7Sheep vs. Oracle Marketing

I use 7Sheep for marketing as a sales person. This works well for me as a single user. I do not think I could use the software together with my colleagues. Although we could have separated lists the access rights might not fit our use case. It has a strong marketing focus and cannot replace a full CRM system.

A duration of one and a half years is enough for us to
recognize the capabilities of a tool and in my opinion, this one is just a
great tool to manage marketing campaigns of even massive-sized firms. Its
marketing automation tool and its way of managing campaign and the way it
executes digital initiatives is enough to get an inkling of its abilities.
Less favorable for the people who want to have something at
a cheap price and are more dependent on the reports as its reports have nothing
much in detail.

Incentivized

• Affordability: the only solution we found on the market that gave us what we needed at a price we can afford!
• Flexibility: 7Sheep seems to offer enough flexibility in the advance features that we can customise it as we need.
• It's easy enough for our whole team to be able to use.
• Their team is helpful and supportive.

• We can look for the behavior of our clients on our website and mobile application using the analytics it provides.
• It is highly customizable.
• It presents data in a form that is easily understandable and reports are highly beneficial for us.
• Analytics in the form of graphs.

Incentivized

• The personalized tags cannot be accessed from the menu/page you create your emails. I get around this by opening two windows, but in the future this might be an improvement.
• I needed to create custom reports in order to get the overview on the campaigns that I needed. More generic reporting would be a useful feature.
• I would like to be able to duplicate e-mail campaigns across different activities/databases. I could set up a mailing template for this but sometimes it would be good to be able to just re-create a particular campaign that we received a good response to for another, entirely different, activity.

• User Interface - The UI is a bit outdated and clunky, but gets the job done with some getting used to.
• Training - There isn't much out there for training, unless you are willing to pay Oracle or a 3rd party.
• Support - There is no dedicated support and you have to use their portal. It sometimes take awhile to get things looked at or fixed, but they eventually get to it.

Incentivized

The tool serves our needs and we like the user interface. The few times we contacted support they were super helpful and responsive. When we asked for more integrations they confirmed the integrations we need (e.g. Hipchat) for the near future.

We have been able to automate so many marketing processes with Eloqua over the past 5 years that the only direction would be to adopt the latest and greatest features Eloqua adds. The alternative would be to go back to the marketing stone-age and start over again. And we would rather move forward with increased automation and efficiency.

It is easy to use and if I do have a problem or question I receive an answer almost immediately.

Personally, I find it quite easy to use. But for those members of our team who have little or no testing experience, it's been a bit more difficult. There's also training required for development teams in order to have your campaigns coded and set up in the most efficient way. Our developers have been able to do basic and intermediate tests with no difficulty, and they find the interface itself quite intuitive... it's just the extremely complex tests that require a bit more understanding.

No one has experienced any problems with availablity.

There are occasional complaints about slowness to refresh a screen or build a report. However, this is as much a factor of network access speeds as the system itself, since often the complaints occur when someone is accessing on a wireless network.

With both chat and email support I have always had enough ways to get through to them! Their support is good, honest and most importantly supportive. They helped us set up and start using the tool when we got stuck. Moving from Mailchimp where there were some semantic lessons to learn and they took the time to help us get used to 7Sheep

I would actually rate day to day support a 1. We often knew more than the person on the phone.

I would however rate escalation support a 7. When we went to “red status”, support was very good. We were assigned a technical resource who performed a full audit. Unfortunately the integration to Salesforce.com still failed

They offer very basic classes which are required for master certification.

After having been through it, I would not consider anyone with a master certification any more qualified, unlike Salesforce.com certification which is a more difficult thing to acquire. For example, one of the classes towards certification was around social media. I would have expected examples of how to incorporate into campaigns in the product, with a demo and hands-on test. Instead, it was a powerpoint slideshow that went on way too long and covered really basic stuff like “what is Facebook, what is Twitter”

Ok, so, this sounds like it could be horrible because it was all remote, but we loved it... the Adobe training environment was easy to use, and the trainers were engaging. It was simple to switch back and forth between the meeting and the hands-on exercises in their training instances. We took the fundamentals training early in our implementation-- before the consultants came onsite-- and I know this made a big difference in our implementation, because we were able to ask informed questions throughout

I give it a 10 because the only issue we had was a result of not following the guidance we were given. Maxymiser provided a customized implementation guide for each site where we were adding the code. On our site implementations when we followed that guide to the letter, it was extremely fast and easy and has worked very well.

I've used MailChimp before and I liked their product as well, however, data protection is key in our organization. As we are working in multiple countries, some of which have very strict data protection laws, and it was important that we kept the data stored on servers in Europe. MailChimp's servers are in the US, as is the case for many other similar companies. That alone was a major reason for us to go with 7Sheep, which is a European company that keeps all data stored on servers in Europe

It was quite complex to generate segments with Adobe
analytics and I wasn’t personally satisfied with the overall performance of
Adobe Analytics and wasn’t enough flexible in any way. So we decided to switch
to something else better than Adobe Analytics and is available in the market at
a cheap rate and we ended up doing our research for the most suitable tool at
Oracle Infinity and we don’t regret our decision.

Incentivized

Eloqua is definitely good for larger companies that have 100,000+ contacts and complex marketing workflows and data. Personalization is fairly robust with Eloqua for larger campaigns with smart content and features. Scaling across channels is also seamless - as the platform has great options for non-email channels like SMS, Direct Mail, Chat, etc.

Incentivized

• I was previously part of a survey with 7Sheep and results showed that we were saving 20 mins per participant per event we held, a working week for an event of 100 people.
• Automating our operational logic with the admin triggers in 7Sheep means there is no time lag between tasks and teams, certainly greater efficiency.
• Tracking engagement on our site and with our outbound campaigns means better and faster reporting and enables us to report on impact in a more quantifiable way. (On the human side, my team members get positive feedback from our target audiences which is very motivating. It is nice to see data backed up by people.)

• Eloqua has had a very positive impact on our ROI and ability to build very complex programs. We have been nomitnated for the past 4 years as a Markie finalist and have won a Markie ourselves.
• Eloqua has a great pulse on the marketing trends and future developments to help keep it's software competitive.

Incentivized