Adobe Marketo Engage vs. LoopFuse (discontinued)

If you are looking to, you're looking to scale up your lead gen work. Adobe Marketo was a very good tool for that. You're looking to deliver leads to a sales team from marketing campaigns. It's a very good tool for that. It runs everything we do on the marketing side and I think a small lead gen team or a very large one could use an equally well.

Incentivized

My advice in choosing software in general is to know what you want to get out of the software. Then start researching the software on your own to see what features and benefits each has that will help you accomplish what you need. Once you have a good idea of what sorts of features you're looking for, reach out to the vendors that have them to see demos. Get really in-depth with your demos and ask for practical use-cases for each feature. Free trials are pretty useless with this sort of technology because the initial set-up is so time-consuming that you would either not set it up properly, or you would not stop using the provider you chose after the set up because you don't want to do it again!

• Adobe Marketo Engage excels at automating complex marketing workflows and delivering personalized customer experiences at scale.
• Adobe Marketo Engage enables marketers to create targeted campaigns, schedule automated email sequences, and personalize content based on user demographics and interactions, resulting in more relevant customer engagement.
• Adobe Marketo Engage provides robust analytics and reporting, allowing teams to track campaign performance, monitor conversion rates, and measure return on investment(ROI).

• It is easy to use without too much set-up.
• The e-mail engine is simple to use and straightforward, and e-mails seemed to get delivered for the most part.
• The reporting information is very in-depth and detailed.

• 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

Incentivized

• I think creating the HTML email campaigns could be made easier.
• I would like to have more HTML templates available.

We're likely to renew for several reasons:

• Now that it's been implemented, I can't imagine not having marketing automation and the easy interface that Marketo provides to run our campaigns
• Marketo's community and customer service is fantastic; I know that when I need help, I'll get it
• Marketo continues to improve the product, so I know that I can expect it to be even more useful in the future

My new company is much larger and we need robust capabilities so we're implementing Marketo currently.

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.

Incentivized

It's pretty easy to use without any technical abilities, but the email editor will require html skills (no drag and drop).

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.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

If you are first time user then the training is perfect, but the advance training is not that effective. After working in Marketo for 5 years there is nothing new to learn. The new tools that Marketo have are expensive and too difficult to use. + I would recommend to learn the basic and use Marketo on the daily bases as you will forget everything in a month if you don't use it.

You can get 100% of your training done online. Marketo's community is filled with experts and they list free training videos on marketo.com. They also have user groups in every major city that help you get the most out of your Marketo instance and Marketing Automation in general. It's really easy to pick up this tool and start running on day one.

Incentivized

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

[...] is a partner of HubSpot, and we are mutual customers of each other. This may be because HubSpot is a [...] investor, but roughly half of [...]'s customers are Adobe Marketo Engage customers (the other half being HubSpot customers).

Incentivized

At the time we had to choose between several versions of marketing products. We decided to choose LoopFuse since a few of our employees were quite amused with the ease of use of LoopFuse. Also when looking at cost-effectiveness LoopFuse is a great product for the smaller companies. Making the decision was not too hard.

As we have grown, Marketo has grown with us. We started with simple single email campaigns and are now doing complex campaigns with multiple emails and tracks that we send a contact to if they take certain actions within our emails. We also have a complex integration with several systems and have the visibility into our marketing activities throughout our organization.

• Adobe Marketo Engage automation capabilities have reduced the amount of manual work required to execute campaigns, allowing our marketing team to focus more on strategy and customer engagement rather than repetitive administrative tasks.
• The platform has helped us generate more qualified leads through personalized campaigns and lead scoring, enabling our sales team to focus on prospects with the highest likelihood of converting.

• The workflows were really easy to build and definitely increased our lead conversion. We did a lot of webinars, eBooks, etc - and it was so easy to decide on workflows to turn those prospects into hot leads by watching what they did on our website, or what they clicked on in our emails.
• Lead scoring also made our sales team more efficient. We had quite a few leads coming through our system, and many were not sales ready - but Loopfuse could transfer the lead score into Salesforce to show them which leads to focus on, as well as why the leads had the score they did (Loopfuse also imported lead activity into Salesforce - including emails sent, opened, clicked, webpages viewed, forms filled out, etc).