Marketo Reviews

With Marketo as the core strength, I have led numerous Marketing Automation projects from end to end. I have analyzed business requirements for MAP implementation, configured database setup, worked on SSL implementation, handled system integration, coded Email and Landing Page Templates, configured analytics setup, and led more than five hundred campaign projects.

Marketo is the backbone for our company's Digital Marketing operations.

The most valuable feature of this solution is Smart Campaigns. It is very easy to use and very powerful too.

Marketo should give more power to the users for data manipulation. Marketo sees data in terms of Leads and Campaigns, which is fine, but there are other perspectives of data too that can and should actually be utilized. I compare this to Adobe Campaign which allows the manipulation of data from different angles.

My organization uses Marketo since around 2013 - 2019, 6 years in total. I myself contributed since 2016, so that's around 3.5 years.

Very stable and solid.

Very scalable and easy to use.

They are very helpful and supportive, but at times I found some communication troubles.

Marketo makes it easy to stay in contact with our base of customers, prospective customers, and partners. The ability to quickly build and automate complex scenarios, create dynamic lists, and analyze campaign results is invaluable.

With the increasing sophistication of anti-phishing and filtering software, we have seen a number of messages that return link clicks – even though links were not actually clicked.  A simple indicator of this, is when Marketo analytics show that every individual at a particular company has clicked on a link (usually the same one) in an email.  These “phantom clicks” can make it difficult to estimate the effectiveness of a particular email or piece of content.

This issue has been discussed extensively in the Marketo community, and the larger ESP community as well.  While there are several temporary works arounds, I would like to see a more proactive attempt at a long-term solution.  I do recognize that this problem is not limited to Marketo, and it certainly has not been a deal-breaker for our continued use of the platform.

Three years

I joined the organization after deployment, but am told it was a relatively smooth process. As with any automation solution, the real hurdle isn't in the deployment, it's in optimizing processes to take advantage of the product's unique capabilities.

Marketo is a solid automation platform with fantastic stability.

The scalability of the solution is virtually unmatched. We've expanded our operations (and database) greatly over the past few years without a hitch.

Customer service is prompt, friendly, and generally helpful.

Pricing depends on the size of your database and feature set.  Our experience with the renewal process has been frustrating.  Marketo bakes a substantial price increase into each contract which has required renegotiation every year.

I like the integration with Salesforce.

We have a better alignment of sales and marketing. It allows me to do things in Salesforce without an admin.

• Speed to sync if you have lots of leads
• Attribution reporting

We have been using this solution for six years.

In terms of stability, it takes longer to sync with Salesforce than it should at times.

In terms of scalability, the more leads you have, the longer it takes to sync with Salesforce.

I would give technical support a rating of 5/10.

I have used Act-On, HubSpot, and Infusionsoft. Many clients switch due to cost.

To make the initial setup better, brush up on best practices and come up with a naming convention that starts with the year, month, and date in order to keep things consistent.

We evaluated Pardot, HubSpot, and Act-On.

Map out your processes and customer journey before you start building.

• Can segment the database in a number of ways. We can target leads based on where they came from, what they did in the emails, and what they did on the website.
• Automation ability: Allows us to build marketing flows that send automated emails based on user actions.
• Lead scoring: Helps us find the most relevant leads based on source and behavior.

We have a large database that targets many different types of users for many different types of events. Marketo helps us easily segment and target the appropriate users for the relevant events. Automation also helps us to instantly send relevant offers to registered participants.

• Marketo is still very slow. Despite promises over the years to improve this, we are still waiting for a reality when it takes a few seconds to load large lists of data.
• The landing page building is still a very non-intuitive and a non-user friendly process. Marketo would be wise to adopt an easier approach, similar to what unbounce offers.
• More proactive support from account managers would be nice, especially in problem-solving.

We have been using this solution for three years.

There were no issues with deployment.

There were no issues with stability.

There were no issues with scalability.

Customer Service:

I would give customer service a rating of three out of 10.

Technical Support:

I would give technical support a rating eight out of 10.

I was not involved in the initial setup.

We have found it very challenging to measure our ROI through Marketo.

Great ease of use creation for campaigns. Marketo enables the use of templated landing pages and emails to make it easy to create messages and landing pages.

The available analytics are sub-par.

No.

No.

Customer Service:

This is where Marketo falls short. Their customer service is awful.

Technical Support:

OK>

Yes. Switched with a new company.

Straightforward.

In-house and vendor.

Yes.

Email drip campaigns

Automated customer outreach from sign up to upgrade

Easier to create/modify graphic driven templates

Need automatic 404 reporting for links included in content

5 years

Takes time to setup and manage

None

None

Customer Service:

8 out of 10

Technical Support:

8 out of 10

Manual solution with Constant Contact - easier to manage multiple campaigns in Marketo

Architecture for the brand and organizing landing page domains/URLs took time

In-house

Saves .5 man/year

Varies

Hubspot

Pardot

Hire a Marketo certified consultant prior to install and launch.

Marketo has a great UI that's both easy to use and navigate.Set-up took a while but Marketo support offers extensive training for new users, both on-demand videos and a 4-day live training session online.I adopted Marketo after using Pardot for lead management and email automation and was very pleased with how easy it was to integrate 3rd party tools. The extensive integration with GoToWebinar and SFDC saved me tons of time following online events.Additionally, the Marketo Community offers extensive information as well as the ability to suggest and vote for new features. If I couldn't find my answer in the Community, the support team was always very helpful.

The design studio offers limited out-of-the-box features and we had to work with a developer to create new landing pages etc.Changing a campaign in progress (i.e. changing the wait period between emails) is unnecessarily complicated. We would have to create a new, nearly identical campaign, pull all leads out the initial campaign and move them to the new one just to change a wait step!The support team in Ireland is very helpful and always goes above and beyond. I wish I could say the same of the US based support team - when I spoke with them, it felt like the rep was reading a script and not listening to my question at all.

Overall - I am very pleased with Marketo for email automation and lead management. I recommend it as a tool but don't disregard the initial training they offer to new users. Not all features are intuitive and training sessions point you in the right direction.

- Relative ease of use - Advanced capabilities for closed-loop lead management - SFDC sync

- Can be more than what you really need - Wish it had a better user interface - Needs integration with marketing resource management