November 11, 2015
Exact Target Review
Likelihood to Renew
8
TrustRadius
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email is an email marketing platform formerly know as ExactTarget before being acquired by Salesforce in 2014. Its key features include integration with other Salesforce solutions, drag-and-drop tools, A/B testing, real time tracking, and graphical reporting.https://media.trustradius.com/product-logos/lM/pg/T1EPPTEZW4E2.PNGSalesforceExact Target Review2014-01-31T18:01:55.882ZI use ExactTarget for our internal and external communications. It's great to relay information and showcase our products and services to customers.,Track subscribers
Organize content
Relay information
I like the customer service I receive when I have issues,It's a little hard to use at first - things aren't exactly easy to figure out without training or hand holding.
Sometimes the formatting can be off - it looks OK on the screen but when you do a test send it doesn't look the same.
I would like to see some more layout options,7,Better tracking of my subscribers
Increased registrations for my events,8,2Nelissa OkamotoExactTarget is right on target.2014-02-03T21:48:49.468ZThe ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub (IMH), or Marketing Cloud, is a robust tool that is widely used by Marketing and eCommerce to manage everything from audience segmentation to executing individual and campaign sends. It's user friendly enough to empower a non-technical user yet sophisticated enough to stimulate the tech-savvy user to accomplish great things.,Point and click audience segmentation. Navigating your subscribers and building the right audience is so simple. Your list attributes are completely available and easily dissected into actionable contacts.
Playbooks. ExactTarget puts their catalog of best practices, case studies, and client success stories at your fingertips in the IMH. Need an idea or way forward? It's all right there.
The calendar. A slick calendar view of all your campaigns, emails, and other interactions is available in the IMH. The calendar puts you in control of your communications strategy.,The transition from "old school" ExactTarget to the IMH can be a little overwhelming . . . some users get into a very defined routine for building lists, querying, sending, etc. The IMH, as user-friendly as it is, does require an adjustment in routine.,8,More efficient communications. Not only do we save money using email and SMS communications, we are able to communicate with our clients in real time. A true differentiator.
Absolutely measurable. From open rates to click rates, we can see exactly how effective our communications are (or are not). We have a new level of accountability that drives us to succeed.
Total integration. The robust interface allows us to do everything we need to do in one place, creating significant employee efficiency.,,10Jack NickExact Target: The Best Option on the Market2014-01-21T22:06:11.450ZExactTarget is the primary email marketing tool for our corporation. We use it across our US and international businesses to send both B2B and B2C emails. Mainly it is used by our marketing departments, but supported by Product Development and Business Intelligence. It helps us send targeted emails to B2B and B2C, and create unique templates for each of our markets, market segments, etc. It also provides extensive data on the performance of our email campaigns.,Targeted Email Campaigns
Easy to create templates or you can directly add your own HTML
Great data on the performance of our email campaigns
Provides recommendations on how to improve our campaigns,Many clicks to achieve an action, such as segmenting,9,increased conversion rates (open, clicks, call to action)
improved deliverability of emails
streamlining of content and templates to ensure consistency of message across markets,Constant Contact,10Brittany DunnLisa's Thoughts on ExactTarget2014-01-21T21:35:35.103ZExactTarget was used by the marketing department to send email campaigns to the entire dealership base. Marketing is done primarily as B2B. Office furniture (industry where I used it at two separate companies) is somewhat of a commodity and tends to look very similar and be close in price point. Differentiating with marketing efforts was one way to stand out. ExactTarget made email communication to mass groups and segments easy.,Susbscriber list import and management is simple and easy to maintain.
Tracking/monitoring success of campaigns is thorough and relevant for both marketers and management.
Creation of text-based emails based on HTML (graphical) emails is simple.,Design and layout of emails - very tough to create lists or tables of information in the body of emails. To get formatting to look right, have to use HTML scripting.
Reactivating a subscriber who has unsubscribed accidently is not a simple feat!
Pricing! For a small to mid-size company that could benefit from ExactTarget, the pricing can be prohibitive.,8,For repeated emails sent that are similar and sent to different groups, modifying the emails and creating a personalized set of recipients is very easy - great ROI.
Easy to tell click-through rates for effectiveness of the email look and call to action. My experiences are not online purchasing, rather B2B overall marketing, so no direct sales ROI is possible.
Based on the pricing I experienced of cost per email sends, the price can be a deterrent to using ExactTarget, and why it has not been implemented at my current company....yet.,,7,5,4,Communication of new products and new product introductions
Promotional opportunity communication
Reseach of information (surveys) for preferences of our customer base,Employee surveys
linking to videos
Social media following by recipients,Personalized email campaigns by sales territory
Direct integration with Salesforce.com
have more template emails that are sent by the sales team without marketing interaction,No,Product Features
Product Usability
Product Reputation
Vendor Reputation
Analyst Reports,I would evaluate the price per email spend compared to the actual number of emails that are planned over the course of the contract year compared to other product offerings. I would also include design capabilities and request a test period prior to signing a contract for the tool. Although I don't feel our choice would be different, it would confirm that is the best product for the price and the effort of using.,Implemented in-house,No,Change management was a small part of the implementation and was well-handled,Learning the tool - design of email usage
Subscriber cleansing
HTML knowledge needed,8,Online training
Self-taught,No,8,No,When trying to get a subscriber (email recipient) who had unsubscribed accidently to be an active subscriber again for our company, I called the customer support line and filed an issue. I had also looked at the online help, but needed more information to help get things resolved. With the help of the support person, they quickly assisted and we got the subscriber back to an active status so they could receive communication from our company.,List management
Spam checking
text-email creation from html emails,formatting body of emails
reactivating a subscriber who unsubscribed accidently
pricing!,8,9,9,8Lisa FranksIMH - The next step in Email Marketing.2014-01-21T21:34:44.159ZWe use Interactive Marketing Hub to automate email campaigns, monitor performance, and execute deliverables. It is used by our department, but also drives decisions in other departments as well. It goes a long way towards creating truly automated and response-driven marketing content, which is a huge competitive advantage for those companies with the expertise required to build such content.,Marketing Program Automation - can transfer files, query/append data, and branch based on decisions
Monitoring - Much more descriptive than past versions of ET. Allows for tracking of multiple campaigns in a central location.
Visual - Much more intuitive, and really helps when trying to relay a process to someone who hasn't been involved.,Wait - Building a wait into a process can sometimes jeopardize the automation, but this function may be necessary for external processes to complete.
Price - this should be the standard version of ET.
Events - event capabilities could be expanded.,8,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.,Constant Contact,8Andrew WindleLove from an email marketer2014-01-24T21:06:58.716ZI currently work for an online job board. We do significant email marketing to job seekers and ExactTarget has been an immensely helpful tool several times. Several departments across the company use it, but I specifically used it for one client in which we needed to do a massive email campaign that stretched over the course of a month. ET allowed us to upload the several hundred thousand email addresses provided by the client, weed out bad email addresses, and send our messaging to them quickly and seamlessly. In addition, one thing we specialize in is A/B testing to optimize performance, and ET allows you to set up A/B tests by randomly selecting a portion of the email addresses to receive one version of an email and another group to receive another, which provides valuable insight to us and the client as to what the most effective forms of messaging are.,The speed as to how quickly the email tool messages recipients - it can save you hours of manual labor.
Allows you to create a nice looking HTML email.
Allows you to conduct A/B testing of emails to optimize messaging and performance.,The email address upload feature can be a little cumbersome.,10,The short amount of time it takes to send emails to large audiences is extremely helpful at improving my time use and efficiency.,10Erik CooperInteractive Marketing Flub.2014-01-24T20:11:38.801ZOur technology team uses ExactTarget IMH to manage multiple areas of our Email and Interactive Marketing offerings. We use it to build custom programs for clients, host assets, host and broadcast emails and do reporting. It is a good way to keep everything in one place and is laid out a lot better than it's predecessor.,IMH has a look and feel that any marketer can feel comfortable in. You can tell they put the effort in to making it presentable.
IMH allows you to easily toggle through sub-accounts to make transitions easy for the user.
IMH lets you view your reporting metrics in a clean environment. All the graphs and overlays are easy to read and understand.,The load times of IMH are definitely an area where I would like to see improvement. Sometimes I feel like I am balding because of the load times actually!
There are a LOT of pop-up reminders. You completed this, you still need to do that. This is how you use this ....even though you have used it 100 times...
I wish I could dig deeper in to the analytics. It only tracks so much, I wish there was a broader set of numbers!
Don't even bother with trying to do mobile yet...just don't...,5,I feel a little redundant, but having everything in one place allows us to easily transition from account to account and cuts some of our admin time down.
As a developer setting up the emails is super easy. Making updates and changes are super easy.
It is laid out in a way that marketers who don't know code can use it. Win for developers everywhere!,Eloqua,10Jacob PniewskiExactTarget Email Marketing Services2014-01-24T18:13:36.784ZI used the Email Marketing Services portion of the Interactive Marketing Hub. It was used in our organization to promote and drive traffice to our ecommerce web sites. The reason we picked ExactTarget was for it's ease of use and reporting modules. I was the only one setting up emails for the company so I needed something that was intuitive to use and robust enough to handle the large number of emails we sent out each week.,It was very easy to import HTML design elements into the interface
It was very easy to set up my email lists and schedule them to be sent at a specific time and day
I really liked the reports I could run on the fly on how my campaigns were doing,ExactTarget can improve on identifying why your emails were rejected for missing code or broken links. This part slowed me down as it was sometimes difficult to determine why my emails weren't ready to send.,8,Definitely, employee efficiency -- less time setting up the emails, more time to create them
Being able to see the campaign data quickly and run reports -- that gave us time to adjust email creative, offers etc on the fly,Epsilon DREAM,CheetahMail,MailChimp,6Kara ThorntonExactTarget is EXACTLY what my clients need!2014-01-21T21:03:18.155ZI work for an advertising agency and one of our clients uses Exact Target for all of their email marketing. The client has numerous business lines and each of them has their own email marketing needs. We average about 10 emails per month. Some of the emails are automated and some use data extensions.,Ability to use data extensions which allows us to personalize the emails for each subscriber.
Ability to see analytics from tracking data so we can view and compare our open rates and CTRs to continue improving our emails.
Easy-to-use A/B testing capabilities to test different subject lines, designs, content areas, from names, send dates/times, and preheaders.,Subscriber management is a little clunky. It's not as easy and intuitive to add and move subscribers as it should be.
ExactTarget tends to run very slowly and take some time for pages to load.,10,The automated emails we send based on database triggers are a must since our client has about 150,000+ subscribers. This is a huge time saver for our client as well as a customer service win.,MailChimp,10Angela NobleExactTarget Email & Web Review2013-11-14T18:13:29.156ZSimple email marketing campaign creation & management.
Easy landing page creation & management.
Strong Salesforce.com integration.
Simple reporting interface.
Highly responsive and helpful customer service team--among the best software customer service I've ever experienced.
Very attentive account management team.
Fast implementation and go-live.,We left ExactTarget for Marketo because of their lack of marketing automation functionality. However, this has since been addressed with their acquisition of Pardot.,We had a relatively small list (under 15,000) and needed an easy and affordable way to grow our list, create email campaigns, and launch landing pages. ExactTarget was a very effective solution for our small business in meeting these goals.,9,9,No,10,Yes,We had a major, self-inflicted hiccup with our ExactTarget-Salesforce.com integration. ET exceeded my expectations in their resolution handling.Jono SmithSolid product2014-01-31T21:11:24.532ZUsed specifically by the marketing department to build communications for our clients and target audiences,Intuitive user experience - simple and effective communication build
Robust tracking - comprehensive tracking metrics
Thought leadership - data rich research papers on industry best practices
Knowledgeable account managers,HTML templates - need to be easier to build
Email platform - more font and size choices,7,Employee efficiency
More effective client communication
Appropriately targeted content,,6Grace DuBachGreat product!2014-01-24T18:23:45.315ZExact target is used within the Online Marketing department to track the engagement our email campaigns receive.,We really enjoy the ease of downloading reports.
These reports provide an easy way to dice the data so you can see when people are engaged with the campaign.,I do not appreciate having to get an email with a security code whenever its been a couple weeks since I have signed in.,8,ExactTarget has helped us engage our email subscribers and improve sales conversions.,10Jason ByerExactTarget for Email Testing and Reporting2014-06-10T19:01:12.810ZWe use ExactTarget for our email service provider. ET is used by our digital marketing group and supports business lines across the company. Using ET, we are able to manage our email addresses, test different ideas easily and see results.,A/B Testing feature is good
Tracking and reporting provide great insights
Overall, easy to use,Diving deeper into ET's data extensions is a bit convoluted and difficult
Auto welcome emails can only be set up for emails that enter your list through the website - not for imports (where you import a group of emails from excel, etc.),8,We've been able to easily test variations on subject lines for newsletters, showing us what is working and letting us move forward with better results.
We set up automated programs to search out email addresses that are not engaged for over a year, try to reengage with them, then suppress them if they still do not open or click on an email. This allows us to stay clear of spam filters and keeps us from wasting money sending to abandoned email addresses.,10Verified UserExactTarget in my eyes2014-01-31T21:15:48.795ZWe use ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub for contacting new leads. Our Marketing Department and New Business Development team use ExactTarget as a useful touch point with customers. We find the automation studio and the event triggered sends to be useful due nature of our business.,The automation studio is very helpful in that you can set it and forget it!
I am very impressed that ExactTarget now provides mobile response templates.
ExactTarget makes managing various Business Units easy because of the user friendly interface.,The system is very slow.
Many tasks can be done different ways and the flexibility can be confusing overtime.
Trying to edit code in ExactTarget templates is a nightmare. I feel that they include a lot of "garbage" code.,5,With the real time tracking, we are able to see what areas are driving the most engagement.
A/B testing allows for an increase in ROI by showing what areas are driving the most engagement,Constant Contact,10Verified UserGreat option for both tech savvy and non technical marketers2014-01-22T17:21:37.351ZThe ExactTarget Interactive Marketing Hub is being utilized by our corporate and various marketing areas within the organization. It allows our marketing teams to leverage data to provide automated campaigns to their audiences that is both relevant and timely. It also provides a method to get information to our subscribers quicker than how we have done business in the past that was not as cost effective.,Automation Studio provides and easy way to create repetitive campaigns and provide ease to change or update as needed
Calendar provides visibility for members of the same marketing team to see what is going on within each campaign
Campaigns features allows for teams to utilized color code to associate for each campaign to filter within the calendar if there is a lot going on,Campaign color code has limited number of color options
Within Enterprise set up it would be nice if ability existed to see across different accounts in a single view especially when different areas share subscribers
Ability to social share landing page content,8,Increased employee efficiency
Improved awareness and planning phases of email marketing
Provides better customer service and timely information to our subscribers,Silverpop,Delivra,8Verified UserNonprofit review2014-01-27T22:25:30.491ZWe use ExactTarget for our newsletter. It is being used as our external newsletter tool.,Metrics are really good.
The test emails are nice to use as well.
Reusing templates is a great feature.,Social integration should be easier.
Sometimes the add-on features seem a bit much and it would be great if there were scaled down versions for nonprofits.,8,More interaction with our constituents
Effective way to send out calls-to-action,,9Verified UserExactTarget's IMH2013-10-26T22:26:28.686ZThe Interactive Marketing Hub gives a holistic view of your campaigns, emails, mobile connect, calendar, social pulse, etc.
The IMH provides an easy to navigate dashboard,Speed
Better integration metrics with Salesforce (ex: A/B split testing with SF campaigns/reports),Increased process efficiency
Increased visibility to campaigns,8,8Verified UserClunky UI. Strong analytics.2013-02-27T22:42:41.424ZAnalytics on click-throughs and opens are very strong.
It's really easy for a non-technical user to seamlessly set up complex automations without having to do any technical programming. This is not always the case. Other tools often require assistance from technical staff to build complex automations.,Ability to do re-mailing just from the initial send. If we sent an email to a consumer who had abandoned their shopping cart and that consumer had not opened the email 24 hours later, we send another email with a different call to action, or a different subject line. In order to do this, we have to re-create the campaign - we have to pull a list and essentially recreate the campaign manually.
Drip campaigns are also manual and require another datafeed and data extension; they can't be based on opens/clicks or specific subscriber behavior.For example, if someone signs up on our website and receives a welcome email It might include an incentive to purchase like free shipping. If they dont use the offer or don't click through the email, they get another email within a week, perhaps showcasing other products. In other words, emails are sent in a drip sequence based on consumer behavior to prompt primary or secondary purchase. This all has to be managed manually. We pull a report, take all the contacts who have not taken any action, upload a new email file and re-create a new email. This is very time-consuming.,Increased conversion on potential lost sales.,2,7,2,2,The primary use case was to develop an abandoned cart program. In other words, prompt customers who had placed items in the shopping cart, but not actually purchased them to make a purchase. Every morning we would send a data file of cart abandonments to ExactTarget. Automated emails would then be sent out to consumers who had abandoned purchase with incentives to encourage them to buy (e.g. free shipping).,,,Vendor implemented,6,Self-taught,It can be difficult to read and understand their documentation without having some sort of walk through training first.,No,6,2,Verified User
Unspecified
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio
342 Ratings
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