Likelihood to Recommend If you are in an industry where content drives pipeline through engagement and education, Pathfactory is an invaluable tool to help people consume more of what you are producing and offers additional entry and interaction points on your website. It also creates very specific and personalized paths through your assets.
Read full review Salesforce Marketing Cloud does an excellent job at collecting and storing leads. Once the leads are qualified by workflows and automations established against your qualifiers, you can begin to segment, target, send communication, and track the efficacy of your campaigns. Being that Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an extension of Salesforce CRM, there is little work that needs to be done to ensure that your SQL are migrated to your CRM once they are ready to do so. The seamlessness between the two systems is paramount to the success of our organization.
Read full review Pros Create Visually appealing performance report Give more in-depth information about performance metrics than most alternatives Ability to track performance over time and compare this performance across time periods Provide and send auto-run reports to top level management based on predefined criteria and timeframes Read full review Filter relevant content so you can priorize those that are more relevant and resolve it first Measure the traffic in the different social networks, as well as the response rate, average response time and other relevant metrics Configure automation rules to order the work of those who must interact with the customer Read full review Cons Evolving into a more sales-focused UX. While the tool is great for marketing, there are some areas to improve the functionality of PathFactory for Sales in regards to navigating and sending out content as a salesperson. GA goal reporting. I can't speak to this specifically, but I know our web team has run into some issues creating GA goals when we lead to a PathFactory track. Evolved reporting. Reporting is great, but for some use cases, we have had to ask for custom reports that the team is always happy to create! But it would be great if this was self-serve. Read full review The email builder does not offer any way to catch/check bugs across different email service providers Creating SQL is not as easy as drag-and-drop; a lot of technical knowledge is required Salesforce Marketing Cloud is sold as a marketing tool, but to be honest, you need a LOT of technical IT support to run the tool Einstein metrics are across the board; if you have multiple audiences in one instance of Salesforce Marketing Cloud you can't segment the data. Read full review Likelihood to Renew We have seen a lot of value from our team's use of Path Factory. We also like working with this vendor as they actually take our feedback and implement it on their roadmap. A great vendor with a great product
Read full review 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
Read full review Usability Overall, I think the tool is fairly easy to use to get a basic content uploaded to create a track and even the more complicated features become easier once you become familiarised with the process
Read full review 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.
Read full review Reliability and Availability I think there was only one time where we had issues reaching our account manager, otherwise PathFactory was always willing to hop on the phone to talk through strategy, to work through issues, and help build custom solutions to fit our needs. Customer service is a big selling point of PathFactory.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Performance The analytics and reports feature is fairly new and have proved very popular with many areas of our business and is growing in popularity. The metrics that are attainable are very insightful and provides a clear picture on the performance of the track.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Support Rating We meet weekly with Jennifer and I can't say enough about her. When issues have happened or we need help, she jumps on it quickly. If she doesn't know the answer, she pulls in Reggie or another on her team that can help. She goes above and beyond and has been very supportive, even when we had a lot of hard questions to answer from higher-ups. All this is on top of just being an awesome person.
Read full review They're fast and knowledgeable. You will always know what's the status of your request and they usually follow up with phone calls to ask you questions or provide updates. Sometimes it takes them a couple of days to investigate, especially if you have custom "situations" like my company usually does but at least they are very good at managing time expectations.
Bogdan Enache Digital Marketing Lead & SalesForce Marketing Cloud Administrator
Read full review In-Person Training I was able to browse around the tool quite easily once some basic training was given. I learnt much from using those method and only needed further help when wanting to learn about Reports, External codes and adding forms.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Online Training The customer service, from technical through to customer success, is one of the biggest reasons I'd recommend PathFactory. This is true of their training. It can be as bespoke as you like, at least in my experience, and the team is always willing (where possible) to incorporate your suggestions.
Read full review 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.
Read full review Implementation Rating The PathFactory team was very helpful when implementing the product. They gave us a lot of recommendations on best moving forward. As a note to new users, when implementing I would make sure that you create with your team a system to make sure that the platform is scalable. My team was able to do this through creating a foldering structure, naming conventions for tracks and assets, and ensuring tagging is used on all content uploads. I would also make sure when implementing that you have an understanding of how your team will track success and that your brand team is involved to make sure that there is consistency in the look and feel of the tracks
Read full review 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.
Read full review Alternatives Considered I wasn't involved in the purchase decision, but I am glad we chose them! Their team is helpful and knows how to help you accomplish what you're trying to do. If there's a feature you see isn't working right or that you need their technical team will listen and make actual changes.
Read full review Salesforce Marketing Cloud stands out for its comprehensive features, scalability, and seamless integration capabilities. Compared to other platforms, its unified suite of tools for email, social media, mobile, and advertising enables streamlined cross-channel campaign management and personalized marketing at scale. We chose Marketing Cloud for its industry leadership, robust ecosystem, and tight integration with
Salesforce CRM, allowing us to deliver exceptional marketing solutions and drive measurable results for our clients efficiently.
Read full review Scalability Pathfactory is growing in popularity amongst individuals from different parts of the organisation and it would be difficult to forecast how scalable this can become
Read full review Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps create profiles for each subscriber. The Contact Builder feature stores information about every subscriber, including whether they're an active customer, their purchase history from the last year, and their email engagement metrics. It also identifies the likelihood of a subscriber churning, aiding in creating personalized campaigns to boost company revenue.
Read full review Return on Investment We saw ROI within the first 9 months of using PathFactory. Our onboarding team saw quicker adoption of our product while using PathFactory to engage them during the onboarding process. We've been able to more accurately understand our content needs and what works best when prospecting for specific segments. (eg. SMB, mid-market, and enterprise) Read full review 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. Read full review ScreenShots Salesforce Marketing Cloud Screenshots