Instapage vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio

• Instapage makes it easy to frame out a landing page really quickly. They provide template blocks for various components of a landing page (header, features, testimonials, etc.) that you can easily modify for your own needs. Other tools provide whole-page templates, but I much prefer the section-level templating. It's more convenient to assemble a page this way and add the details on top of that versus taking a finished template and peeling away design and functional elements to get what I want.
• Instapage's mobile auto-resizer works better than other platforms I've used. I found that I had many fewer adjustments on their auto-resizing of the full page than I've experienced with other tools. I still had to work with text size a bit, but they generally did a better job of ordering elements for mobile the way I would want and maintain proportionality of page elements better.
• Instapage has a lot of integrations that marketers will love. I don't know if they particularly stand out in this respect, but this is a particularly important aspect of their tool that most marketers will care about.

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• Sends client confirmations when they subscribe to a newsletter, sign up for a conference, or place an order with our company (SourceMedia). We don't have to hire an agency to send these for us.
• Manages newsletter subscriptions and allows us to deploy on specific dates/times.
• Helps us discover and manage the correct audience base per newsletter, and automates the distributions so we don't have to do it manually.

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• There are only a couple of minor issues that I dislike. One is offering a Drupal community-approved update to their module. We are using a slightly older version of Drupal and it appears they don't have plans to offer a Drupal-approved update to their module for that version.
• There are also random bugs when trying to format text. For example, sometimes a sans serif font appears as a serif and doesn't seem to want to change.
• If you work with a template and some code, it can be challenging to edit the default coding.
• The built-in forms can be a bit limiting.
• The program will try to automatically reformat for mobile, but it may not always be exactly the way you want it to look, so there is a bit of redesigning required when going to mobile.

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• Deliverability reports - before sending emails they are checked for known issues and deliverability performance. The SFMC offering is ok but could be better. There additional software that can be purchased which should be included as part of the offering
• SF should make it easier to integrate other clouds i.e commerce cloud and service cloud. The implementation of commerce cloud has improved but I still feel there is a way to go

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• We've not had much of a conversion rate on some of our landing pages -- but this could be because we are relatively green with the marketing side of things and forget to send people to it. It's not easy for people to find on their own -- so I highly recommend you use some of the "hidden" SEO tools to increase the ROI. Without it, you're not going to be happy with your investment.

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• Better execution/monitoring - when multiple steps are involved, IMH is great at dashboarding.
• Facilitates exploratory campaigns - it is great at instilling confidence when you're trying a new facet of a campaign, due to the process transparency.
• Cloud - can be a double-edged sword. Allows for on the go access, but isn't truly mobile-friendly, and can sometimes sputter. But certainly will improve with time.

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