Negative ROI for our B2B company; cancelled our Silverpop contract after 1 year
October 16, 2014

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

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 1 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Silverpop Engage

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.
  • The time and money we spent set us back a year. We basically wasted a year. Since deploying a different approach to lead nurturing and list management, sales are up over 30%.
We had evaluated Marketo at the time, but had chosen Silverpop instead. Some people compare Hubspot, but we consider that a different flavor of marketing automation--not apples to apples.
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.

Using Silverpop Engage

We cancelled as quickly as we could (1 year).

My rating is based on 1 year of implementing and using Silverpop. I believe it is likely a better fit for larger companies with marketing teams; if you have a team of 3 or more people, you can likely handle this product's complexity. It felt to me, as a user, to be more like 3 or 4 products that had been glued together, but I could be wrong... Really not intuitive at all. So given the negative ROI, I have to give it a poor rating.

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