Acoustic Campaign vs. iContact

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.

iContact is a great option for small businesses. It doesn't have enough features to create the demands of a large corporation. Of course the price goes up exponentially with more subscribers, which would also make it beneficial for small businesses. If you have too many lists to add people to it can get a little crazy too.

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.

• Customer service is wonderful! They are always helpful, guiding and available for any odd question, even if those questions are training for a newbie to the email world.
• Building forms for data collection and the code generator the for the site is very easy.
• Ensuring double opt-in is extremely straightforward.
• Including unsubscribe on every message automatically means we never have to worry about CAN-SPAM.

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!

• Every time you edit or sometimes open an email it brings it to the top of the list. I would prefer my email to go to the top only after I send it out to my subscribers.
• When I add a new contact I sometimes copy and paste the email. This is not allowed sometimes and I have to manually type the email in.
• LinkedIn will not allow you to add pictures anymore when sending emails out.

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.

After 4 years of using iContact we finally cut the cord. It was hard to justify staying with them when it seemed like they had some of the most outdated software in the industry, some of the worst deliverability, and were in general extremely lacking in customization. They are a decent ESP for a great price point, so if that is your main concern it may be worth it, but if you want to have your emails you are paying for hit inboxes (not spam folders) then look into someone else that guarantees great deliverability.

Incentivized

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.

I rate iContact as an easy to use program due to its user friendly dashboard and user interface. Most companies of small to medium size do not have a dedicated marketer, therefore it is someone multitasking who may or may not have this kind of experience. iContact makes it relatively simple and can actually expand one's knowledge in the area of business promotion.

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.

iContact is regularly up and running. Only once has it been unavailable for maintenance, which is to be expected and even desired for optimal performance when needed.

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

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

They have always been responsive to any issues or concerns that have arisen with our account. Our customer account manager participates in our monthly county-wide communicators meetings via telephone to ensure that we are getting the most from the service. He also analyzes our lists to help us weed out inactive contacts.

Incentivized

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.

The templates are difficult to customize, and they don't render well in email platforms

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.

i wouldn't be using it if i wasn't satisfied. time is money

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.

We selected iContact because it was available at the time, and in our price range. I inherited it at the school. If it had been the program it is now back then, I would not have chosen it. At the moment, we are too busy to fully vet another program, so we are stuck with this one. It does get the job done. It is great for a small business with small needs, but once you start expanding and having more intricate needs, it does not compete with others like MailChimp

Incentivized

iContact stays the same with the number of users added or taken away. It certainly remains reliable despite increased usage, and so, can be considered scaleable in that aspect.

• 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.

• Increased Employee Efficiency - once a template is created, it is very easy to edit the content within the template with minimal or no assistance from developers.
• Domain Reputation - if you aren't careful, it is very easy to hurt your domain reputation when using iContact. Make sure the person in charge of email marketing knows the risks of email marketing or is willing to closely work with iContact's customer service to follow best practices.
• Increased Lead Conversion - through the use of automated email functionality, you can stay in the forefront of your customer's minds. This increases conversions by reminding customers that you are there to provide the goods or services that they may need periodically or in the future.