Adobe Marketo Engage (acquired by Adobe in 2018) is a marketing automation platform whose basic features include email marketing, drip nurturing, landing pages, and lead scoring, but other editions offer additional advanced features. Typical customers are B2B firms with complex sales cycles.
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Campaign Monitor by Marigold
Score 8.8 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Campaign Monitor by Marigold enables users to create, send, and optimize email marketing campaigns.
Marketo had the best balance of customizability and usability. It matched our need for advanced data capabilities, marketing automation, and a native Salesforce integration.
Marketo is a step above the rest in its customizability and sheer power. In my line of work, there's a general agreement that the other platforms are more for small to medium businesses, and can be grown out of. Marketo will take you to the next level and it would be hard to …
I appreciate that for a smaller but growing company, Campaign Monitor was more of a just right size for us compared to Marketo, but had more functionality to grow with us than MailChimp. I've used both before, and Campaign Monitor stood out as being both better suited for us …
Adobe Marketo Engage is an excellent tool for hosting registration forms and sending out tokenized emails based on a particular person's information within your database. For example, if someone attends an event or webinar and indicates that they'd like to learn more about your product, then Adobe Marketo Engage can easily trigger a specific email template to that person that will be personalized with tokens about them. The pixel tracking that can be applied to any web page is also very helpful. If you want to focus on a more 1:1 type of follow up with a Lead, then the automated emails are not going to be as useful.
Campaign Monitor by Marigold is great at both scaling up as you grow (i.e. for a startup or if you're starting fresh on building a subscriber list) and providing more than just basic templates and tooling. We vetted across a lot of different options to account for where we were starting and where we hope to grow into with our opt-in email marketing, and Campaign Monitor stood out.
It keeps all of our very important lead data in one place. It's very flexible, allows us to do a lot of different things around list building and segmentation. It deploys our email campaigns for us and it's also where our landing pages are built. So it does a lot of the things that we need to do from a data and deployment perspective.
Campaign Monitor’s support is great. They have a great help page built out to help answer all your questions, and if you do have a question or issue that needs extra support, their support team responds within a couple hours to help resolve the issue.
The email builder is very clean and easy to use. It makes A/B testing, personalization, and dynamic content easy to implement.
I appreciate the insights reporting that Campaign Monitor provides. We use that regularly for our quarterly reporting to track list growth, as well as campaign performance from a high level.
The automation is very straight forward and has truly transformed our marketing. The learning curve is pretty low, so my entire team knows how to use it to create and edit automated email journeys.
Adobe Marketo Engage crashes a lot or freezes. We don't have many users and less than 300k contacts so there's no reason it should ever crash.
It's really expensive! It would be nice to pick which features we want a la cart versus being stuck paying more for a feature and not using the others in the package.
Because of our integration with Dynamics, we had to use a 3rd party tool called Scribe for field matching. No one at Adobe will help us now that we have a 3rd party tool
I'd prefer a central contact list with tags, rather than multiple lists. I can have one person on 5 lists and that counts as 5 subscribers.
While the email builder is very good, I'd prefer more customisation options.
Updates they make are good, but are perhaps a little slow.
I'd like better mobile compatibility. I get that might not be possible for the email builder (although aiming for that would be great) but for lists, reports etc there's no reason that shouldn't be mobile-compatible or have a mobile app.
It flexes with us both because of the tiered pricing, and due to the comprehensive tools available. We're able to go from one newsletter to many, and few automations to many very easily while not paying for a Cadillac when what we need is a sturdy crossover.
In some aspects, the tool can feel quite clunky in parts. But with the rich feature set it has, it's understandable. There is a lot of room for improvement for the user interface. The system itself doesn't have a slick or modern feel, so the usability could feel nicer to use with these areas considered.
It's a very user friendly tool and a highly intuitive interface. It's really clearly thought out, so from a users perspective it feels very simple. By comparison, we've also used Mailchimp, and when comparing one to the other, the Mailchimp dashboard is far less logical and intuitive.
Marketo provides different way and abilities to connect. If you are having product support or unexplained errors you can get someone on Marketo support 24 hours a day. One of Marketo's greatest assets in my opinion however would be the community. Often times our company is just looking for case success stories from someone else. In the community you can search for problems you are currently facing and see others having the same issue and solutions for those issues. If not, you can pose a question to the whole community and champions of the product and others can chime in to provide suggestions to fix your needs. The community is truly a 24/7 place to get your answers quickly.
There have only been a couple of instances where it's been down and this has typically been middle of the night type situations that were planned downtime so they could work on maintenance. They provide notice well ahead of these instances. I've never noticed a surprise outage.
There are times when it is slightly slow for us, where we sit on a screen waiting for it to load. This could be our internet since we have had the same issue occasionally with other systems, but it is enough to make you crazy.
I have noticed no slow page loads within the design interface or reports. It's all quick, even with list uploads which are notorious for being clunky in other systems. It's all been quick and easy for us.
On multiple occasions we've had Marketo support (technical and license based) issues. Technical issues were minor and resolved within a day. License based issues (even things encouraged by Marketo for partners, like provisioning another license) took WEEKS. They actually took so long to respond that the client we were working with withdrew from the contract because they were no longer convinced Marketo was capable of supporting their business. As an agency trying to sell the software, you can only explain away so much before they just made us look silly.
Our account rep stopped out in Lincoln, NE to ensure we were properly set up and running. This was very much appreciated. I was very, very new at this point, so I can't comment very much on the extent of what was taught because I was still brand new to the company and the system
I had never used Marketo prior to taking this job so online training was my starting point. I was able to follow along, it was interesting and quickly and efficiently taught me what I needed to know without a lot of fluff. It was far from boring and really helped me get my hands dirty with Marketo.
1. Have a content marketing plan to run in parallel with the marketing automation installation--you'll need a lot of content to make full use of Marketo's capabilities. 2. Work with sales (and ISRs) to define and document a workflow--build your Marketo installation around how you do business--not figure out how to apply your business to the tools 3. Spend time of data cleaning--both an initial project as well as a strategy for ongoing data management. We found some change manaement issues (no more appending ZZZ to the first name to identify contacts who have left the company, for example, or prohibiting the entry of "info@company.com" email addresses). 4. Find some champions in the sales and ISR teams. You'll have both fans and detractors--work with the fans to build some success stories
Adobe Marketo Engage is one of the best email sending platforms I have worked with, because there is so much you can do on a lead scoring area and also then connect this to other platforms such as Salesforce. It allows for seamless reporting and working alongside sales colleagues. We chose Adobe Marketo Engage because it allows for more sophisticated audience segmentation and management of ongoing large scale nurture flows across a number of complex criteria.
The ability to track the effectiveness of email marketing campaigns in real-time is what makes Campaign Monitor interesting to use. All the vital features that we need to run professionally designed email campaigns that look wonderful on any device so that we boost our business are included in this platform.
We look at scaleability in a few different ways. First, the speed while using Marketo has remained relatively the same as our database has grown. Though I would say Marketo is slow at times, it has not gotten slower over the last few years. If anything, it has improved, and they are working to improve it. Second, the amount of programs we have developed in Marketo has exponentially grown as well. Marketo has allowed us to drastically increase our output without having to drastically increase our headcount.
It is so easy to use, and the things you'd want to have as you scale and get to a more complex email marketing approach are all there. From automations to lots of mobile responsive templates, it's easy to set up what you need and then customize for your brand.
Private-label reports that are visually appealing and easy for clients to understand
The 'Worldview' map feature is a MAJOR setting point and hit with clients, as they can watch a realtime map of their emails being opened in specific locations across the world, and instantly see when a recipient clicks a link in their email.
