Item: Adobe Campaign
Rating: 5
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Campaign

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Neolane is being used to send our paid advertisement emails and our own email campaigns. It is in use by our marketing team and our business teams. We switched from Experian, to Neolane due to the better re-targeting ability that Neolane offered us, and a better integration with our own and partner databases

Pros and Cons

Pros

Customizability: if you know what you want and need - Neolane is able to provide you with an environment that should suit your needs.
Cross-platform: the ability to manage campaigns - SMS - Email - Social media etc.
Analytics: Neolane provides a vast amount of data

Cons

User interface - it's not modern looking. I wouldn't call it particularly user friendly. And overall it's not highly responsive
Debugging: the information given is not always enough and contact with Neolane support needs to be made
Resource management: the software in general (the client and the server side) are a tad resource heavy

Return on Investment

We lowered our overall cost of routing emails, we are now using our own servers with a flat-fee cost for the connection. However against substantial initial investment - cost of deployment and training of staff.
Our turnover in email increased by a bit, due to the fact we can route more - and a bit better targeted
Employment efficiency went down. Unlike Experian we have now full time 2 people providing technical support. The Client software is slower than the Experian web interface and overall action takes more time. However this is on the shoot-per shoot basis. For the more permanent campaigns the customizability of Neolane is absolutely better (read good)

Alternatives Considered

CheetahMail

We used to use Experian, or CheetahMail as it's referred to. Overall with the cost of deployment and training there is not really a way of going back. Given the chance, we probably would have saved ourselves the cost and would have stuck with an SAAS agreement with either Experian or an equivalent.

That is not to say that Adobe's Neolane is a bad product, in fact it's a fairly good product. However it needs a lot of polishing to become the all round pack it should be.

Likelihood to Renew

Once you go for Neolane you are a bit stuck with it, so we will most likely stay with Neolane. Cost of investment and training are the main factors at work here. We havesimply have invested too much in the product to stop using it after 2 years.

That said, my score of 8 does not imply that the product is worthy of getting an 8 but reflects our willingness to renew.

Given that upgrading to a new version will cost again a substantial sum, we most likely will keep using the current version we are on which is 6X.

Likelihood to Recommend

Smaller less technically staffed companies should avoid it. For mid-size companies with a serious need for a email solution, it might be worth considering if the staff involved in using the product isn't afraid of technically looking stuff. The staff that runs the servers (if it's on-premises deployment) needs to be fairly technical, and willing to dig into issues and errors that will arise.

Using Adobe Campaign

Users and Roles

9 - Marketing, they work on keeping our customers, and use Neolane to that effect reminding people to get back to our site, special promotions and the like
Business sending emails to our client databases for advertisers, retargetting and making the most of the campaigns ran.
Technical staff provides the support to our agents

Support Headcount Required

4 - 1 system architect, server management and providing assistance to the operational support when needed.

2 operational support agents, they mainly take care of the back-end - server updates, interaction with the database on a deeper level and providing assistance with "work flows" within Neolane, the things that sales people feel is too technical.

And we have 1 internal consultant, who provides feedback on campaigns (code correction) and can help with technical difficulties encountered. in relation to the Client software (GUI)

Business Processes Supported

Email
Sms
Social

Innovative Uses

Able to link all distribution channels together
Re-targeting on a very precise level

Adobe Campaign Implementation

Change Management Lessons

Change management was minimal

Adobe Campaign Support

Support Rating

I would say that generally the knowledge of the support team we work with is good, great even.
I can't say that they seem to be very interested or involved in trying to make the product work best for us.
They do what needs to be done, and they do it well - but not really going the extra mile.

Adobe Campaign Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed Immediate help available Support understands my problem Quick Initial Response	Support doesn't seem to care

Premium Support

Yes

Bug Resolution

Yes - Reported many bugs, sometimes they were in our deployment sometimes they were in the software (client side) and at other times they were in the server. Generally speaking the ones in our deployment were resolved rather quickly (except for one perky one they could not get resolved - quite critical as well). The ones in the client side, we usually get the answer to update to the latest version because that one always resolves every bug that you might have.... and if it doesn't well the next version will, so not really useful or satisfying on that level. The server part is a bit like the client software, except for the fact that it's a pain in the ass to update to major new version.

Comments

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Neolane a great product in the right hands

Software Version

Modules Used