Agile CRM is a customer relationship management (CRM) software built to make the entire marketing and sales lifecycles more efficient, built around features like sales enablement, marketing automation, social suite, and web engagement.
$8.99
*per user per month
Adobe Marketo Engage
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
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.
Agile CRM is well suited if an existing customer business process is defined or drafted thoroughly. Agile allowed automating workflows and marketing to improve lead management and suppress tedious tasks so users can focus on more important matters. However, Agile CRM costs can increase significantly if you want additional features and customizations. If you know what you're doing with CRMs and marketing automation or customer contracts and management then AgileCRM is worth a try.
I would definitely recommend Adobe Marketo Engage to other large or medium organisations such as ourselves, who have a number of users from different offices around the globe. It is well suited to those who have large email marketing contact databases and need to do sophisticated segmentation. It has a lot of functionality for integration with Salesforce and lead scoring models.
The email template building tool is inflexible although it is simple to use and looks nice if you can work within its parameters.
Customer Support is not committed to finding answers and providing the best solutions. Many times each support person has a different answer or fixing a bug will take up to 2 weeks to address. They do not seem to understand that they are an online marketing platform that requires solutions within hours (or maybe days) and not weeks.
At some point in mid-2021, the process for sending out emails to 10s of thousands of contacts stopped functioning as simply and effectively as it had in the past. My staff (which I use as test cases) was no longer receiving emails, even though it showed in the system that they had received it (and no, it wasn't in spam). The bandaids that they provided me would work for one or two mailings and then stop working again. I was regularly trying to get customer support to find my answers but they were never able to solve my problem. The basic functionality that I appreciated - sending out nicely formatted email newsletters - is now completely gone and the platform is useless for our needs.
The reporting tools are awful and poorly configured. Querying on groups of people is inconsistent and inaccurate. There is no segmentation feature that I found that was actually effective.
Marketo's email editor is basic in comparison to other cheaper alternatives out there.
Marketo doesn't work as well in B2C scenarios as it does in B2B. One of the painpoints of this is it's difficult to showcase a selection of product recommendations based on purchase behaviour without a very time consuming workaround. It's manageable if you're only selling a handful of products, but it's inefficient when dealing with a large catalogue.
Marketo's form and landing page builder are also behind the times. Perhaps not as bad as the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform, but for an enterprise company the product should be much better.
There was a little bit of a learning curve and some bumps along the way to managing this platform, but AgileCRM appears to be responsive to any challenges that arise, which I consider to be of vital importance.
Until the email issues are resolved I cannot recommend agile for any function. The email delivery rate has halved in the last six months and halved again in the last two with no resolution in sight. The customer service discussions start from zero information anytime suggesting agile are not writing notes or using a ticketing system to track customers' complaints. This results in our staff having to send emails manually and defeating the purpose of the system.
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.
The training sessions are very helpful, because you have specialist that is available to answer any questions, guide you and coach you on how to dominate a certain feature of the platform. That being said,Whenever I have an issue that needs to be resolved, I can send email or call a support line. I usually use the support line.
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.
The performance of AgileCRM has been acceptable to date. I'm pleased with the ability to modify leads in the system and search for them and add groups to campaigns.
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.
The technical support of this software I liked a lot because whenever we need help to solve any problem or even to answer any questions about the software, Agile CRM's support was quick and efficient and guided us on the best solution to solve the problem. I admire and respect that a lot.
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
Each section of the AgileCRM platform has an instructional video that describes in detail all of the features of that section. I found this to be very instructional way to learn about each section. Whenever I had more questions, I could always schedule a conference call with a tutor..
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
It was able to do most of the functions needed but was the most cost-effective to get us started. If you are a new company and looking to get started with a CRM start here for a year or two and when you have the money you can pay for one of the bigger players. This platform will give you all you need to be successful. We have been using it for 2 years and we profited more each year.
Marketo helps us to show our customers we understand them by delivering personalized content, delivered at the right time, every time. Also gives the sales and marketing teams the ability to create more coordinated journeys. From emails to landing pages, Marketo Engage uses in-depth, real-time behavioural and demographic data, and AI to personalize users experience, even for the anonymous visitors.
This products Starts with a free Limited version. You can upgradeTo an affordable paid version with minimal features. There's also an enterprise version which is what I have. It's much more expensive, however it allows me to access the full range of features available.
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 may be me but I spent a disproportionate amount of time figuring out how to derive more ROI from Agile CRM. The functionality and facilities were there but I eventually gave up as it was taking too much time and attention.
