The evolution of email marketing software proceeds apace. Multichannel integration is a serious ongoing challenge, and now the leading vendors are ramping up their marketing automation capabilities. We last reviewed Silverpop’s email application four years ago and gave its exceptionally well-developed roster of features a glowing recommendation. Now rebranded from Marketer to Engage, has it kept up with the pack?

The next generation

We’re looking at Silverpop’s Engage 8 this month. Released in May 2010, it’s had two substantial updates since. The general thrust of the upgrades in this version has been to improve web functionality with some analytics and social media tools, polish up integration and add b2b-focused lead management capabilities from the Vtrenz purchase.
Email functionality remains excellent, with simple segmentation, top-notch suppression management and robust querying. Email building, personalisation and process automation are all strong too, as is user access control and the clear, simple interface.
However, there have been some upgrades to the core functions in this version. For example, building customised landing pages is always a chore, and being able to employ dynamic and real-time content to automatically generate them is an excellent idea.
You can pull in content via XML in real time or insert a permanent link to part of the main website to scrape other content, perhaps news, to use as part of a landing page. There are also links to take content from tools like Adobe’s Test&Target.
Building web forms for surveys and the like employs similar tools with a range of nice marketing-oriented modifications. It’s quick and easy to tweak texts and formats, while you can save out any form as a template for re-use.
Silverpop innovations such as Share-to-Social and Send Time Optimization remain, and very good they are too. The latter is a simple but massively powerful idea: work out when recipients tend to be at their computers from the time and day that they open and read their emails, then send their email to them at that time. Apparently this technique works so well that many companies now request it specifically when choosing a new supplier.
The minimal web analytics functions in this email package do make sense. These tools work conventionally, with page tags embedded on the website passing back visitor data to the application. According to the vendors, most clients in the midmarket or smaller tend to use the free Google Analytics tool which does not identify individual browsers. This means that users can select outbound lists of named customers based on their browsing behaviour without having to buy a separate application.
Social media monitoring is another new feature, bringing in basic reporting on brand names and keywords. Of course, social media behaviour could then potentially be used to target outbound emails from within Silverpop, though this is not yet possible in version 8. This meshes nicely with the existing ability to post content from an email directly to a Facebook page, then track who sees that content and who they pass it onto as well.
The other big development is lead management for b2b which includes a descriptive segmentation tool. Users can configure this to apportion different scores to customer records for attributes like age, gender, industry and job title, or for actual behaviours like purchase, web site visits, form filling and so on.
With similar techniques used in other lead management applications, this tool should be quite useful, particularly to b2b marketers. The industry calls it “lead scoring”, which might lead you to believe there is some element of predictive modelling or statistical rigour involved. There isn’t, so high-volume b2c marketers will need to look elsewhere for their modelling tools.
This is effectively “seat of the pants” targeting, or a way to group customers by their key attributes and behaviours. Effective targeting will demand plenty of testing to make each score accurately reflect the contribution of that activity or attribute to the desired outcome.
For example, what score should someone get for re-visiting the website three times versus someone who visits only once but fills out a registration form? With vast numbers of permutations possible, more sophisticated marketers might find that building a proper predictive model is actually less time consuming than this empirical method.
When in place, customers can be ranked and selected by their scores. It’s well suited to triggering too, as scores are refreshed constantly as customer data changes. Alternatively the system can use the scores to generate sales team alerts if lead behaviour changes for the better (or worse).
One of the best features (added in 2009) is the visual campaign builder, already seen in other lead management tools like Eloqua and Marketo. Actually much more than that, this offers the chance to completely programme in a sequence of customer treatments or, if you like, a “customer journey”.
Using a set of flowchart-style icons representing steps and decision points, it’s simple to set up a few sequential campaigns or go on to generate complex sets of alternative actions whose execution depends on customer behaviour. Currently it only covers email and SMS, but direct mail and call centre features are to be added later in 2011.
As a SaaS-only application, integration is a key concern. The vendors have made big efforts here with a comprehensive API, XML compatibility and many pre-built connectors to various other packages. Links to web analytics packages like Coremetrics means Silverpop can be used to manage any email, such as those triggered by abandoned carts or abandoned browsing sessions.
The low-level Salesforce integration is extremely tight, mapping both databases in order to share any data item; Salesforce users can view complete browsing and email histories for any individual. A similar connector is due soon for MS CRM.
Reporting has also been revamped, with a completely new environment that includes around 80 standard templates covering the usual email and campaign metrics. The range of graphs, heat maps, funnels and so on give decent visualisation, while dashboarding has also arrived and it’s now possible to send reports and so forth to mobile phones. Sadly the long-awaited report builder has not yet turned up but the ability to use Excel as a front end to the underlying Oracle database makes up for that.
This brief review can only give a flavour of the range of features derived from user needs that Silverpop offers. One brief example: you can set “send rights” to define who is allowed to sign off a campaign and also set up the approval groups that must see an email for sign-off, with obvious applications for agencies.
Options here include adding notes on why a campaign has been rejected and setting up auto emails to a “seed list” to alert relevant managers in departments like legal or customer service that the campaign is going out.
By bringing in marketing automation from Vtrenz, what was already a very competent email marketing tool is now a much broader strategic package. The lead management makes it much more credible as the central element of a marketing system, particularly for b2b-focused SMEs, while the web and multichannel coverage reflects email’s new role as the glue that binds online channels like social media, the web and mobile apps together. One for the shortlist.

Pricing and Specifications

As Engage is delivered over the web as a service rather than installed, any user will only need a secure Internet connection and a compatible browser to get started. There is no set-up fee and pricing is based on outbound email volume or the number of users. www.silverpop.com