Marketo - a robust B2B marketing automation platform
March 29, 2016
Marketo - a robust B2B marketing automation platform
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Global Enterprise
Modules Used
- Marketo Lead Management
- Marketo Sales Insight
- Marketo Revenue Cycle Analytics
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo
Marketo was used for all email marketing, marketing automation/triggered activities, lead tracking, lead reporting, lead nurture and all lead lifecycle management. It was also used for customer marketing communications and promotions, static/non-automated email campaigns, image hosting and landing page creation. The marketing and the sales department also used Marketo Sales Insight to send template-based emails from Salesforce. It was integrated with Salesforce with back and forth syncing of lead data.
- Marketo was very easy to configure reports based on email sends. It was easy to export the data into csv or Excel. It was easy to categorize and group emails together to create reports.
- Alerts, task creation and notifications were great. You could set up alerts based on particular behaviors of the prospects like Interesting Moments. You could configure the alerts to go to anyone and/or the lead owner. We found it valuable to keep the sales staff in the know if a prospect took a particular action (visited a page, completed a form, responded to a particular campaign.
- Integrates well with Salesforce. I never had to worry about data not sycning. I always knew the data was up to date. And I loved the fact that you could assign prospects to a particular Salesforce campaign as part of a Marketo Program (campaign). I also liked how you could create tasks in Salesforce from the Marketo interface.
- There is no way to use A/B testing native functionality within automated emails. You can do a workaround solution (random sample, split lists), but only the static sends have the A/B functionality built in. It would be great if there was an interface for it within a smart campaign set up or within the Engagement Engine.
- The Engagement Engine isn't the most intuitive set up. It took some time to learn it and get used to it.
- There really was no way to property do multi-touch attribution within the tool. You really need an add-on solution in order to properly report on all touches and give proper credit to a lead across its lifecycle and conversion to customer. You can see a number of leads who have been touched by more than 1 campaign but you can't drill down specifically into WHO those leads were.
We definitely achieved lead management and engagement with Marketo. We have automated all lead entrances via external and internal web forms with the proper tagging and categorization within Marketo. We were able to track leads via Leads Source and other categories. We were also able to automate sending custom messages across a lead's lifecycle from Early to Late stage nurturing. We were also able to set up other various auto-response campaigns for other lead behaviors including email auto-responses and Interesting Moment notifications for the sales staff.
- Pardot and Oracle Eloqua
I used Marketo before using Eloqua so there wasn't a choice. It was the solution in place at my last company. I think the two tools are similar in terms of being able to manage leads and automate campaigns. Marketo doesn't use visual canvasses for automation flows like Eloqua uses. So it's more linear. There are benefits to this in Marketo as it is more straightforward but you cannot visualize a email flow as you can do within Eloqua.
250,000 to 1 million