Salesforce Marketing Cloud Reviews

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

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.

Pros

Can't say I particularly liked anything about Salesforce marketing cloud other than the fact it somewhat integrates with an existing Salesforce instance.

Cons

Unfortunately, the product is a solution that really only makes sense if you have an existing dependency on Salesforce. In terms of using marketing cloud for marketing communication, or any kind of communication, it really falls short. The product is very complicated when compared to competitors that cost less and offer more seamless functionality. We ended up switching to another product because the product had a huge learning curve and required work around to perform pretty basic tasks. There are 4-6 steps to accomplish what other products do in half the steps.

Pros

I liked that this is integrated within the SFDC CRM and i do not have to use a separate platform for managing leads and opportunities with sending email marketing and outreach.

Cons

i do not have anything i dislike so far, we constantly use this feature

Alternatives Considered

Outreach

Reasons for Choosing Salesforce Marketing Cloud

functionality, price and staying within 1 platform

Switched From

Groove

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

I don't like anything about this software.

Cons

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.

Alternatives Considered

HubSpot Marketing Hub, ActiveCampaign, SendGrid and Mailchimp

Reasons for Switching to Salesforce Marketing Cloud

We chose MC over other tools because we were sold a native, deep integration with Salesforce. What we received was hacked together and barely functional. We can't wait to switch to another platform, even though it will result in a lot of rework on our end.

Pros

Experience and user friendly easy to login and easy to install.

Cons

lease like about is like we have to take login every day that to with OTP authentication.

Pros

Campaign management and lead tracking are very streamline. It is easy to track, monitor and measure the results as well.

Cons

It is slightly complicated to understand, specially for junior folks.

Pros

Integration with SF is fluid and smooth. It is possible to have intelligent and personalized automations.

Cons

It's not easy and intuitive to use. It requires experience, training, and even certification.

Pros

This software is a great tool to publish a newsletter of your company or creating Marketing Emails for your costumers. Once you have you template set then it is very simple to add the content and send to large audience.

Cons

Very complex software and formal training is required before you can start using it. You have minimum flexibility when it comes to editing your template

Pros

As with all things SalesForce you can expect nothing but the top level of customer support and options. We currently run a Salesforce website, so the integration is flawless and easy. There's not much additional setup or any big learning curve to start using it.
The Marketing Cloud is a great way to easily manage our social media accounts, facebook posting, and email automation solutions. Because this platform is integrated with our website, it's still very easy to have outside vendors and software solutions that integrate with it. An example of that is that we still use Mailchimp to help manage our email channel even though the Marketing Cloud offers an email solution as part of their software.

Cons

The main disadvantages of using this software are pretty much the same disadvantages of any of the Salesforce platforms and/or integrations. For the uninitiated those are:
- Some of the most costly software that accomplishes the same tasks as other platforms
- Can be a bit complicated to navigate due to the sheer possibilities + abilities you have using the Salesforce platform.

If you understand both the expenses associated with using Salesforce and have people who can either learn it, or teach it, then i'd say there's no other real disadvantages to using it!

Pros

This is an outstanding product for 1:1 engagement with an existing audience. We're still somewhat new to it, but are quickly coming up to speed. Best modules are open APIs, Journey Builder (basically pulls the entire suite together to build repeatable workflows), Audience builder (works hand/glove with Journey Builder), and Mobile Studio. It will take time for us to gather enough behavior and other attribute values to really put this to work. But it has plenty of horsepower and data tools and really get us to advanced personalization and performance analysis.

Cons

The suite is a set of modules cobbled together via the original product (ExactTarget) and new apps purchased by SFDC (e.g., Social Studio, which as Radian 6). This makes it cumbersome to assemble an entire campaign because you're constantly pinging back and forth through different modules (via a tabbed interface) to get things done. It's probably too late now for a truly unified, campaign-based UI, so it will have to do.

Pros

The pros that come inherently, with Salesforce, number far in excess of the amount of reading, anyone wants to give some review from the typical CEO. Therefor I will provide a direct, concise, list of the benefits we attained at Impetus Global Technology when we adopted this software.
* Effective Cost
* Time-Saving Ability
* Support
* Ease of Use and Training Availability
* Extensible by Nature
* Incentives to Sales Employees

Cons

Honestly, the task of espousing a list of Cons, towards this business tool has proven quite the challenging endeavor. Not only am I CEO, but also I hold the position of Director of Software Development. Speaking now as a developer, I would encourage introducing more direct compatibility with Visual Studio and/or the JetBrains stack. By the previous statement, I mostly refer to some sort of Extension or Framework that can be utilized through something such as a Xamarin or WPF application to source business data.
From the view of an Executive, I cannot honestly provide any criticism that would merit the publishing of a review.

Pros

Salesforce offers a tons of flexibility. Salesforce allows you to build anything you can imagine.
The CRM can perform some serious heavy lifting and integrates with practically all programs on the market.
Tasks let you keep track of ongoing discussions or tasks with clients and prospects, whilst reporting lets you monitor how your team is performing.

Cons

Sometimes it is slow to use
However, that is just how CRMs are, I've looked at many different CRMs available, and Salesforce has so far proven to be the finest.

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

If you are using other Salesforce Cloud solutions this easily integrates into your overall marketing strategy. The support team is very helpful and answers question in a timely fashion. They are great to work with!

Cons

If you don't use other Salesforce Cloud solutions you won't get all the benefits of this tool. It really helps to use all Saleforce products if you want synergy among all of your initiatives. It is a costly investment, but if you are willing to spend the money the cloud solutions can really help grow your business and make your team more efficient.

Pros

When you connect all the different pieces of Salesforce software that are applicable to your organization, the results are astonishing. Having used other CRM and Marketing Softwares and having to integrate the two was far more difficult than using the various aspects of Salesforce. It is fantastic to have it all in once place. It connects easily to Google Suite apps and is overall easy to use for the technically inclined and after a little training your less technically inclined employees will have no problem with it.

Cons

For those that are not technically inclined, the learning curve can be difficult. The integration of a large business application can be extremely lucrative, however the kick starting period can be a turn off. For small businesses that have multiple solutions to the problems that Salesforce can solve, the transition period can be difficult to cope with.

Pros

The whole baked out process is easy to understand and roll out, using the tool to manage email campaigns and other selling tools is a real revenue generator!

Cons

As with anything Salesforce, it looks good until you sign the contract, then you see all the hidden add-ons and expenses you need to get the tool actually doing what you want. Be prepared to spend more than they tell you!

Pros

was really simple to use, comprehend, and navigate, and it offered helpful automated marketing capabilities that made reaching a big audience straightforward. The email builder is absolutely great with its drag and drop functions and the ability to preview and send a test email to yourself to view how the email looks like before sending it out to a larger audience makes it an absolutely wonderful application.

Cons

The only con i can think of is not being able to add video content to your email and not being able to add more than a 5MB file (image).

Pros

You can hire a consulting company to change Salesforce to fit your business needs if you don't have the time or knowledge to do so (we hired Cloud Creations on the referral from our sales manager). The community is so large and expansive that you could easily find a fix to any sort of business problem you are having. We really needed a platform that integrated with our home grown system and made sure that all of our departments were talking to one another. We chose Salesforce because of its ability to be shaped and molded based on our business model. And you can adapt as your company grows-change things, add things, do whatever you want!

Cons

It did take some months to get our version of Salesforce to be where we wanted it, but for other companies that had more IT resources or time to devote to it would probably not take as long. Make sure you have a project manager or person dedicated to its success and implementation internally or it might not get adopted within your company.

Pros

Organized and user-friendly interface for creating emails and lists
lots of options for tracking list/audience performance in reporting section

Cons

Hard to share lists, emails, reports etc. between multiple business units
visual editor in emails is glitchy and has a lot of technical issues
Only recently introduced easier drag/drop tools for creating user-friendly templates
hard to organize/maintain different levels of user permissions for different employees

Pros

Salesforce is extremely versatile. Anything you can dream of, you can build in salesforce. The CRM can do some real heavy lifting and integrates with almost every software out there. Tasks enable you to keep track of on-going conversations or to-dos with customers and prospects, while reporting allows you to keep track of how well your team is doing.

Cons

Due to the fact that Salesforce enables the user to build out a large number of custom fields and processes it can become very complex to use. This CRM can be as easy or difficult to navigate as you want to make it.

Pros

Originally we purchased a solution from a boutique third party vendor but ended up requiring a fair amount of custom development in order to get a workable solution. We moved to Marketing Cloud after a fair amount of pain. The integration was immediate and we were able to quickly move most of our marketing campaigns onto Marketing Cloud. The primary use case is to solicit leads from our landing page and setup the appropriate objects in SFDC. The sales team was very accommodating when it comes to working with our budget and providing initial support and configuration.

Cons

Our Marketing Cloud has a restriction on the number of contacts that can be in our mailable database. We constantly get reminders to either remove contacts or upgrading to a higher limit plan. We ran into an issue as one feature required access to specific Google APIs. We submitted a feature request but it's been months and they only provided a workaround that involved developer resources on our end.

Pros

With this product you can store any bit of customer data. This is a sales persons greatest tool. In addition you can create custom objects to enable the support team to better work cases.

Cons

Not all stored data can be pulled into reports. Salesforce does not do calculations on dates or times. This can make it difficult to do everything you need to in the system itself.

Pros

Easy to find accounts and account information. If I need to know who their customers account manager is, Salesforce will tell me who is assigned.

Cons

Wish it was linked up with our system SAP. We have accounts that get transferred out of reps names and into another. Just wish the salesforce would stay in tune with that information.