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Built by marketers, for marketers.
October 15, 2012

Built by marketers, for marketers.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review

Overall Satisfaction

  • In general the capabilities within Marketing Resource Management seem like a platform built by marketers for marketers.
  • The out of the box processes are pretty
  • The uniformity of the user experience across modules makes user training and change management a lot We are still in early stages of using the reporting capabilities, but we can see lots of value in what they Unica was not as standardized.
  • We are still very much focused on adoption.
  • Users have to adjust to Aprimo. More challenging for organizations that have deep-rooted processes and this is something that has to be addressed in training.
  • The portal full application experience varies greatly and it can become cumbersome for users to communicate via Aprimo on projects.
  • We are early users of the tool so it's hard to quantify actual benefits yet, but the following metrics have been established per business function:
  • Brand & Creative - Cycle time from creative brief intake to delivering the final design; Number of reviews/re-works per creative request
  • Field Marketing - Time to consolidate a field marketing forecast
  • Digital Engagement - Cycle time to complete a website request
  • PHSS - Time to complete a marketing plan for a specific PHSS campaign
  • CEOP - # of emails and phone calls required to get a CEOP request through the cycle; Time to develop a consolidate quarterly report on CEOP requests/status
  • Email Marketing - End-to-end email production process, through to launch date (# of launches that don't stay on schedule; # of email launches that have mistakes - audience, sender line, grammar; # of email launches that involve internal complaints, miscommunications)
  • On-boarding/CDRP - Time to generate a quarterly client status regionalization report; Errors in data capture and missed deadlines; Capacity to handle on-boarding requests
  • Direct Mail - % of mail campaign requests that miss 15-day approval service level, Involvement of LOB/ Stakeholders in the review process while maintaining response time.
The investment you have to make in process and ensuring your people have the right skills in the art of marketing is critical.

For successful change management, make sure you form a team of what we called “process champions” composed of a member from each of the functional groups. These individuals will be the voice of their team to the deployment resources and the voice and the champions of the project to their teams. They should maintain an ongoing presence for the life of the relationship with Aprimo with their role being continuous evaluation of their processes, voice of their function with regards to new capabilities and requirements.

Aprimo have taken the challenge of technology out of the picture by focusing so much on the user experience.

Product Usage

100 - 100 users in Marketing:
– Brand And Creative
– Field Marketing
– Consumer marketing (Direct Response)
– PHSS Marketing
– RCO Microsites
– Corporate Microsites
– Celebrity and Entertainment programs
1 - We have one contracted resource, but we are taking steps to secure full-time employees. We expect 1-2 FTEs to support this deployment.
  • In aggregate, Aprimo supports 6 processes and their sub-processes:
  • Field Marketing - National Campaign workflow
  • Field Marketing - Template Edit workflow
  • Brand & Creative - Creative Review workflow
  • RCO Microsite - Microsite workflow
  • Microsites - Corporate Microsite and WPG workflow
  • PHSS- PHSS workflow
  • Direct Response creative processes

Evaluation and Selection

We had no legacy systems that deliver the same capabilities. We were just using mass communication tools.
Unica - Both platforms (i.e. Unica and Aprimo) delivered comparable capabilities. However, due to internal limitations around technical support and technical maturity of the organization we selected Aprimo as it delivered the more user friendly user interface. Unica requires more technical saviness. With Aprimo you can be completely non-technical.

We evaluated Epsilon, but they were too expensive and don’t compete on price.

We evaluated Axciom. They offered an outsourced full service and were very powerful, but we wanted to bring capabilities more in-house. The capabilities were more advanced that we needed today. We felt Aprimo or Unica could both carry us a long way.

We did not look at marketing automation vendors like Eloqua, Marketo. From a scale standpoint, we were looking for campaign management and not just marketing automation. Also wanted MRM (Marketing Resource Management) or internal workflow management capabilities. We did not take a deep dive as they didn’t have the full suite solution.

Implementation

We were very well supported. TopRight who performed the process/requirements definition as well as project management functions came with ample experience with various marketing automation platforms. They also came with very good multi-channel marketing experience that allowed them to tackle this implementation as a marketing deployment and not a technology deployment. TopRight bring expertise in multi-channels strategy.

Aprimo performed the configuration and training functions. Their personnel were very well versed in their platform and brought much empathy to a deployment that required a great deal of change management.

I am stunned by how many people (from for-profit sector who work here) have not been exposed to these types of platforms. I want to make sure that folks are so accustomed to user interface. When I roll-out campaign management, teaching them the art and science of campaign management versus just learning the tool. TopRight are marketers. They are familiar with all these technologies. Their job has been to define processes, best practices and turn into training. Similar to training from Salesforce.com about funnel mgmt etc, vs. just the product. We will create training modules that are agnostic to the platform.


  • Vendor implemented
  • Professional services company
TopRight (http://toprightpartners.com/).

Training

  • Online training
  • In-person training
Aprimo offered a number of hands on sessions customized for each group. As such, they address specific needs and configurations of each team. These sessions also offered another round of cross-functional collaboration in process design.
It was very generic and we took it prior to configuration. It was however adequate to educate our user in the basic capabilities that will have become available to them after deployment.

Configuration

We have not had any need for customization. We went into this with the mantra of let’s adapt ourselves to the platform.

Support

Customer service has been responsive and attentive in line with the service we have bought. However, any organization that wants to make investments in Aprimo should plan to make an investment in internal support headcount to serve as the first line of defense for user issues and inquiries otherwise it could become too expensive.

We are on a standard service plan. You get 8 hours/month of whatever you want to ask them. This has been good enough. Will be buying more when we implement campaign management.

Usability

They have taken the challenge of technology out of the picture by focusing so much on the UI.

Reliability

We have not yet experienced any downtime
We are struggling with it though I think it’s our firewall i.e. an internal issue. Accessing the software outside or on mobile is faster.

They have a multi-tenant and single tenant option (more expensive) . We bought the single tenant option in anticipation of using Campaign Management and based upon our scale. You get more capabilities with single tenant.

Integration

  • Our first goal is to get integrated with data warehouse (Teradata). Ultimately the data warehouse will have integrations to Salesforce.com etc.
Teradata owns Aprimo and are integrated. It was a factor in our decision, though I'm not sure if there’s a system integration advantage, as Teradata has been agnostic historically.

Vendor Relationship

Deeply discounted licenses. If you have in-house resources capable of configuring of the platform you will have significant savings in implementation costs.