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The main use case for Salesforce Marketing Cloud is email marketing through Salesforce for the B2B segment on a day-to-day basis.

For B2B email marketing using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, I can provide a specific example where we have divided the flow into two campaign types: always-on journeys which last for around six months to almost a year, and quick campaigns such as New Year wishes which are non-always-on journeys with only one event that ends in a day. There can be journeys that follow the marketing funnel structure and can run for an entire year. For organizations where events are occurring, there will be invitation campaigns, initially with lead selection, then invitation emails, and then registration emails, which include the flow for event-based emails such as registration, invitation, and thank you emails.

For setting up these campaigns in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, they are set up via Journey Builder only, with automations to process the audience as it flows from the SQL database to Salesforce into the data extensions.

The best features Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers include being easy to set up, having a strong Automation Studio, and providing excellent reporting along with the data views it provides. This allows me to obtain extensive information on my email campaigns that have been sent out, letting me know the interactions happening. There are many integrities that it captures, and we can send it back to the SQL database to store it for a longer duration to run machine learning models on it, to analyze the data, and for reporting purposes.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud has positively impacted my organization by reducing costs while significantly increasing the return on investment.

I feel that Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be improved in how the data views are accessed; it would be better to have something more physical. With data extensions, you can view them directly, but for data views, it is very difficult as you can only send it out or load it into data extensions. Improvements can also be made in the connections to different external tools such as Azure or AWS.

Customer support can be improved in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, as sometimes it is not clear what the issue is or how to approach solving it, and it also takes time to resolve issues.

I have been using Salesforce Marketing Cloud for around two and a half to three years.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is stable, with issues occurring sometimes, but it is stable approximately 90% of the time.

I find Salesforce Marketing Cloud to be scalable, as we can easily send out campaigns; I have tested sending out to somewhere around 100,000 to 200,000 people at a time, and we have even sent out more than that.

Customer support can be improved in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, as sometimes it is not clear what the issue is or how to approach solving it, and it also takes time to resolve issues.

I previously used Marketo and switched because it was charging us too much, while Salesforce Marketing Cloud was offering a lower price. Additionally, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is gaining significant momentum in the market, and other companies and competitors are using it, which was another reason to adopt Salesforce Marketing Cloud to stay competitive and upgrade with changing technology.

There are certain features in Salesforce Marketing Cloud that I have noticed differ from Marketo; Marketo is more flexible, and since I am from a coding background, working on Salesforce Marketing Cloud is easy for me. However, I feel that for people who are from a non-coding background, Marketo is a better tool to work on, but it also adds to the cost as Marketo stands at a higher cost compared to Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

My advice for others looking into using Salesforce Marketing Cloud is to analyze and review your use case carefully. If you plan to run marketing campaigns using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you definitely need people who are well-versed in Salesforce Marketing Cloud's development side since it is not a tool where you can drag and drop to run a campaign or find an easy user interface, as you need to write code and be skilled in server-side JavaScript or SQL scripting to fully explore the capabilities of Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Overall, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a good product, and organizations can definitely consider adopting it. I would rate this product a 7 out of 10.

Private Cloud

Microsoft Azure

Intercom Customer Communications Platform is for monitoring and visualizing data. Basically, it is used to know exactly what is happening. We monitor the software via logs, and whatever errors appear, they appear here in the dashboard.

We believe it was a little bit outdated. With everything—new technologies and new ways of customer behavior—Zendesk was giving us more data and more tools. There is this new thing, Zendesk Workspace, which gave us more opportunities to engage with customers that way.

With Zendesk, we have much more signals that we could use to understand better our client patterns. For example, one thing that was super useful on Zendesk that we didn't have on Intercom Customer Communications Platform was the ability to make a forecast of our customers during specific times of the year. So we allocate more resources on support to attend to that demand. And since we were a multi-country, global company, we understood that at these times in Europe, the demand goes up, so we can do things like that. We had more of a strategic view with Zendesk, whereas Intercom Customer Communications Platform was more of a day-to-day, quarter-to-quarter approach.

It was very basic. It was the basic communication with customers. It was inherited, as I was not part of the purchasing process of this platform. It was useful but not any big feature. It was good for what it was meant to do, but only that. It was not a strong platform. Everything was okay, but there was not one feature that was amazing.

We did not explore them. The problem with Intercom Customer Communications Platform was a little bit of the implementation. It was complicated to use to actually get the automations and everything. We never used the automated part.

We did not integrate it with many platforms. We only integrated with our native website to send the customers there. We had an integration with HubSpot, which is our CRM, but only that.

We used it for about one year, just before using Zendesk.

I would say the support was knowledgeable and everything, but it was very reactive. They made changes and did not let us know with anticipation.

I used to use Zendesk before Intercom Customer Communications Platform.

Regarding log monitoring, DataDog and Kibana are other platforms to review logs. Kibana is another platform to review logs.

Regarding CRM and project management, we do not use Monday.com, Freshdesk, Freshsales, or Hootsuite. For those, we use ClickUp and Notion mostly. I have heard of Monday, but I have never used it.

For the help desk, we are currently experimenting with Pylon, which is a fairly new software on the market.

Since I was not part of the pricing discussion, I am not completely sure about the conditions that we had at the moment, so I could not tell you exactly. My overall review rating for Intercom Customer Communications Platform is eight.