Leadfwd, from the company of the same name in Staten Island, combines B2B Prospecting, Sales Outreach and Account-Based Marketing. It replaces the former INBOX25.
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Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Score 7.8 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.
I think Inbox25 is a great fit for companies outgrowing lower-end, disconnected email marketing applications. Companies with a more formalized marketing organization that send a lot of emails (tens of thousands monthly or more) will be better served with a product like Inbox25 that is less complex, easier to use, and much more affordable (30% lower by our experience) from the larger marketing automation products on the market. Our company has 3 full-time marketing staff with over 100,000 contacts (with valid emails) that we target in various direct and drip email campaigns and Inbox25 fits our needs just fine. I suspect that we may outgrow the product eventually but I think it'll meet our needs just fine for many years to come.
I think the product, by definition, is meant for marketing — and we use it exactly for that, for running campaigns. That’s the best-suited use case for the product. I don’t think it’s really meant to be used for anything else — that’s just not how it’s designed.
Inbox25 is in a growth phase and has transformed their product pretty fast. With that comes an increased need to continually learn how to leverage new features.
Tutorials and product documentation exist but it is relatively minimal. They overcome this with personalized, one-on-one training that is recorded for future review using a project management platform.
Inbox25 has expanded beyond Sugar CRM to include Salesforce.com integration. I'm not sure if they plan to add integrations to other applications but they are positioned well for growth.
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
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.
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.
We use Salesforce Marketing Cloud for lead management, generating reports, tracking customer and dealer information, inputting orders, and more. I prefer HubSpot for email marketing and automation because it is easier to use and the emails are designed much better. We currently use Salesforce and HubSpot, and we are very happy to have both, as they have different pros/cons.
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.
We have successfully moved cold suspects to leads and leads to opportunities, and opportunities to customers with Inbox25. We are just now starting to realize more value given that we've only recently started using the more advanced drip marketing and lead scoring features.
When we used the pay-as-you-go version we were paying just pennies per email and remained CAN-Spam Act compliant. It was harder to quantify the ROI then but it was apparent that email marketing was working and moving prospects from one sales stage to another. It was also very useful for re-engaging prospects and promoting products and services to customers.
Our total investment in the advanced edition is less $30,000 annually and we expect the ROI to be less than one year. It could have been sooner if we'd have been more thoughtful in our initial implementation.
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.
