Likelihood to Recommend A duration of one and a half years is enough for us to recognize the capabilities of a tool and in my opinion, this one is just a great tool to manage marketing campaigns of even massive-sized firms. Its marketing automation tool and its way of managing campaign and the way it executes digital initiatives is enough to get an inkling of its abilities. Less favorable for the people who want to have something at a cheap price and are more dependent on the reports as its reports have nothing much in detail.
Read full review I think Sendgrid is a great tool for sending out emails of all types. I've primarily used it for transactional emails as we've had other solutions for marketing emails, but I'm sure it would do just a good job - there is a "Marketing" section within the app you can use. Sendgrid integrates really easily with the development frameworks I've used, such as Laravel and Lumen; I've also integrated it with Moodle with ease.
Read full review Pros We can look for the behavior of our clients on our website and mobile application using the analytics it provides. It is highly customizable. It presents data in a form that is easily understandable and reports are highly beneficial for us. Analytics in the form of graphs. Read full review Managing email lists / audiences is easy with features like groups and segments. They provide pre-built email templates that are very easy to modify. It is also super easy to create new email templates with their drag-and-drop email builder. Provides clear / easy-to-read analytics of email campaigns. I can easily import large email contact lists all at once or add a user manually one-at-a-time, when needed. Read full review Cons Integration options outside of auto-syncs. I am currently having an issue trying to find an adapter to use with Eloqua to API into our data warehouse but keep the functionality on the Eloqua side. To provide more transparency and visual details of the syncs (integrations of outside data) from any other system that is feeding Eloqua, like what is being updated or changed, better explanations of errors, drill down to newly created records. Custom Objects - Need to have a way to create CDOs outside of just form submissions and uploading of lists, like if you needed to import a file nightly to feed that CDO data but automate the import and make sure it maps to a contact record. Import of data from a file on SFTP - There is no way to filter or create logic to control what is being fed into Eloqua. Currently, that manipulation has to be done by the IT side first. Less flexibility. Better auditing capabilities within the canvas. meaning, sometimes if something is changed or not working the problem may not necessarily show up in immediately, the pattern could take a while to present itself. For example, the feeders into the program. If there is a problem, I don't know that maybe contacts are not entering the program until we do reporting that month and realize there was a lull of contacts going through. Then we have a whole month of missed records or other potential data issues. When you get do large and your Eloqua machine is very robust, the harder it is to see everything Be able to add more than 250 custom contact records. That definitely inhibits my organization in how we need to use that record. Read full review Not necessarily their Email API but their email in general - they are currently in beta for automated email sequences but are still bare bones. Much more work is needed before it can be used mainstream and be able to convert everything to SendGrid. Helping with warming up our dedicated IP for the best-sending score. We seem to hit the promotions folder a decent amount (maybe the IP problem above) and even a lot of their emails hit my spam or promotions folder (whether they be transactional or marketing) which isn't a great sign when trusting an ESP. Transactional email sequences would be a huge plus. Now that Twilio owns SenGrid, having an integrated platform where you could see all our transactional emails together. Better reporting and split reporting between transactional and marketing emails. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have been able to automate so many marketing processes with Eloqua over the past 5 years that the only direction would be to adopt the latest and greatest features Eloqua adds. The alternative would be to go back to the marketing stone-age and start over again. And we would rather move forward with increased automation and efficiency.
Read full review Usability Personally, I find it quite easy to use. But for those members of our team who have little or no testing experience, it's been a bit more difficult. There's also training required for development teams in order to have your campaigns coded and set up in the most efficient way. Our developers have been able to do basic and intermediate tests with no difficulty, and they find the interface itself quite intuitive... it's just the extremely complex tests that require a bit more understanding.
Read full review It has the potential to be really cool. However, it feels as if it was created by developers for developers (and I work with developers, yet even for me the instrument was somewhat not easy to use - just read SendGrid's help manuals...) However, if you are into data and your way of thinking is more mathematical rather than lyrical, you'll enjoy this instrument
Read full review Reliability and Availability No one has experienced any problems with availablity.
Read full review Performance There are occasional complaints about slowness to refresh a screen or build a report. However, this is as much a factor of network access speeds as the system itself, since often the complaints occur when someone is accessing on a wireless network.
Read full review Support Rating We found that we often were telling support people how the system worked. Because we were on E9 that created a lot of support issues as well since few people on the support team seemed to know how E9 worked. That was mostly okay except when we had major system issues (like SSO preventing us from logging in after an update), it became really hard to get answers that weren't vague. It was always the issues that had the highest visibility within the organization (like with Sales) that seemed to take forever to resolve and didn't have a clear escalation path. When Oracle switched Eloqua over to the Oracle support portal it just got worse
Read full review Twilio SendGrid Email API is everything we want it to be, and we have no reason to look for any other solution. Features and pricing match exactly what we need. As developers for SaaS products, Twilio SendGrid Email API provides a great service. I hope that they stay this way and don't inflate the service with too many marketing oriented features, because there are other tools for that and Twilio SendGrid Email API is a API for sending email first and foremost.
Read full review In-Person Training They offer very basic classes which are required for master certification. After having been through it, I would not consider anyone with a master certification any more qualified, unlike Salesforce.com certification which is a more difficult thing to acquire. For example, one of the classes towards certification was around social media. I would have expected examples of how to incorporate into campaigns in the product, with a demo and hands-on test. Instead, it was a powerpoint slideshow that went on way too long and covered really basic stuff like “what is Facebook, what is Twitter”
Read full review Online Training Ok, so, this sounds like it could be horrible because it was all remote, but we loved it... the Adobe training environment was easy to use, and the trainers were engaging. It was simple to switch back and forth between the meeting and the hands-on exercises in their training instances. We took the fundamentals training early in our implementation-- before the consultants came onsite-- and I know this made a big difference in our implementation, because we were able to ask informed questions throughout
Read full review Implementation Rating I give it a 10 because the only issue we had was a result of not following the guidance we were given. Maxymiser provided a customized implementation guide for each site where we were adding the code. On our site implementations when we followed that guide to the letter, it was extremely fast and easy and has worked very well.
Read full review Alternatives Considered It was quite complex to generate segments with Adobe
analytics and I wasn’t personally satisfied with the overall performance of
Adobe Analytics and wasn’t enough flexible in any way. So we decided to switch
to something else better than
Adobe Analytics and is available in the market at
a cheap rate and we ended up doing our research for the most suitable tool at
Oracle Infinity and we don’t regret our decision.
Read full review If given a choice between the two, I would pick
Mandrill over SendGrid.
Mandrill is slightly more expensive but the data & reports that you receive from it make the service worth it.
Mandrill lets you export reports over a period of time, view the actual content of emails that you've dispatched and the customer support is way better. If you can bear the slightly higher cost,
Mandrill would be a better choice.
Read full review Scalability Eloqua is definitely good for larger companies that have 100,000+ contacts and complex marketing workflows and data. Personalization is fairly robust with Eloqua for larger campaigns with smart content and features. Scaling across channels is also seamless - as the platform has great options for non-email channels like SMS, Direct Mail, Chat, etc.
Read full review Return on Investment We are able to use it to help our clients scale through testing We have been able to measure the impact of our events and sales events so we can determine which events to continue in the future and determine future investment Launch a new brand out of Eloqua and measure awareness Read full review Our clients experience significant ROI from their web forms - without receipt of forms, many of them would not still be in business. As a solution for clients' sites, we find SendGrid is a fast installation and a 1 stop problem solver, saving us man-hours. Read full review ScreenShots Oracle Marketing Screenshots