Silverpop

Benefits:

Ability to manage contacts at scale, with very rare outages and reasonable cost versus competing products

Drawbacks:

Interface is looking increasingly old-fashioned, client support can be hard to reach, and help manuals for integration can be hard to locate

Benefits:

Now it's called Watson Campaign Automation (IBM Marketing Cloud) allows you to offer your clients exceptional experiences throughout the purchasing process, using customer data, providing value information extracted from analytics and automating multi-channel interactions. Is a digital marketing automation platform designed to put the power of data in the hands of the marketer. Use behavioral data from any source to create consistent campaigns wherever your customers are through channels like email, web, mobile apps, SMS, social, group messaging and more.

Drawbacks:

You must have a great knowledge in the area to know how to interpret the data, in the same way the information reflected is quite complex.

In sum:

Definitely the best benefit is reflected in the return on investment, since it uses a digital marketing platform based on the cloud and is more easily integrated with other applications and customer data sources.

Benefits:

ability to update and make quick changes

Drawbacks:

customer service

In sum:

We purchased training from them and they did not give us all of our training hours. There were problems with their system internally and they were not helpful enough with these issues. Our offices are right across the street from their location. There was 1 gentleman that was very helpful in person (I think his name was Michael, he trained us), but everyone else lacked luster.

Benefits:

Flexible integration and reasonable pricing to add a comprehensive feature set for the digital marketer.

Drawbacks:

Parts of the UI have yet to be updated hiding much needed functionality deep in menus. The reporting module needs to be revisited with an archaic interface and burying much needed web tracking features.

In sum:

Originating in the Email Service Provider (ESP) space, Silverpop was acquired by IBM and has evolved to become IBM Marketing Cloud. The core feature set still revolves around email with sophisticated features such as "Send Time Optimization" which samples users opens and schedules each contacts mailings for when they are most likely to open your email. Building on a simple workflow system, Marketing Cloud now offers Blueprints for the most common opportunities such as warming campaigns, retargeting and automated responses. A recent rearchitecture has brought the user-interface in line with other IBM Blue Mix and Commerce platforms. The updates also mean that IBM's mix of SAAS such as the new Customer Analytics and the existing WebSphere Commerce content platform. The future looks bright for Marketing Cloud with coming integration with IBM Watson preparing to lead the way with Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence guiding contact segmentation and product targeting. But its current position places it in steep competition with market leaders such as Adobe Experience Manager and Marketo. The promised integration with Watson and the recent updates with SMS and push notification integration merit Marketing Cloud a closer look when looking for a marketing automation solution.

Benefits:

Allowed us to begin integrating our marketing under one system

Drawbacks:

The interface is very difficult to interact with and the customer support is not very strong. Takes a very long time to produce reports and export the numbers we need.

In sum:

I'm hoping with recent purchase of Red Hat and other competitive technologies that IBM makes stronger improvements. It was the most affordable product but had a lot of drawbacks with it.

Benefits:

Setup of the system and getting everything established is a very quick process, particularly if you have used Silverpop previously. It very quickly allows you to add users (unlimited) and assign permission levels. Mailings are very easy to create, although the WYSIWYG mailing editor isn't the best (an entirely new mailing creation process is going to be implemented in the somewhat near future from my understanding). Hopefully, IBM's acquisition of Silverpop will add some resources to get things done faster and offer some more advanced features. Silverpop also has an annual conference (Amplify) in May each year that is outstanding. It's great, particularly for new users, to really become immersed in the system and learn best practices and how to use some of the more advanced functionality.

Drawbacks:

There is slow implementation of UI fixes and enhancements. Testing of the automated mailings is daunting and difficult.

Benefits:

Tons of features and database functions

Drawbacks:

Very difficult to use for inexperienced users

In sum:

SilverPop is great for technical users, but it's not easy to use for a average person

Benefits:

The IBM Marketing Cloud provides incredibly strong analytics and is integrated into many other services.

Drawbacks:

The IBM Marketing Cloud purely serves a single purpose, and if you want other tools you will have to invest in other IBM software as IBM makes several products with focused feature lists instead of a few products with broad feature lists.

Benefits:

Marketing Cloud makes targeting audiences and sending focused campaigns incredibly easy. And everything can be automated to make it super easy.

Drawbacks:

Their customer support system could use some work. I have had mixed experiences and cannot depend on always getting a resolution.

In sum:

Frequent platofrm releases. Ease of navigation. All features available. Great phone & web support. Good KnowledgeBase & Customer Community. Dynamic Content, Landing Pages, A/B Testing, Program/Touchplan creation, Database Scoring, strong API toolset, Deliverability Tools & performance, etc. It's all there in a stable, predictable platform...