Silverpop Review
Overall Satisfaction with Silverpop Engage
Silverpop is currently being used to power our entire email program, run by our e-commerce department, from promotional messages, browse behavior, confirmation email and more. The variety of messages we send span across the entire organization and assists us in easily and quickly communicating with our customers and driving revenue.
Pros
- Automated Messages - we currently have over 70 automated messages going out on any particular day through feeds and API calls that we pass to Silverpop. We rely on these automated messages to communicate to our customers and can rely on Silverpop to always be up and running to get these messages out.
- Robust query building - We can target customers easily based on a combination of demographic profile data, as well as email and site behavior and purchase behavior, allowing us to finely segment our audience
- Deep dive reporting - the UI reporting, as well as the available reports to download through the API give us tremendous insight into how our subscribers are responding to email.
Cons
- Testing - The testing functionality could be a bit more robust. We would love to be able to A/B test automated messages/programs, as well as more easily test one content against another, which is currently a bit manual
- Frequency caps - while Silverpop does offer frequency caps, we would like to be able to set frequency caps depending on whether it is a promotional message or an account related message. Currently, it sets it at the organizational level, which could potentially prevent somebody from not getting an account related email if the max emails for that day went out, even if promotional. For this reason, we don't use frequency settings.
- Reporting on automated messages within the same campaign could be rolled up a little better. Using the UI today, to get to any detailed reporting of a particular campaign, you have to go into each individual mailing sent. For this reason, we typically use the API, but that might not be an option for some people due to a little more technicality.
- Better customer service: emails are more reliably sent than our last platform
- Better holistic view of our email program: All emails are now currently sent through Silverpop, so we have a better view on how customers are engaging across all email messages and what messages they are interacting with.
- More control for the Marketing team: Previously all of our automated messages were sent from our internal platform and marketers had little control over messaging, without going through IT prioritization time and a release. Today, we can make changes to copy, links, imagery on the fly. Data changes sometimes do still require IT time, but much less than before.
I have used EmailLabs and evaluated ExactTarget during our selection process for SIlverpop. At the time, EmailLabs and Bronto didn't reliably offer the API integration that we were looking for (which probably could have changed in the last 4 years). ExactTarget and Silverpop seemed to have very similar offerings in 2010, but we chose Silverpop as the reporting interface stood out from the competitor. I have been in contact with reps from many other ESPs and tried to stay up to date on many of the competitors' offerings and so far haven't found many major differences between Silverpop and its competitors.
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