Dynamic Yield is presented as an AI-powered Experience Optimization platform that delivers individualized experiences at every customer touchpoint: web, apps, email, kiosks, IoT, and call centers. The platform’s data management capabilities provide for a unified view of the customer, to allow the rapid and scalable creation of highly targeted digital interactions. Marketers, product managers, and engineers use Dynamic Yield for: Launching new personalization…
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Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Score 7.9 out of 10
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Marketing Cloud is an AI-powered, cloud-based digital marketing platform within the Salesforce Customer 360 ecosystem. Marketers can segment their audience, deliver personalized messages, track campaign performance, engage leads and accounts, and optimize strategies based on real-time insights.
Dynamic Yield is great for just about any sized organization, though to get the best bang for your buck, I recommend having a front-end web developer well-versed in JavaScript. Additionally, a front-end web designer would be advisable as well as their templates have great functions but some have lackluster UI's that can't be tweaked without developer assistance. Were it not for the above + the occassional slowness on the console/admin-side of the platform, I'd give it a 10. If you have a front-end dev/designer, then it's closer to a 9.5. Ideal utilization scenarios could include: Personalization, CRO/UX/UI testing, and audience or user-level tailored digital experience.
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.
Provide fantastic support, both in relation to strategy/best practice and troubleshooting.
An easy to use interface, as a user who is relatively new to Dynamic Yield I find that it is an intuitive platform to use.
The ability to segment and drill down on data allows for really specific insights which, whilst not necessarily being leveraged on a testing basis, can be super valuable from a greater marketing perspective.
The impact (either positive or negative) of potentially overlapping campaigns, especially the UX personalization or custom code campaigns, may not be easily identifiable.
It would make more sense for the new deep-learning and machine learning (ML) driven strategies be made part of the standard offering, as opposed to positioning them as add-on subscription, given that many other completing services are baking in ML as part of their platform evolution.
The documentation on the API and custom code implementation can be fleshed out further.
implementation took a long time but also, DY has really proven that they are transforming and adapting their platform to be more user friendly and the right technology choice for their brand or company
As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch
Setting up strategies, audiences, and experiences is simple and fast. It is incredibly easy to modify the appearance of your site and optimize every aspect with the Dynamic Yield Personalizations. However, while the data visualization on an experience level is easy to modify and analyze, exporting the data in meaningful ways is time consuming.
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.
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.
Overall, the support is very good. If you are a partner (my case), they assign you a customer success manager, that helps a lot. Also, there is a technical person to provide support to the partners, again a great help.
My only "complain" is that with some complex issues, the support may delay in providing you with a solution. Sometimes that can cause some tension with your client.
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
The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.
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.
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.
Oracle Maxymiser is very clunky and hard to code with. Previewing changes was a challenge and development for fixes were slow
Optimizely - Great for coding. Fast and efficient. Everything worked great. They were limited at personalization triggers though and their costs were expensive.
Monetate - Evaluated but their UI was hard to use.
I think that all of the marketing platforms I have evaluated and used in the past serve different markets and purposes. Salesforce Marketing Cloud was more palatable to our team because of our existing tech stack where we had Salesforce CRM already deployed and in use. Compared to Marketo and Hubspot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a bit dated in terms of the UI/UX and the overall experience but still meets the needs of our organization. Mailchimp, however, isn't even playing in the same arena and is meant for small organizations and companies that don't have a need for a full fledged offering that SFMC brings to the table.
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.
Most tests have had a positive impact on either revenue or conversion rate - quite often in double digits.
Dynamic Yield has also helped us to stop some particular initiatives through direct interaction with the customer base via questionnaires or by a test proving negative quicker than rolling out a permanent feature.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to more efficiently reach out to a higher number of prospects.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to nimbly communicate important messages in a timely fashion to facilitate conversion.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to track who is opening our messages so that we can stop sending to those not interested and focus on the most engaged audiences.
