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.
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Signpost
Score 2.0 out of 10
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Signpost is an automated marketing solution that helps local businesses to get more customers, reviews, and referrals. The software builds customer profiles by capturing email, call and credit card transactions. Signpost's automated marketing engine then uses this data to drive new customer conversion and loyalty, reviews and referrals from existing customers.
The best thing with this tool is how they use rich behavioural data, built -in intelligence and sophisticated journey flow to identify and engage our best customers and accelerate the customer experience. The support team has been very phenomenal and outstanding for the last 1 year I have not been delayed any response to my question.
I would NEVER recommend Signposts! Signpost's fee is very expensive for a small company like ours, so I had to cancel the service - or at least TRY to. I contacted them the day after they billed our card for another $2,000, and I was told that we were automatically on the hook for another year, with no exceptions and no recourse. Very greedy and desperate; this doesn't seem like the way to keep happy clients.
The ability to clone entire programs and campaigns should not be underestimated as a marketing manager. This is a stand-out feature that other automation tools can't do (yet) in my experience.
myTokens: Campaign-based/local variables that can be used in emails and landing pages for everything from basic text, rich text, email scripts, CSS, scoring, and more. Set up your emails and LPs with myTokens and you'll be able to create an entire campaign without opening the email or LP editor. Clone program, update myTokens, test, and launch.
Engagement Programs: let you quickly create basic email nurture tracks with ease. Currently EPs can only send on a cadence of once per week, but future product release announcements suggest variable cadence will be possible soon.
AB Testing: using Email Programs and AB Test or ABCDEFG Test is simple to set up and report on. Manually chose the winner of your test or have Marketo choose automatically.
The best feature that I like the most and have been using for some time is their marketing tool. Signpost makes marketing an easy task. It has enhanced our productivity.
As I did things manually in the past but now Signpost has made this very much easier for me to just trust their marketing tool to do marketing according to the algorithm.
It helps me to have more organic views on the platform and more positive reviews on the newsletter.
The automated system asks for reviews from the customer which makes it even more helpful in changing and advancing new things.
It also changes our approach to the work and with the automated extremely functional setup it increases our positive reviews which is good for the organization.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
Prior to Marketo, we used SharpSpring. I will say that SharpSpring is more intuitive to use than Marketo, but it has much less functionality. If you have the time to really learn Marketo, it has much more to offer as well as many more options to customize the solution to your exact needs.
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.
The support team is very professional. I had problems while using Signpost in the past and I contacted their support on that matter.
They responded very professionally, listen[ed] to each and every problem related to the work, and doing hindrance to the flow of work with the full-fledged solution to the problem.
This makes me more confident in using the platform more in depth.
