Salesforce Marketing Cloud Reviews

Inside our company, our primary use case is on the commercial field. But as an integrator, we've gotten a lot of use cases related to the use of the Salesforce ecosystem.

The way the solution improves the organization is to personalize the experience on the website. If you know the customer that is visiting your site, and you can personalize their experience, it can be very interesting and could increase the user experience and also the results. 

The most valuable feature is that it's a CRM. You can build your data model and you can use this model to personalize the experience of your customers using, for example, the marketing cloud-connected with the CRM.

I think all areas of the solution always have room for improvement because the needs always are increasing. The CDP solutions could be one of the cloud solutions that need to be deployed as soon as possible. Another one that we are seeing as an integrator, for example, is loyalty. Salesforce has a loyalty cloud that is just at the beginning of its development. This is imperative to be developed better than it's currently now.

An additional feature needed for the next release of Marketing Cloud would be better capacity for personalization. They have many third-party tools such as interaction studio or CDP, and you want to see more connectivity. When you go from another vendor, it is necessary to implement changes and to integrate with your ecosystem. We are waiting for more integration.

I have been using the solution since 2018.

The stability of the solution looks really great.

The scalability is incredible. Almost three upgrades per year with very, very nice functionalities. This solution is covered by Salesforce.

The technical support for Salesforce is good, but sometimes it's hard to contact them. When you open a ticket, you always get an answer, but there is room for improvement in that area.

I have used solutions by Oracle and Microsoft, but they are far from this solution. Very far. Oracle and Microsoft are not at the same level. Microsoft is just for the SMB market, not big companies, and the scalability and performance are better than in Salesforce.

The Salesforce solutions are quite complex to deploy. If you have to do many integrations with other data sources, it's quite complicated, but they have a very good web service and if you know whatever you're doing, it's easy to do. But for a person that is trying to deploy himself, it's quite complicated. It's not normally plug-and-play.

The length of deployment depends on the cloud that you're implementing, but normally for a large company, deployment would normally be more or less three months. It depends on the integration with your own system, for example, if you have any ERP such as SAP. Also the data model, then integration with marketing cloud. I'm talking about complex, complete deployment for the data model, such as marketing cloud solutions. Normally just three months to deploy this kind of infrastructure.

We manage the deployments ourselves.

There is an ROI, but I cannot share any information related to KPIs. But there is a return on investment, and in many cases that we are implementing, the ROI is why.

The licensing cost for the solution is on a yearly basis. If you are storing documents and you need more storage, it means more pricing or you have to move the storage to other clouds. To clouds such as Microsoft or Amazon.

My advice is if you want a scalable solution, this is the solution, but it's necessary to have the support of a good partner to help deploy. You will need someone inside of the organization that has the knowledge to support the internal team.

I would rate the solution a nine out of ten. This is a very powerful and scalable solution. We can grow with the solution and they have many solutions around. For example, around CRM you have solutions related to integration, orchestration, personalization, support, analytics, and artificial intelligence. There's basically a solution for anything you need.

It is used for campaign management and running events. We are a service organization. We build the Salesforce Marketing Cloud for our customers. Some of them are high-tech manufacturing customers. We are not end-users.

The Journey Builder and the Email Studio features are most valuable.

We need a development environment for Marketing Cloud. Currently, there is no development environment for this solution. Other Salesforce products, such as Sales and Service Cloud, have a development environment in which the developers can do some things and then post them in production. Currently, everything happens in the production for Marketing Cloud. There is only one environment, and the developers and the end-users have to work in the same environment, which seems to be challenging. If Salesforce can bring a developer environment for Marketing Cloud, it will be good.

It is stable.

It is scalable. We are using it for three or four customers.

We are fine with their technical support. For any support requirement, we reach out to our customers, and we ask them to raise a request. We get their credentials, and then we take the support request.

We don't require a big team. It is a team of two or three people.

Its licensing is on an annual basis. Customers are okay with its licensing cost, and they don't find it expensive.

I would recommend this solution to others. I didn't get any complaints from our customers.

I would rate Salesforce Marketing Cloud an eight out of ten.

Basically, in the present company where I'm working right now, I'm into the firewall purely on a security end. There are two kinds of deployment, whether it can be on-premises or on-cloud. We don't need any additional features or additional things to the firewall itself. If the customer is demanding "Okay, we want a specific cloud", they can have that flexibility. They specifically can name features and everything. 

The solution helps to boost the basic revenue generation of a company. 

The most interesting part is knowing your customer. If we go for any person who is just a random person we don't know anything at the start. However, we get to know something more about their infrastructure, their architecture, their flow, et cetera, over time. Accordingly, we can do some research and increase our productivity in our field and also in our company.

The solution is very, very scalable.

The solution is stable.

Technical support has always been helpful.

The product can improve security. If we can get better security on the cloud, it would be ideal. With the cloud, you don't need any infrastructure or any kind of end-user person. We'd like to increase the security protocols and increase the policies which have been assigned or have been deployed from years back. 

The solution can be difficult to set up for non-technical individuals.

I've been in marketing for over five years, and in that time, have adopted Salesforce.

The solution is quite stable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. It's reliable. It helps if there's a technical person on hand to handle the deal flow when pitching to customers to showcase proper handling.

The solution is completely scalable. The sky really is the limit. If a company needs to expand it, it can do so as much as it wants.

We've dealt with technical support in the past. It's been pretty good overall. They seem to be helpful and responsive. We're satisfied with their level of support.

The initial setup can vary in complexity.  

If a customer is from a non-technical department or a non-technical field, then we struggle a bit in explaining what needs to be done. However, if a particular person is knowledgeable about the technology or the upcoming trends, it will be a fairly easy process. 

The pricing is reasonable. However, it depends on the particular customer. It depends on what their needs are and how much of the product they will use, et cetera.

The pricing can also vary depending on the deployment model.

I'm in distribution. I'm a developer.

We work with different deployment models, depending on what the client needs.

I'd rate the solution at a nine out of ten. 

We use this solution for sending personalized emails to prospects and clients for reminder consultations or meetings. Use 'Journey Builder' to have clients/prospects first name, last name, financial advisor's signature at the bottom, and dynamic sender for personalized emails that are sent ad hoc, weekly, and monthly.

This solution has improved organization brand awareness with prospects and clients. It can track open and click-through rates, among other Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). While only Premier Support customers (like our firm) have access to Accelerators, these subject matter-taught webinars give detailed implementation instructions.

The most valuable feature is the 'Accelerators', which are expert-taught subject matter webinars on items such as personalization of emails and SMS to contacts and prospects.

Setting up the 'short code' with cell phone carriers to send short messages to contacts and prospects has proved valuable.

We would like an improvement to the 'Einstein Engagement Frequency'; the optimal range of emails that our subscribers will engage with. Then take action to suppress those who receive too many or send more to those receiving too few. Also, we would like a 'sandbox' for Marketing Cloud because only PROD exists today.

Market Volt was elementary compared to Marketing Cloud.

Know that six months on ingesting data is a minimum requirement. You cannot port six months of data, it must be ingested.

Salesforce offered Pardot but the 'road map' showed the long-term internal investment would be on Marketing Cloud.

We are only touching the surface of segmentation in the Marketing Cloud, primarily for sales and marketing teams.

A powerful platform with robust features — for a seamless one-tool solution.

• Eliminated multi-platform departmental dependency
• Helped in the controlled sales cycle.

Options with API and cross-platform connectivity.

Data protection and region specfic customization.

The need to build a single, comprehensive view of each consumer to power 1-to-1 journeys. Integrate every touchpoint and experience with your brand across advertising, marketing, commerce, sales, service, and apps.

• Allows organisations to engage customers with one integrated platform to unify sales, service, and marketing.
• Allows organisations to connect with leads and customers across every channel, on any device.
• Allows organisations to implement automated solutions, saving time and money.

Content Builder: Content Builder is a cross-channel content management tool that allows you to consolidate images, documents, and content in a single location for use in the Marketing Cloud. With an easy-to-use, drag and drop interface, Content Builder allows you to create re-usable templates for emails and landing pages.

Advertising Studio: Advertising Studio uses existing customer data from email, mobile push interactions and conversions on your site to securely sync with the contact's Facebook, Twitter, Google AdWords and Social Studio accounts. Engage customers with relevant, timely messages and find new customers with similar attributes by combining the functionality of Advertising Audiences and Advertising Campaigns.

Social Studio: Social Studio is a one stop solution allowing you to manage, schedule, create and monitor posts organized by brand, region or multiple teams and individuals in a unified interface. Social Studio offers powerful real-time publishing and engagement platform for content marketers, plus the comprehensive content performance by social network and time frame.

Journey Builder: Journey Builder is used for creating responsive, automated, multi-channel campaigns. Use Journey Builder to design a communication plan that reaches customers at every stage of their journey with your brand.

Marketing Cloud releases product updates every three months. With each update, users have to adapt to the product changes and new interfaces.

To improve user experience, there should be clear workflows to assist the user through the setup processes. The help documentation also needs to reflect product updates more accurately. Being at the front of innovation is difficult if you are playing a guessing game.

Marketing Cloud provide a live feed of any product issues, and users are notified in advance of any stability issues. As a side note, this product is cloud based and I would recommend using a Chrome browser to limit issues.

There are no issues with scalability as long as you have a well-defined solution prior to account configuration.

Customer Service:

This is dependent on the license you purchase.

• I would rate Standard Support 8/10.
• I would rate Premium Support 10/10.

Technical Support:

This is dependent on the license you purchase. If you have a standard support agreement and need a quick fix, I would recommend escalating your cases as soon as the option appears in your case log.

• I would rate Standard Support 5/10.
• I would rate Premium Support 9/10.

No.

This is dependent on what your business is trying to achieve.

An integrated approach is always recommended. If you are using Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud, the initial set up is medium complexity. If you are integrating with other CRM systems, websites and apps, you will need an experienced developer to implement your solution.

A non-integrated approach, such as manual imports and file drops is a straightforward setup. However, you will not reap all the benefits of Marketing Cloud.

As consultants, we will always implement Marketing Cloud for our clients. This requires working collaboratively with key stakeholders to discover, plan, build, test and deploy the correct solution.

We have have a dedicated Customer Intelligence Manager who works closely to define our clients' measures of success. We find it challenging to measure ROI directly through Marketing Cloud, often this is a wider conversation.

We make educated recommendations about which features would be used to implement our clients' solutions. Our clients engage directly with Marketing Cloud to negotiate licensing costs. In general, the costs are high.

Initially my previous company Davanti Consulting chose Marketo as an alternative Marketing Automation tool, however we did not see this as a good fit for the business.

My current company CloudShift Group stay ahead of the game by solely offering Marketing Cloud (B2C) and Pardot (B2B) as our preferred marketing automation tools.

Consider your options and stay true to what is best for your business.

We are able to concentrate all inbound and outbound data in one screen.

This tool is user-friendly. They can improve on the analytics and visualization parts inside the tool itself.

The analytics feature needs some improvement.

We have been using the solution for two years.

We did not encounter any issues with stability.

We did not encounter any issues with scalability.

I would rate the technical support at 8/10. I raised many problems on the website and I got good responses.

I worked on Oracle Eloqua and Marketo. However, Salesforce is user-friendly and the sales rep can easily handle data.

The setup was easy.

Add more features that include both analytics and visualization.

We did not evaluate any alternative solutions.

It is a good product.

For me, having a developer mindset, I found the script functionality and the cloud pages to be very useful.

I automated the creation of almost everything in the platform using scripts and cloud pages to make life easier for the deployment team.

There are a few bugs here and there, but nothing bad. The platform is pretty robust. One thing to improve would be the error messages which aren't very helpful.

We have been using this solution for more than two years now.

Deployments are fine, unless there is a human error.

The platform is quite stable, but the platform updates have made some issues in the past.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform is able to handle billions of subscribers and huge Data Extensions, so there nothing bad to report here in terms of scalability.

It seems that they try to sneak in a fee wherever they can. For instance, making you pay for Trigger emails to be instant instead of with a few minute delay.

That's where it gets bad, in my opinion. I have had to deal with the support several times. Almost every time, I told them the solution to the problem because I figured it out faster than they did. I guess the issue is the Level-1 support, because it's hard to make them understand what the issue is.

I used the Experian email platform and it was very slow and hard to use. Mailchimp is great for small businesses, but I wouldn't recommend it for a big corporation. I also had a look at Alterian and once again, it might be right for smaller businesses, not for a big corporation.

It takes a solutions architect like me to set it up because it's like setting up a database. You have to know what you're doing. There are a few things to setup at first, like defining if the SFMC is going to be the master data for the audience, or if it will sit in an external database.

I am part of the "vendor team". In my previous position, it was deployed through an external company which did a great job, and from there, I took the in-house work.

Not everything sold is vital, but there are advantages to having items like Journey Builder. The platform is worth the money for big corporations who want to take channel services to a higher level.

I arrived after the platform was selected, so I can't say much about that.

I sincerely recommend the SFMC platform and advise you to hire a Solutions Architect to set it up. It is quite a complex piece of technology, full of nuggets that can only shine through proper care.