automated campaigns from a simple spreadsheet and some HTML in no time.

VU
Verified User
Technician in Marketing (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Reseller
Acoustic Campaign
3 years of experience

Takes Email Marketing to another level

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

IBM Watson Campaign Automation is being used across several divisions within my company. We use it for our email marketing campaigns, ezines, and reporting.

Pros

  • The WYSISWYG is very user friendly for new people working with the product.
  • The reporting is very detailed. You have several ways to conduct reporting, and fully scope how your campaign did.
  • It's great for its capabilities to create automated mailings and trigger series.

Cons

  • Some of the reporting features could be grouped together. I don't like that i have to do a general report pull and a deliverability pull to see how well the entire campaign did. I would prefer if these reports were grouped together.
  • I also wish that when working in a template and you want to save in the folder you are currently in, it would automatically populate to be where you are currently working not force you to find your folder again.

Likelihood to Recommend

This product is great if you have a very detailed marketing program. Its very robust, but covers a lot of specific needs many companies may have. For smaller companies looking to use it for email marketing purposes I would encourage a different platform, as this one can do so many things, it may be an overkill for a smaller company.

VU
Verified User
Employee in Marketing (501-1000 employees)
Vetted Review
Acoustic Campaign
1 year of experience

Silverpop and SFDC inegration

Rating: 8 out of 10
Incentivized

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We used Silverpop for email marketing to prospects and current customer base. It was chosen based on its integration with Salesforce.com. It allowed us to easily track communications to these audiences and engage our sales team in follow ups on those communications.

Pros

  • Integration with SalesForce.com
  • Easily able to create queries of lists.
  • Easily able to test campaigns before sending out.

Cons

  • Hard to build emails if you have little familiarity with HTML.

Likelihood to Recommend

Silverpop Engage is well suited for Salesforce.com. The support on the product was phenomenal when needed. The personal training was lacking unless you wanted to pay for it, but their online courses were helpful and always available. I would refer back to them frequently.

AW
Amanda Wheeler
Marketing Manager / Product Specialist in Marketing at CornerStone Telephone Company (51-200 employees)
Vetted Review
Acoustic Campaign
4 years of experience

Negative ROI for our B2B company; cancelled our Silverpop contract after 1 year

Rating: 1 out of 10

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We implemented Silverpop to help us automate offers/responses/activities based on behavioral factors. We were looking for something beyond the traditional auto responder and drip campaigns of standard email platforms. We wanted to leverage both email and website behaviors so we could identify and treat leads appropriately with minimal human intervention. We needed something scalable.

Pros

  • The ability to examine email and website behavior together was cool, and what we really hoped to leverage
  • Customer support was ok
  • Training was ok

Cons

  • Creating email templates was shockingly difficult. Getting them to look good across all major clients was a lot of work.
  • Reporting was surprisingly complicated. And some numbers were suspicious. Then when we double checked, we did find errors (comparing reports to queries).
  • The amount of work required meant that this tool was not automatic at all. After about 6 months, we still needed at least 25+ staff hours a week or more to use Silverpop and analyze results. Really, you need a full time manager on this platform if you want to get a return on your investment.

Likelihood to Recommend

Silverpop was a poor fit for our company. We are a small business (database at the time was only 6,000 or so), and sell B2B. Maybe it would be better for companies with truly large databases--they may be able to get a better ROI on a fulltime staff person + the sw license. Also, at the time there was no "out" clause; they really should offer a 60 day trial OR a cancellation clause. At the time, and this may have changed, it was a one year contract, no exceptions, no flexibility.

VU
Verified User
Executive in Corporate (1-10 employees)
Vetted Review
Acoustic Campaign
1 year of experience