Salesforce Marketing Cloud Software

Pros

I like how its functionality especially when generating business reviews and reports. It helps in analyzing which areas are successful and which aren't.

Cons

It could be complicated to navigate given that it has different tools and features. However, if you learn the basics, it is already a good start.

Online marketing - eblasts and landing pages okay, but not good enough to make up for lack of service.

Pros

Email software is easy to use which is nice

Cons

Customer Service is terrible. Our account rep has changed several times (internally they have a lot of confusion around WHO are account rep is), the company sends us around and around to different people when we have an issue. Long time to get issue resolved. Responsiveness is quick when they want to upsell you something though.

Pros

Salesforce Marketing Cloud has a lot of very useful features from tiggers, to custom drip campaigns.

Cons

Honestly you almost need to take a course to learn how to use their software, because there is so much to it. Also I wish their UI didn't look so old school.

Pros

For me, Marketing Cloud/Exact Target meets the basic requirements of what I need to do -- send emails, track those sends, format the email, etc. I think that if you are using it at a very basic level, the interface is fine.

Cons

I think my biggest issues are that the interface is not intuitive at all, and kind of like a maze. I have to have a checklist of exactly each function I need, because otherwise I wouldn't be able to find it. The interface is also very outdated and the reason that we are looking at alternative options for emails.

Pros

The personalization options are pretty cool. But when you use them (with AMPscript) the Journey Builder is pretty much useless as Engagement Splits don't work with them.

Cons

Where to start.
- Extremely buggy system. We had multiple issues with the Journey Builder that resulted in a number of our subscribers receiving thousands of emails which put us on the spam list for Gmail.
- The Journey Builder is extremely rigid. You have to create new versions if you want to make even the smallest edit. Then you'll likely need to double check every single step because things break super easily.
When you update emails that are used in Journeys in Content Builder, you need to go into these Journeys and manually update these emails again to make sure the changes take effect. You can try to solve this with Reference Content but then Engagement Splits don't work because it cannot see the URLs. Same goes for using Dynamic Content. Also, current subscribers in the existing version of a journey cannot be placed into the new version of the journey. Lastly, you can only add subscribers to retargeting audiences but NOT REMOVE them from these retargeting audiences. You'll have to create ANOTHER retargeting audience (for which you have to pay extra) to exclude these in e.g. Facebook. Compare that with a cheap tool like ActiveCampaign and you're just amazed how bad Marketing Cloud is. Especially Journey Builder is the worst app I've ever come across.
- The platform is basically not usable without Salesforce CRM. This creates a number of problems, e.g. not being able to simply send a realtime response email when someone fills a form on your website. Also, even though it's the same company, the integration between Salesforce and Marketing Cloud is complex and just basically terrible.
- Cloud Pages Smart Capture forms are useless. It doesn't accept people that are already in the data extension that is connected to a particular Smart Capture form but it does not warn you about this in any way. Also, if you use Salesforce as your DoR you can't use Smart Capture forms but are forced to build custom AMPscript code due the ContactID being created in Salesforce (not possible in Marketing Cloud).
- As I mentioned above, functions don't work well with each other. This because they just bought a bunch of different companies and tried to tie it together. This also makes it very difficult to navigate as some functions overlap while others are completely incompatible. The system is also very slow. Loading times are not rarely over 10 seconds. This makes working with it daily a true torture.

There are numerous other smaller bugs and annoying things that I don't have time for to write down but if I can summerize, if you want your marketing team to be lean, flexible and successful then do yourself a favor and pick any other system.

Pros

I like that Marketing Cloud is reliable. You can count on the product to do what you tell it to do. Be sure to double check yourself several times to ensure you are asking the server to do what you really want it to do, as it will only do what you instruct it to do.

Cons

I wish the SQL queries and import file functions did not time out at 30 minutes. This is very limiting for some of the queries that we need to run. What would be nice is to have a loading/ processing bar that showed the amount of processing time left for the query or import file.

You get the benefit of an easy to use email platform, and the ability to automate workflows to enhance the personation of your customers.

Pros

There's a lot that we use the marketing cloud for. Automation, email, journey builder, etc. It's something that helps us work with such a massive audience. We can send emails easily and import our own templates. It's also great for automating workflows and building out dynamic emails to save time in the future. You're really able to dig into personalization with this tool and really connect with your customers.

Cons

The customer support. The support is horrible. You have to call this number (if you can find it) and then bounce around an automated system that usually ends with a message to check the online forums for help. If you have any kind of emergency or need help ASAP you're not going to get it.

Pros

Salesforce Marketing Cloud has some impressive features when integrated with Sales Cloud - in particular the ability to build complex automations based on customer attributes and changes to those attributes, and to add reporting about email activity directly into the CRM.

Cons

It takes too many steps to create and send a relatively straightforward email campaign - there's a significant learning curve, and a lot of things that can go wrong if you're working with an integrated instance with Sales Cloud. I'm also not impressed with the email template building capability; by default it's not simple to create good-looking emails. This feels like an old tool that was bolted onto Salesforce (which it was in some sense, given that it was acquired) and lacks the ease-of-use of other programs like Mailchimp.

After moving off of SFMC, I was definitely hurting for the robust nature of personalization and segmentation that was offered through the proprietary Ampscript language, and the full SQL editor to run queries on data extensions. Although I think that it could have been built in a smarter way to execute processing of queries faster, and have a better UX/UI, the power that's available to a slightly more tech savvy marketer is unmatched.

Pros

The first email platform I worked on was SFMC. Definitely the strongest features of the platform were the ability to customize so much through the use of Ampscript functions, content areas, and data extensions, as well as the ability to segment and cohort large amounts of user data with the power of having a full on SQL editor to do so.

Cons

The platform was hacked together on the backend, and whoever headed up product did not do a good job of making the UX/UI cohesive. Extremely slow to execute queries on large data sets, and until they moved it into Automation Studio, there was no way to know when your query finished running, or what the error was if it ran into one. On the UX/UI side, who the heck made the decision that Emails and Data Extensions could be shared across Business Units, but User-Initiated Sends/Queries/Scripts, etc can't? It's not consistent, random items can be shared, while others can't and must be manually copied over to the other Business Unit.

Pros

I love how much better our emails have been since we started using Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It really provided an answer to our marketing needs.

Cons

Sometimes there are too many ways to do the same thing, which makes things difficult and complicated.

Pros

It's built to handle large-scale email communications and does its job very well. You have the ability to create engaging customer journeys and can make a great impact with your consumers. Customer support has been super helpful. I've engaged support via phone, email, and Chatter, and it's always top-notch.

Our organization just switched to using Content Builder within Marketing Cloud, and it is much easier to build emails without having to rely on HTML coding.

Cons

There aren't a lot (any?) resources out there for learning how to use Marketing Cloud, so I had to self-teach with my coworkers. This could be difficult for people who have to use this software but aren't technically inclined.

Not all pending sends will list themselves under "Pending Sends," so that has caused some issues with accidentally sending the same email to the same list more than once. Seems like there are a few features like that that could definitely be improved.

Pros

I would love all the things it can do except the fact that it doesn't really work or integrate well.

Cons

Literally everything. It took months to setup and even then it wasn't setup the way we wanted it. Support was terrible. They even threatened us with the contract when we said we wanted out. They want long contracts because as with many things that need long contracts the program is actually barely functional. Seriously do yourself a favor and pick literally any other system.

Pros

Best enterprise CRM out there. Use it to store all data from all time on all your customers and generate reports accordingly.

Cons

Implementing a CRM at the scale of SalesForce can cause a lot of heavy lifting for your organization

Pros

I like the ease of use. I am somewhat technologically limited and this was super user friendly. Definitely recommend.

Cons

The constant updates. Some of the tabs are confusing. Other than that its a very versatile system to use.

Easy email marketing and list/preference center management.

Pros

Once users get up to speed, it's a very easy UI to master and accomplish email marketing tasks quickly. Good list management and customizability, along with reporting.

Cons

The UI is quite outdated, and the workflows are very intuitive -easy to get up to speed on, but it does require an "expert" on the team to help you onboard to how the business uses the software, as it's pretty free-form.

Pros

I am very happy with Marketing Cloud's new Content Builder, which is definitely an update from their Classic Content. Although my team is still learning the new builder, it already appears to be a lot more initiative and easy than Classic Content. I'm hoping it makes the experience of building and sending emails through Marketing Cloud an easier one.

Cons

I'd say that Marketing Cloud is fine, however very hard to navigate without training. Even for users who have experience on other email platforms, the interface for Marketing Cloud is neither intuitive nor are there any clear training resources for it. It's also largely insufficient without being connected to a Salesforce CRM. I also do not like the visual representation of their automation workflows.

Ties right into our CRM (Salesforce) and allows us to use existing data to find our prospects on social platforms instead of having to do it individually on each platform with spreadsheets, etc.

Pros

Has great potential. Looking at a studio, you can find your CRM contacts on Facebook, AdWords, and Twitter and then send customized emails and messages, which is great.

Cons

It is tricky to set up and does take time. You also must have a large database for this to be worth it.

Pros

The most brilliant feature of this software is it allows to connect with the customers with ease, which is the most basic and essential step towards any Digital business success.

Pros

This platform is excellent for email marketing. It does a great job at keeping your email content organized and easy to find.

Cons

Its quite expensive. The WYSIWYG editor is kind of terrible. It should be easier to put together mobile first email templates.

Pros

This software is great for seeing emails that were sent over time ina calendar format. It's also helpful to see some analytics at a glance.

Cons

Sending emails is very tedious. The test emails very rarely look like what you created - there are random lines and font changes, buttons repositioned, etc. which makes it difficult to know whether your email will be correct when it goes out.