Item: Adobe Marketo Engage
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Marketo as our email automation platform. We have over 200K emails that we keep in our database and we try to reach to them on weekly basis. We provide training to the federal government so we need to reach our users to make sure that they are aware of: what are the courses and when are the certifications due for renewal. Some of those courses are recommended and some of them are required by different Agencies or different military branches. We use Marketo to make sure that everybody goes through a proper journey of acquisition, ie. Welcome Series. What happens before the class? What happens after you take the class? Marketo helps us to make sure we can always re-engage with the user based on user's preferences. On average, our courses range from 2-5 days. However, some of courses have to be repeated every couple of years. Marketo is definitely helping us to make sure that all of our data gets updated so we can identify and reach proper audience based on user's interest. One of the reasons why we acquired Marketo was because of better attribution view that we were not getting from the other platform.

Pros and Cons

As I mentioned, it definitely give us a little bit better insight of exactly not only WHO the customer is, but provides detailed Lead Scoring. It's much more helpful for us to see the full journey of somebody clicking through exact touch points on our website to lead them to where we want them to go to, and provide the best experience through the website, as well as through email. So if there are different domains or different reasons why they actually are our customers, like our returning students, we actually provide them with better insights into that.
Easy way to set-up Programs, i.e. Welcome Series
Marketo back-end user experience is lacking search capability and it's is outdated

I've been a Marketo user for over a year because of the exposure to various platforms. I do think a big improvement could be made in the area of the user experience on the back-end user. It's definitely something that seems like it's being stuck in the very early 2000s. And yes, it's a very powerful tool. It has a lot of different little pockets that you can definitely tap into and I understand there was an upgrade just recently. I actually feel a small thing like uploading an image right now, it's an extra click, which as a marketing user, you do want to always limit the click. So now within the newer experience, it seems like it makes more obstacles for me to actually jump into the simple thing like uploading the image. Before the update it was little bit more clunky and was more boxy, but it was quicker. So I feel like Marketo could definitely improve upon overall structure and the UX just for the user.
It's very simplified, yet I feel like there's still lots of room for UX improvement and reporting. I think reporting would be another reason. It provided insights and you can kind of go and play with that, but I do think things could be done a little bit better.

Using Marketo to Support Sales Goals

Product Launches
Upsell
Cross-Sell

Alternatives Considered

I worked with Acoustic (Watson or IBM) MailChimp, cEvent. For our current organization Marketo is for sure the best fit. I feel like MailChimp would probably be more suitable for smaller crowds. We also use MailChimp for some other side of our business, so I do have to know day-to-day basis. But again Marketo has much more functionality. It has better insights into the customer journey and more of the contract info. We can actually create different campaigns and we can provide tokens and we have a better view and understanding of the user. So we can target user much better, but with a benefit to the actual user and to make sure that they are getting what they need instead of getting multiple emails. That's just because now they're getting one email that is just for them. So definitely Marketo stands out for many, many reasons. Cvent, it's event based platform. However, I also used that for another organization that was a non-profit, and again it was great. It was a lot of managing. Had different aspects that maybe Marketo does not really provide that much or maybe I just didn't really get into it yet. But it was just built much differently than Marketo. So I think Marketo, the way it's structured, as I mentioned before, is a little bit clunky on the user end, but it also provides a lot of opportunities for the user to kind of go and tackle the different aspects. If it's a journey, if it's a form, if it's a landing page, if it's an email, you do have that flexibility to kind of work with all of that.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

100,000 to 250,000

Using Adobe Marketo Engage for B2C or B2B marketing

Both

Key Insights

Do you think Adobe Marketo Engage delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Adobe Marketo Engage's feature set?

Yes

Did Adobe Marketo Engage live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Adobe Marketo Engage go as expected?

Would you buy Adobe Marketo Engage again?

Yes

Likelihood to Recommend

Marketo is definitely scalable. So that's one of the things we had to know before we were moving into Marketo. We had over half a million contacts, but we had to do a little bit of a data cleanup and make sure everything was updated. We ended up with 200K contacts but we still have thousands to add. So with Marketo the fact that we can grow, and expand as we go, was one of the biggest assets to actually choose and work with Marketo. So scalability of it is definitely a plus.

Adobe Marketo Engage Review

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Marketo Engage