ExactTarget is EXACTLY what my clients need!
January 21, 2014

ExactTarget is EXACTLY what my clients need!

Angela Noble | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio

I 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.
  • 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.
I personally only have other experience using MailChimp which is great for smaller clients. ExactTarget is a lot more feature-rich and makes it easier to customize emails with data extensions. MailChimp is great for out-of-the-box, template-based solutions, whereas ExactTarget requires a lot more setup time. The two platforms have a totally different user-base and provide entirely different services.
ExactTarget is an extremely feature-rich platform and is only cost-effective for large organizations. To use it for email marketing, be prepared to know how to design and hand-code HTML emails. There aren't pre-made templates to use.

Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio

We have so much data living in the ExactTarget platform that it would be crazy to move to something else. Plus, I've not seen anything that compares and would meet my clients' needs.