Heaps of features straight out of the box; a great little tool!
August 11, 2017

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

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Reseller

Overall Satisfaction with IBM Watson Campaign Automation

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.
  • You get a lot of features out of the box as standard.
  • What you can't get do of the box, you can either purchase as an add-on or execute via some API development.
  • Automating simple campaigns easily frees up more time to work on more complex work.
I've used IBM Campaign and Apteco PeopleStage and find WCA significantly easier to get to grips with. Simplicity comes from the presentation of the data to the tool and an intuitive UI. IBM Campaign has significantly greater ease of access to and manipulation of ad hoc data sources, but that ease can lead to excessive/unecessary data being drawn in and laziness around preparation.
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.

Acoustic Campaign Feature Ratings

8.7
WYSIWYG email editor
8
Dynamic content
10
Ability to test dynamic content
9
Landing pages
8
A/B testing
9
Mobile optimization
8
Email deliverability reporting
9
List management
9
Triggered drip sequences
8
7.5
Lead nurturing automation
8
Lead scoring and grading
9
Data quality management
6
Automated sales alerts and tasks
7
6.5
Calendaring
5
Event/webinar marketing
8
6.0
Social sharing and campaigns
7
Social profile integration
5
6.0
Dashboards
3
Standard reports
9
7.7
API
9
Role-based workflow & approvals
5
Customizability
7
Integration with Salesforce.com
9
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
8
Integration with SugarCRM
8

Using IBM Watson Campaign Automation

Very easy to use, meaning you can save time by automating all the easy things that would otherwise be manual. Great, intuitive UI. Everything just feels really easy to do
ProsCons
Like to use
Relatively simple
Easy to use
Technical support not required
Well integrated
Consistent
Quick to learn
Convenient
Feel confident using
Familiar
None
  • The UI is very intuitive
  • HTML can be easily imported and personalised in the WYSIWYG editor
  • Great multi-channel automation capabilities
  • Few minor flaws like switching between HTML and Design view in WYSIWYG editor have been around for a while and need fixing.
  • Sometimes when a program (campaign automation) is particularly lengthy and complicated it can be difficult to figure out what is happening. Also there is no save function, so make a mistake and you may have to spend a while putting it back together again!
  • Reporting needs modernising and introduction of greater customisation capablities.

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