Acoustic Campaign (formerly IBM Watson Campaign Automation) Reviews

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Silverpop hosts an annual conference every year (Amplify) in Atlanta. It's a 2-day conference (3 if you do the boot camps) where you can network and meet the staff, attend trainings, listen to expert panels, see new features. Really great experience and really got my teams excited to try new things.

They also do annual user-group conferences (in various cities) that allow users to meet other local users and discuss features and do hands-on examples. Not as helpful as the conference, but good nonetheless.

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.

In case of marketing automation Silverpop Engage gives the right tools to perform complex automation tasks with ease. The provided interface is so intuitive that it is extremely easy to perform even the most complex automatic processes. The ability to combine email, sms and other systems gives flexibility and helps exploit the tools set provided to the fullest.

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.

Overall, we have been extremely satisfied with Silverpop, the platform, as well as the high level of account support we have. Outages are rare, if any, and we are always notified well in advance if there is a release (usually once or twice a year), that could short term affect the speed of the system. For someone looking at Silverpop during the selection process, some key questions to ask could be how they handle import of data, whether email lists or data from your e-commerce platform as well. What is on their roadmap that will help handle more of the 1:1 messaging and trying to prevent recipients from getting too many emails in 1 day more easily - currently a bit manual to manipulate each individual query. Silverpop is a self-service platform, so someone looking for more full-service should ask about the level of support they might receive and if they offer any full-service features.

How advanced or sophisticated is the email program. Silverpop tends to lean toward the more complex side and my not be necessary for programs that are more straightforward.

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.

Silverpop is possibly an option for companies who are just starting with automation in general or are on a tight budget. For us, we run campaigns globally in multiple languages and we are quickly outgrowing it as our automation needs increase. We need an automation program that can grow and scale with us. Also, its important to have a support team that's responsive and listens to the issues that customers face and makes the necessary improvements. We are looking at other solutions like Pardot and Marketo and they have functionality and usability that far surpasses what we have in Silverpop.

Are templates easy to set up and troubleshoot - is interface something that is easy to utilize. Can queries easily be set up. Is the synchronization seamless between SP and SFDC.

Silverpop is excellent for small to large businesses, but if you are a mom-and-pop shop or just starting, it may be more expensive than you're willing to pay initially. However, it's worth every penny as soon as you have a budget for it. We had deliverability issues before we used Silverpop.

I haven't used any other emails system like it. it gives you everything you need from being able to laod the lists to creating the email and finalizing the send. they even help you become white listed!

It's very powerful but complex, if you need a system that you can use quickly then this is not it. Consider the ability of your users and how much time for training and learning they would need. Make sure you review the design and creation elements, they are not easy to use.

I would advise them that the on-boarding process is long and that a lot of budget dollars need to be taken into affect even above and beyond the purchase of Silverpop. Marketing automation takes a lot of time and money even beyond the tool itself.

There is always room for improvement, even with the best tools so remember that during the selection process. SilverPop gives marketers all the tools they need to more efficiently manage landing pages, email campaigns, and determine the ROI or value of those campaigns.

I would do your due diligence, and get in and try the product. Compare that to other solutions like dotMailer or Bronto for basic email marketing, or Marketo or Act-on for more advanced lead-to-revenue management solutions.

Easy to use, but reporting can be improved upon.

The ease of use and the reliability of Engage set it apart from other solutions. The features and functionality are geared to revenue increases and customer engagement.

Silverpop is amazing for external emails. Utilizing it for internal emails has its challenges including company spam filters. It is not always easy to see who, out of the contacts in the database, received the mailing. Also, reporting can be a bit of a pain, as it isn't always easy to get the information out of Silverpop that my company is asking for. It would be nice to report on email performance for both programs and single mailings, without getting test or cancelled mailing in the mix.

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.