Clunky UI. Strong analytics.
February 27, 2013

Clunky UI. Strong analytics.

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 7 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Modules Used

  • Automation

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio

Pros

  • Analytics 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.

Cons

  • 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.
Make sure when negotiating your contract, that they include Inbox Deliverability tools such as IP reports, etc. I would also maintain a working relationship with your rep; when you submit tech cases, CC your rep - so that they are in the loop.

Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio

2 - One developer and myself.
  • 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).
Some of this dissatisfaction is related to the functionality issues described above regarding re-mailing and drip campaigns, but a big part of the reason is customer support. When I was at an agency, I had used this product many times with different clients and the support definitely seemed to be getting worse, and was also quite variable depending on the size and clout of the client company. This was very problematic.

Evaluating Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio and Competitors

We switched from Constant Contact to Exact Target.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio Implementation

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio Training

It can be difficult to read and understand their documentation without having some sort of walk through training first.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio Support

Although support was not terrible, they have grown rapidly in last couple of years and bad service is an unfortunate by-product of that growth. The company has grown too fast.

Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio

ExactTarget had just launched Interactive Marketing Hub when I started using it. Before they didn't have anything similar and their other tools were much more developer back end focused. This legacy clearly showed in the product which was quite clunky and technical looking. It dod not have a clean marketing-like UI.

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