Needed Software to Help Simplify

Salesforce is Still King of the Hill, even in Marketing

Salesforce is the central repository for our business. All of our user activities like signups, payment history, the apps they have used and when, our marketing communications, our presentation collateral, and our customer support....all lie within the Salesforce cloud. It is the key to our customer facing business, and the Marketing Cloud is just one more piece to the puzzle.

Pros

Marketing Automation is hugely important to any business looking to scale their user base. SFDC's Marketing Cloud allows all communications that go to customers to be tracked, seamlessly within your overall SFDC instance. Campaigns to different groups are a cinch to setup. They have a nice, graphic UI for overall management, much better than the core SFDC stuff, for sure. Overall, this is a great tool to add to your company toolkit.

Cons

Maybe I am in the minority, but just about anything in Salesforce takes a little bit more time to learn than it seems like it should. Their UI is a touch clunky, and it certainly could use more design.

Amazing Automation with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

We've been using Salesforce Marketing Cloud for over a year now, and it has been an invaluable resource for our automated marketing campaigns. The platform is highly customizable and allows us to easily create personalized campaigns to meet our specific needs. The only downside is the cost, but it's well worth it for the time and money it saves us.

Pros

Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers amazing automation features that help to reduce manual labor and increase efficiency. The platform is highly customizable and allows us to easily create personalized marketing campaigns to meet our specific needs.

Cons

Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be expensive, so it might not be an option for small businesses with limited budgets. Additionally, the platform can be complex and overwhelming to learn, which can be a barrier for new users.

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

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

If you're a Salesforce user, it's a no brainer

Overall, i'm very satisfied with Salesforce Marketing Cloud and cannot imagine having to rely on multiple tools to execute the same functionalities like I used to

Pros

Salesforce Marketing Cloud has been a great all-in-one solution for my team as we previously relied on multiple tools for customer journey management, email campaigns, and analytics, not to mention updating the CRM after. The UX was pretty easy to understand and the platform and the list feature has made pipeline management so much more efficient

Cons

One of our campaigns bugged and contacts received duplicate emails. When I tried to contact customer service, it was almost impossible to get in touch so we had to figure out the solution internally which took a while. The price is also pretty high if your company is not paying for it