Salesforce Marketing Cloud

"Powerful, but complex"

Vantaggi: 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.

Inconvenienti: 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"

Commenti: 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.

Vantaggi: 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.

Inconvenienti: 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.

"Awful UX"

Commenti: Nothing is easy to use. I miss the UX- intuitive ESPs I used to use.

Vantaggi: I like nothing other than the fact that I now know how to use Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which apparently is a great accomplishment. I'd personally rather use ANY other ESP.

Inconvenienti: The UX is absolutely terrible. Can't make segments easily, everything is so unbearably slow. I cannot believe SFMC is so "talked about" in the industry. It's awful.

"Streer clear of Marketing Cloud if you're a small company"

Commenti: It's 2020 and this product has the UX of the 2000's and a backlog of tech debt and bugs for a premium price. For a small business I'd HIGHLY recommend going with something else. Not only do you pay a PREMIUM price for Marketing Cloud, but you'll also end up spending more time than you should trying to figure out this product. There are "features" that exist, like data conversion on automations, but you'll have to spend time figuring out that they exist so you can e-mail support and request they turn them on, when they should have just been there in the first place.

Vantaggi: I like that Send Time Optimization was included, this was extra with the previous e-mail marketing product we used.

Inconvenienti: First, we ended up in Google's black hole even when following the plan laid out by our integration partner. That you need an integration partner to get a small business setup should have been a huge red flag, but we thought we were stepping up to a more powerful e-mail product. There are bugs everywhere. Our integration partner had many tips like making sure to unselect an e-mail reselect it and stop and start a trigger to make sure the new e-mail is used, these are things that should be handled by the UX and not tribal knowledge. We used alias in our e-mails to aid in reporting, but sometimes they show up in the report and sometimes it shows the original URL. We opened a ticket and months later it was closed with no resolution, because there's a back end bug in their system that they believed was causing the issue. There's a lot of duplicated functionality that has different features. Want to manage your data extension you can do it in Email Studio or Contact Builder, BUT the features are different between the two. You can only easily add records in one of them so you have to remember which one you can do a specific action in. Their reporting is limited on Journey's and you'll need to extract all the data to do any deep dives. You'll need to use Journey's if you want to use send time optimization or any of the AI logic, so you're guaranteed to have to build your own reporting in your own tools. We needed this to realize we were in the Google black hole.

"Definitely a step up from MailChimp"

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

Inconvenienti: IT is sometimes hard to organize and sort files