CoreMedia vs. Optimizely One vs. Salesforce Agentforce Marketing

I think this CMS is best suited as an enterprise level system. For small, or simple sites, there are better options, but for large high-traffic sites, this is a great CMS.

It is well suited for heavy-duty A/B testing where management would like to see and quantitatively determine the effect of a change. It is not so efficient to try for a single page simple form, except when the form is part of a larger workflow. The security model is not very well understood, including RBAC and protection against injection attacks.

Incentivized

I rated this a seven because I love Salesforce, and it is excellent on the sales side. However, the marketing side has some pros and cons. It is terrific for keeping track of lead, customer, and dealer information, but it is not easy to automate workflows, integrate other software, or create well-designed emails. It is also straightforward to generate reports, which is very helpful in keeping track of lead progression to better market those leads and turn them into customers.

Incentivized

• CoreMedia is a robust system that can manage large sites with multiple, well-organized subsites.
• CoreMedia has a built-in workflow system that functions well for a distributed contributor model.

Incentivized

• Provides quicker release cycle for the way the product cards should be displayed.
• Provides feedback for new product introduction and how it'll be perceived.
• Allows rapid blackout from user experience changes that alters traffic flow.

Incentivized

• Filter relevant content so you can priorize those that are more relevant and resolve it first
• Measure the traffic in the different social networks, as well as the response rate, average response time and other relevant metrics
• Configure automation rules to order the work of those who must interact with the customer

Incentivized

• Every so often, there would be issues with HTML, that were occasionally difficult to troubleshoot.
• Suggest having a preview feature that would show exactly what the website will look like after changes are implemented.
• Add direct social media feature.

Incentivized

• Can use better interface for managing test, including scheduling and notification.
• Feels too heavy for simple projects, though this isn't a factor once past the PoC stage.
• Notification on various aspects can be made more powerful and granular if such a need arise.

Incentivized

• Automation studio is very hard to use. We need to create a Data extension with all required fields before we can run SQL. So it takes a lot of time.
• Query Studio is much easier to use but it often gives an error while running the same SQL in Automation Studio works fine.
• We were not able to set up SMS messages as SFMC is not supporting MMS which is a big problem.

Incentivized

CoreMedia continues to refine and deliver new features. They also explore new technologies and trends, like social media integration. The platform is solid and growing. We are also slightly locked into using CoreMedia. Migrating such a large amount of content to another system would likely not be feasible or prudent.

We are happy with Pardot. It has made our jobs easier and installed some reporting functions that have increased our ROI with the company. We have worked hard to set-up the functions in Pardot and it has taken time, but paid off.

You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.

Incentivized

Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.

Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.

They are really responsive and more than not solve the problem or give you insight to how you can manage the solution yourself. I do find however sometimes a long delay on the more complex issues when they need to loop in other departments. but overall a good experience with support

Incentivized

Training program is not very well established. There is very little documentations. More often than not it's in-person training. I wish there were more video tutorials so that somebody can learn the system quickly. Their documentation is very much like an RFP. Long and very technichal. They should definitly improve on this area.

Incentivized

Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.

Set aside more time than you think you need to migrate content. That is the hard part. Implementing the technology is easy.

From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.

CoreMedia is slightly better. I was not a part of the original team to select CoreMedia for our web content management tool. It was already in place when I came to my organization, but it's certainly presented challenges along the way as well as solutions to certain problems. I think at this point, we're going to continue using CoreMedia, although we're investigated ways to enhance our use of it.

There is a big difference between the two: Google Optimize uses Bayesian analysis while Optimizely uses Frequenting. There is a risk of counting multiple visits. Google Optimize data isn't available instantly (if I remember correctly). Optimizely's analyses dashboard is a lot richer and offers a better experience, though it may get intimidating.

Incentivized

The only other product we’re currently evaluating is on the Veeva side — Veeva Campaign. It’s a relatively new product that Veeva has released; it’s only been about six or seven months since it went into general availability. So time will tell whether it can compete with Salesforce Marketing Cloud or not.

Incentivized

Prior to this, we had no solution and literally were doing things on paper in a world where technology is outpacing paper. Having this process optimized has made it easier for the sales and marketing people to change information. From the training perspective, it has allowed us to see holes in where we could create additional support training, so the ROI here has been a lot more than just the optimization of a process.

Incentivized

• Once trained, users really ramp up, but getting them to switch mindsets has not been easy or painless.
• We can easily show ROI with add-ons and increasingly do so.
• Since it's a very large site, we have to go a bit slower than everyone would like in terms of the roll-out.

Incentivized

• Almost immediate payoff in terms of the benefit.
• Easy to justify the TTM benefits to upper management.
• Still somewhat hard to justify ROI, though this is not my expertise.

Incentivized

• We have been able to create mature lead generation opportunities using Salesforce Marketing Cloud in conjunction with CRM.
• We have had to spend much more in technical support
• We have been able to save on costs of daily maintenance emails through automation.

Incentivized