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.
N/A
Full Circle Insights
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Full Circle Insights (formerly Full Circle CRM) is built on the Salesforce platform and is primarily a marketing performance management tool. It is used to calculate the ROI from marketing programs and includes robust analytics dashboards. As such it integrates with the major marketing automation systems including Marketo, Eloqua and Act-On.
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.
In full disclosure as a professional services marketing agency and consultancy, based on our very positive experience with Full Circle CRM, the robustness of their offering, and our ability to work together, we have entered into a partnership to provide implementation and consulting services in cooperation with Full Circle CRM. Rather than paint this review as biased, I hope that it provides insights into our decision to partner with an impressive and growing company.
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.
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
We worked closely with the vendor to add functionality to their current release to allow us to track multiple separate waterfalls simultaneously in order to operationalize the new Sirius Decisions Waterfall model. With the needed changes, the product works as advertised, and is providing the specific results we anticipated. In 6 months, we have not found anything else that we would want to change.
Full Circle CRM has solved a major visibility problem for us that was the result of architectural differences between Eloqua and salesforce.com that cannot be solved by reporting alone. We rely on this visibility as much as the core systems themselves.
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.
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 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.
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.
The vendor worked with us tirelessly, never complaining about our broken processes and bad data. In fact, they went above and beyond their responsibilities to assist us in the process re-engineering and the data clean-up
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
The instructor was the same person who guided our implementation so they not only knew their application but they were also familiar with our data and our specific configuration and processes within salesforce.com. They were able to provide customized instruction to match our needs and personnel.
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
When I look back at where we were on November 25th compared to where we were on January 25th, having been live for just one month, the difference is amazing. Our management discussions had already moved from discussing the validity of the data to the implications of the insights. As we approach the mid-point in our year, it is difficult to remember the old days when we could not see the road in front of us.
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.
Full Circle's main competitors are standalone reporting tools which perform well and are a good first step into attribution. All tools require significant investment to improve your marketing data model and how you plan and execute campaigns. Full Circle is heavily married to Salesforce and takes advantage of Salesforce's reporting suite vs. visualizing in a standalone tool. This approach also works well if you prefer to visualize data in an alternative tool such as Tableau or Looker. The proprietary approach to visualization used by Bizible and BrightFunnel are less appealing to enterprise companies who are building a modern stack.
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.
