Acoustic Campaign vs. Adobe Marketo Engage

Silverpop is possibly an option for companies who are just starting with automation in general or are on a tight budget. For us, we run campaigns globally in multiple languages and we are quickly outgrowing it as our automation needs increase. We need an automation program that can grow and scale with us. Also, its important to have a support team that's responsive and listens to the issues that customers face and makes the necessary improvements. We are looking at other solutions like Pardot and Marketo and they have functionality and usability that far surpasses what we have in Silverpop.

If you are looking to, you're looking to scale up your lead gen work. Adobe Marketo was a very good tool for that. You're looking to deliver leads to a sales team from marketing campaigns. It's a very good tool for that. It runs everything we do on the marketing side and I think a small lead gen team or a very large one could use an equally well.

Incentivized

• Silverpop Engage is an ever-changing platform., which is certainly one of my favorite things about it. In my one year as a user, multiple new programs have been launched. Not to mention they are constantly improving upon their current platform.
• Silverpop provides an abundance of training and support. As a new user or an experienced one, you will find that you have most all of the resources that you need. My favorite would have to be the online support portal where you receive one-to-one help on any issue you may have.
• Silverpop provides every customer with its' own relationship manager. This is important for not only on-boarding but providing additional support throughout a company's lifespan with the product. Often times with products like this you find that once you purchase, you are left to fend for yourself, but Silverpop does quite the opposite.

• Adobe Marketo Engage is a great platform for custom email design. The user interface is simple and easy to navigate.
• With Campaign Optimization, Adobe Marketo Engage allows for real-time adjustments, ensuring my campaigns remain relevant and effective.
• With Advanced Analytics, Adobe Marketo Engage provides robust marketing data analysis, helping us better understand our campaigns' effectiveness.

Incentivized

• UX - Despite joining their customer UX council (and having very little ability to steer the product team), the usability of Engage needs the most attention. From not officially working in several common browsers - Safari, Chrome, to cryptic notifications and cumbersome processes (manually having to recalculate list totals or going through a confusing process to send an email), the product is just really dated. Old-style drop down menus and annoying in-between pages greet you when logging in. Even the recently updated homepage of data widgets (an attempt to make it feel newer), is really limited in functionality and customization.
• Email creation engine - Other ESPs like Bronto and dotMailer (yes, I realize these are different level tools) have advanced Ajax or jQuery based creation engines that allow significant flexibility in layout design without having to hardcode each email. Do you want three stories instead of four or two columns on one row? Easily done in these other tools, but a manual HTML process in Silverpop.
• User profile controls - We were never able to isolate users from gaining access to the core database. An inexperienced user could have easily sent an email to the entire database by accident. Also, users were often locked out and were not able to reset their own passwords. The password reset function never worked, so the admin had to handle each one. Additionally, if a user creates a list or query and leaves the company, not even the super admin can edit or delete it.
• Reporting - Overall reporting in Silverpop is very weak. Confusingly, there are two different reporting engines, one legacy, one new. You could edit the links after an email was sent in the legacy, but not the new. They were not flexible, and despite hundreds of users asking Silverpop via its customer community to remove Test sends from the list of emails in the reporting tool, they're still there. If you want to see the contact info for opens/clicks to provide to your sales team as an FYI, it's buried on one of the reports.
• Forms - Signup forms are part of the 'landing pages' functionality, which is one of the more buggy parts of the product. On several occasions while editing a form, my browser would lockup and I'd have to reopen it. The usability also suffers here. If you want a list to be available to allow people to opt-in, you have to exit the landing pages section, find the list in the Data section, and then buried on a tab is the "allow opt-in" checkbox. There are also significant limitations for the forms including styling, no adoption of existing CSS, and it uses an old school table-based layout.
• Auto-reply handling - We all know that despite telling recipients 'please do not reply', people still do. We found no way of reviewing those replies.
• Services and Account Management - As a fairly large ESP, we had expected a more comprehensive implementation services offering in-house. We were only offered a quick start program. In the last several years, I can say that I've spoken to the ever revolving list of assigned account managers less than five times.
• Asset library - More than a year into using the product did Silverpop finally add the ability to upload and link to PDFs in your emails. The asset library does not provide thumbnails of the images you upload while browsing (only have file names to go on), and it does not offer an image resize tool. Additionally, there is no notification or auto-renaming if your filename contains spaces. Something that they do alert you to only just before you hit the final send. But even then they don't tell you which image has the issue!

• Marketo's email editor is basic in comparison to other cheaper alternatives out there.
• Marketo doesn't work as well in B2C scenarios as it does in B2B. One of the painpoints of this is it's difficult to showcase a selection of product recommendations based on purchase behaviour without a very time consuming workaround. It's manageable if you're only selling a handful of products, but it's inefficient when dealing with a large catalogue.
• Marketo's form and landing page builder are also behind the times. Perhaps not as bad as the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform, but for an enterprise company the product should be much better.

Incentivized

We have been extremely satisfied with Silverpop and our entire e-commerce system is tied into the platform. Switching costs would be extremely high and we would need to have an extremely compelling reason that Silverpop isn't fulfilling our needs anymore as the sole reason to switch, which today, I cannot see being the case for that to outweigh the high switching costs and lose the relationship that we have built with the team at Silverpop. I have always had positive interactions with all Silverpop employees and receive extremely timely answers to any questions I may have. Silverpop puts its clients first, and that is not something you find with every vendor.

We're likely to renew for several reasons:

• Now that it's been implemented, I can't imagine not having marketing automation and the easy interface that Marketo provides to run our campaigns
• Marketo's community and customer service is fantastic; I know that when I need help, I'll get it
• Marketo continues to improve the product, so I know that I can expect it to be even more useful in the future

In my opinion the web training for Silverpop is very comprehensive and the system itself is pretty easy to pick up if you have had past experience with email marketing systems. If this is your first foray into email marketing it may be a bit tougher to learn than the entry level systems like mailchimp or constant contact.

In some aspects, the tool can feel quite clunky in parts. But with the rich feature set it has, it's understandable. There is a lot of room for improvement for the user interface. The system itself doesn't have a slick or modern feel, so the usability could feel nicer to use with these areas considered.

Incentivized

While several of the other reviews have mentioned poor performance in this department, we have only had one situation where the system was down (although it was down for several hours). Silverpop segments its clients on different servers, and I know that the problem we experienced only occurred on our specific server (maybe other servers have had their own problems?) but our service has been reliable otherwise.

Marketo provides different way and abilities to connect. If you are having product support or unexplained errors you can get someone on Marketo support 24 hours a day. One of Marketo's greatest assets in my opinion however would be the community. Often times our company is just looking for case success stories from someone else. In the community you can search for problems you are currently facing and see others having the same issue and solutions for those issues. If not, you can pose a question to the whole community and champions of the product and others can chime in to provide suggestions to fix your needs. The community is truly a 24/7 place to get your answers quickly.

Incentivized

The throttle time for sending emails would vary depending on how many other campaigns were going out that day, which I found inconsistent

There are times when it is slightly slow for us, where we sit on a screen waiting for it to load. This could be our internet since we have had the same issue occasionally with other systems, but it is enough to make you crazy.

The Salesforce Integration support team is fantastic. I'd give them greater than a 10 if possible. The rest of the support team can be extremely frustrating to work with. Too often they try to blame something obscure and refuse to escalate or look into the issue. And on occasion when you find system glitches they don't seem to care about fixing them

On multiple occasions we've had Marketo support (technical and license based) issues. Technical issues were minor and resolved within a day. License based issues (even things encouraged by Marketo for partners, like provisioning another license) took WEEKS. They actually took so long to respond that the client we were working with withdrew from the contract because they were no longer convinced Marketo was capable of supporting their business. As an agency trying to sell the software, you can only explain away so much before they just made us look silly.

Incentivized

If you are first time user then the training is perfect, but the advance training is not that effective. After working in Marketo for 5 years there is nothing new to learn. The new tools that Marketo have are expensive and too difficult to use. + I would recommend to learn the basic and use Marketo on the daily bases as you will forget everything in a month if you don't use it.

The online trainings are very detailed (for the most part) and really walk through the entire system. They are a little dry, but they are usually broken up into segments to allow you to skip to the parts you need.

You can get 100% of your training done online. Marketo's community is filled with experts and they list free training videos on marketo.com. They also have user groups in every major city that help you get the most out of your Marketo instance and Marketing Automation in general. It's really easy to pick up this tool and start running on day one.

Incentivized

Based on recommendations from Silverpop we made some implementation decisions that we later regretted pretty substantially. In hindsight we should have started a pilot implementation earlier so we could learn and then start over. The big issue for us was that Silverpop recommended a non-keyed database, or at least a database that doesn't use email address as primary key. This is resulted in a large number of duplicate email addresses so that the end user is forced to unsubscribe multiple times to stop receiving emails.

1. Have a content marketing plan to run in parallel with the marketing automation installation--you'll need a lot of content to make full use of Marketo's capabilities. 2. Work with sales (and ISRs) to define and document a workflow--build your Marketo installation around how you do business--not figure out how to apply your business to the tools 3. Spend time of data cleaning--both an initial project as well as a strategy for ongoing data management. We found some change manaement issues (no more appending ZZZ to the first name to identify contacts who have left the company, for example, or prohibiting the entry of "info@company.com" email addresses). 4. Find some champions in the sales and ISR teams. You'll have both fans and detractors--work with the fans to build some success stories

Two words: value and scalability. Compared to its competitors, Silverpop offers soup to nuts functionality, complete customer support and account management that is delivered at an unmatched value in the industry. The tool is also incredibly scalable in terms of automation, its ability to support large, multiple databases.

[...] is a partner of HubSpot, and we are mutual customers of each other. This may be because HubSpot is a [...] investor, but roughly half of [...]'s customers are Adobe Marketo Engage customers (the other half being HubSpot customers).

Incentivized

As we have grown, Marketo has grown with us. We started with simple single email campaigns and are now doing complex campaigns with multiple emails and tracks that we send a contact to if they take certain actions within our emails. We also have a complex integration with several systems and have the visibility into our marketing activities throughout our organization.

• we have not experienced any currently but moving to lead automation and lead scoring could change that.
• i'm not sure how increased employee efficiency would ever be a benefit b/c lead importing and visibility, along with setting up email templates is quite cumbersome.

• Generated a 35% higher return on investment (ROI) in demand generation in the company.
• The focus on the accounts that presented a greater sales potential, allowed us to prioritize and reduce costs by 20 Million USD.
• Being personal and optimized. reduced efforts towards a more personalized customer experience, in working hours by almost 100 h.

Incentivized