Salesforce Marketing Cloud

"Powerful, but complex"

Puntos a favor: This software is an online SAAS, and is some of the most powerful Marketing Software on the planet. The software is best used in an environment where personalized, but mass email communication is needed--typically for B2C situations. Pardot is an ideal product for B2B solutions. Although the product can be configured and used by end-users, it is best to work with a partner.

Contras: There are many updates needed in order to make the software work in a more user-friendly fashion, particularly when compared with less powerful solutions, like Constant Contact, MailChimp, etc. A Salesforce partner will cost additional money to implement the solution, but it is a good investment.

"SFMC"

Comentarios: This is a very serviceable software and will serve it's purpose. It can do a lot, so depending of the size of your organization it might be too much for the cost.

Puntos a favor: In addition to being able to import a distribution list, this product integrated with our CRM (Recruit) so we were able to send to segregated lists and it showed what emails were sent in Recruit. This made it easier for our reps to see when correspondence went out to their pipelines. It is rather simple to create and distribute emails.

Contras: Some of the functionality was a bit wonky, and emails viewed differently between various email clients. Line spacing was the biggest thing that varied quite a bit. Everything would look great in SFMC, but when an email was received in Outlook, Mac Mail, or Gmail, all three would display it just a bit differently. Not sure who's problem this is. It also doesn't embed video either. The workaround is to create a screenshot as a graphic, then add a link to it.

"A huge waste of time"

Comentarios: Working with the support team is extremely painful. We spent hours over multiple weeks showing them our issues over video. Their premium support resources often couldn't figure out how to resolve our issues. It felt like they were just as fed up with this crap tool as we are. Although they didn't say it, I think one of our key employees quit over the frustration of dealing with marketing cloud.

Puntos a favor: I don't like anything about this software.

Contras: The integration with Salesforce is WAY oversold in the marketing materials. Moving data back and forth between the two products is extremely finicky and prone to breaking. Expect lots of duplication of data and lists that will invariably be out of sync. Managing email opt out lists with two systems of record from the same company is a CAN-SPAM nightmare. The integration's administrative tools can't be accessed in lightning. The customer facing unsubscribe and profile management pages look like shit and can't be branded or customized. They are so old, they still provide customers a warning about using HTML emails with AOL. Your Salesforce users will see email sends and interactions in contact records for some but not all emails sent via marketing cloud. If you try to send to a campaign or report from Salesforce, email personalization won't work. Same thing for transactional emails. You will have to send every single piece of personalization data in the API call to marketing cloud, because MC won't be able to find it on its own, even though it has a list of all these attributes and is supposedly syncing with Salesforce. There is single sign on, but only by request, and provisioning of accounts is not supported. Journeys will break the minute you make the slightest change to them. Trying to split journeys based on Salesforce attributes often just doesn't work. Because it's Salesforce, anything you would actually want to do with this software comes at an additional cost.

"Revolutionary all-in-one marketing"

Comentarios: This has allowed a lot of things that we used to have to manually manage - email, customer journeys, etc - to be run semi autonomously. It's a lifechanger!

Puntos a favor: I was blown away when we first started using Marketing Cloud. Finally a lot of the marketing activities we had done in many separate places were condensed into one place, all the data tying back into Salesforce

Contras: There have not been any huge issues I've found so far, though admittedly we've only been using Marketing Cloud for a couple of months.

"Definitely a step up from MailChimp"

Puntos a favor: This software makes it easy to build professional looking emails that add all the information you need with drag and drop

Contras: IT is sometimes hard to organize and sort files