Silverpop's Latest Release Targets Sophisticated Marketing Automation Buyers

Summary: Silverpop has continued to extend the marketing automation capabilities of its Engage platform. The latest release adds features that are most important to enterprise marketers.

More than a year has passed since Silverpop merged its email and marketing automation systems into a single product, Engage 8. The combined product offered advanced email but was missing some capabilities available in the previous marketing automation product. These included revenue reporting, anonymous visitor lookups, marketing calendars, and advanced scoring features such as caps on points from one event type. Clients who needed those features had to remain on the previous system (Engage B2B). Prospects who wanted them had to look elsewhere.

Silverpop has been steadily enhancing its new product since that time. The latest version, Engage 8.3, was released last month. It still doesn’t offer all the features of the oldl B2B product because Silverpop decided that some were not worth duplicating. But it does offer other capabilities that are improvements. Here are some highlights from the latest set of additions:

- multiple scores per lead. This is important in large companies that need to score leads against multiple products. It also allows different scoring rules for different customer segments. Scoring models can now include data values, such as a score that was calculated externally and imported.

- progressive profiling. Online forms can automatically remove questions a visitor has already answered and replace them with new questions in a user-specified sequence. Silverpop's form builder handles this quite elegantly, without requiring the user to embed rules or a scripting language.

- social sharing. The system can publish directly to Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn accounts. Content can include sharing buttons for a wide range of other systems. The system can track the number of shares and reshares for each message and identify traffic from those shares. It also captures the identity of the original sharer although this is not currently exposed.

- revenue tracking. Engage still relies on Salesforce.com to produce revenue reports. But it now feeds Salesforce all campaigns that touched the lead and flags both the original source and the campaign that generated contact information. This will allow advanced attribution analysis.

- Salesforce.com integration. Users can now embed campaign codes within a URL link, making them easier to capture. They can have the system create Salesforce.com tasks when a new lead is created, use Salesforce.com opportunity stages within campaign rules, and add leads to a Salesforce.com campaign at any step in a marketing automation program.

- enhanced security. Silverpop suffered a widely-publicized security breach in December 2010. The new release tightens access in several ways, including user-specific IP restrictions, challenges to log-ins from new IP addresses, two-factor authentication, and narrower restrictions on administrative rights. Given subsequent breaches at other firms, most recently Epsilon and Sony, it's possible that vendors and marketers will start paying more attention to security issues.

- email controls. Merging the email and marketing automation systems does have the advantage of giving B2B marketers access to features developed for Silverpop’s advanced email business. These include send-time optimization, which automatically sends campaign emails at the most effective time of day, and a “snooze” option that lets recipients halt email messages for a specified time period instead of opting out completely.

These are all valuable additions to Silverpop’s B2B capabilities. But Silverpop faces an uphill battle in regaining lost momentum and competing with the advanced analytics now touted by several competitors. Silverpop may be positioning itself to serve the upper end of the market, where companies with multiple products and world-wide organizations need advanced features like multiple scores, dynamic content, enhanced security, and high scalability. That’s a plausible strategy, although it means competing against both high-end B2B marketing automation vendors and B2C products like Neolane and Teradata/Aprimo. Given the costs of product development, it would be tough to remain a first-tier system by selling to large enterprises alone.

Silverpop Engage B2B Adds Visual Campaign Builder

Summary: Silverpop Engage B2B has added an innovative visual campaign builder that supports complexity without the drawbacks of a Visio-style flow chart. Thumbs up.

(This is the first of three planned posts on updated interfaces from demand generation vendors.)

Silverpop Engage B2B (formerly Vtrenz) on Monday released its first visual campaign builder, finally matching a feature offered by nearly all its competitors. The interface takes a creative approach to the conflict between simple presentation and complex campaign flows, using what Silverpop describes as “horizontal video-production-style features” that lay out each contact stream in a separate row on the screen. Movement between streams is handled by objects that list the destinations, but don’t connect to them with lines like a conventional, Visio-style flow chart. (Click here for a video demonstration.)

Silverpop told me that they had originally planned to use a Visio-style approach but found the diagrams became unworkably complex once they expanded beyond a few branches. Since this matches my own oft-stated opinion, I readily agreed.

It also can’t have hurt that the Engage B2B was already organized around contact streams, which it calls “tracks”, and rules to direct movement between streams, which it calls “track routes”. This fits perfectly with the new interface. In fact, “track” is precisely the term that audio, video and film producers use to describe their synchronized inputs. Think “sound track” or “8 track tape”. But I digress.

The ability to explicitly direct leads from one contact stream to another is what separates the Engage B2B approach from simple linear campaign flows. In the new interface, track routes are objects within the contact stream, and can be opened to edit the decision rules that determine where the lead moves next. The stream can also contain decision objects with a single rule that is tested repeatedly during a specified evaluation period. This allows the system to wait for an event (e.g., allow one week for response to an email) and still react immediately if it happens. If the rule is not met by the end of the evaluation period, the lead can move to the end of the track, to another track within the campaign, or to another campaign.

The interface includes a variety of thoughtful details that have a major impact on usability.

- A track can include placeholder objects, letting users design a campaign before its marketing materials are ready. Since this raises its own risks, the system flags incomplete objects so users know which still need work.

- Users can hover over the list of destination tracks within a track route object and then click on a destination to move to it.

- When events are based on fixed dates, as in a Webinar promotion, the objects in the different tracks are vertically aligned by date. This makes it easier to grasp what happens when.

- Once a campaign is under way, the system displays actual metrics on the track objects (responses, leads currently in the object, leads that have passed through, etc.) so users can see the results at a glance.

- The rule definition interface offers a wide variety of pre-formatted, fill-in-the-blanks statements. This lets non-technical users build complex rules, since it spares them from learning about database details or programming syntax.

Of course, no interface is perfect. There is no visual overview of how leads move across tracks and campaigns, which can make the flow hard to grasp. Nor is there an alternative, more concise interface for simple linear campaigns. The system doesn’t seem to adapt to different user skill levels or to adjust which options are exposed, although I might have missed some of these features.

Still, the Engage B2B interface represents a much-needed fresh look at solving some of the basic issues in campaign visualization. It definitely raises the bar for the rest of the industry.