Item: Adobe Marketo Engage
Rating: 8
Author: Alec Dibble

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Marketo is being utilized organization-wide to fulfill all of our automated email needs. Uses include marketing campaigns, application-based transactional notifications, and internal notifications. Being able to do all email automation using one program simplifies email management across the org. It helps ensure all automated emails are consistent and coming from the same trusted source. Additionally, it provides a high degree of automation, flexibility, and integration. Most campaigns and automation sequences we need are implementable using Marketo.

Pros and Cons

Marketo's flexibility is where it excels. The architecture and interface have a learning curve, but Marketo gives the end user a lot of power to set up campaigns or flows exactly how they need it. I have used many competing products and none are as flexible.
Marketo's token and custom fields implementation is mature and powerful. Many competitors fall short in this department. Tokens and custom fields can be used extensively in flows and segments, creating almost endless possibilities.
Marketo's 3rd-party integration are well thought out and maintained consistently. Integrations I have utilized include Salesforce and GoToWebinar. Both integrations worked great and enabled a lot of productivity and automation.
The segmentation engine is very powerful. Many other services have limits or restrictions on how you can segment your users or what filters you can use. Marketo is incredibly flexible in this regard. I have never ran into an issue where we couldn't build a segment we needed.

The interface, including querying members of segments, can be very slow. Sometimes queries can run for over 10 minutes with no useful indication of status. Sometimes the query fails and I have to reload. In the past, it caused us to miss target campaign send times. Currently, the email team tries to account for this issue when implementing and executing campaigns.
The documentation can be very poor. Marketo is a VERY technical and complicated service. While the documentation has different guides for different skill levels, overall reference material can be really lacking. Some parts of the REST API also have undocumented behavior. The community and forums can be a useful substitute. However, it can be very slow searching through that content.
I'm not a fan of Marketo's interface and visual aesthetics. It looks much less modern and professional when compared to most competitors.
Their SEO keyword tracking feature feels underpowered compared to many services dedicated to SEO tracking. I do not depend on it and use other services for keyword tracking.

Using Marketo to Support Sales Goals

Product Launches
Upsell
Cross-Sell
Lead Management
Prospecting / New Business
Other

Marketo is utilized for several different business functions. First of all, it is utilized for email marketing campaigns to the existing user base. These campaigns are meant to educate our user base and provide help suggestions and call to actions to help utilize our service effectively. It also provides transactional email support for our application. Finally, we use it for internal notifications that require automation or formatting.

Alternatives Considered

Pardot, Autopilot, ActiveCampaign, Customer.io and Intercom

Marketo is the most powerful of the platforms I demo'd. Many platforms promise a lot but don't deliver. For example, most platforms have odd restrictions on how you can define segmentation conditions. In many cases, I'd have to do a lot of setup or work outside the service to work around this. With Marketo, there is almost limitless potential for flexibility and automation.
Marketo does take tons training and expertise to properly utilize. For orgs that can't invest in dedicated email resources or headcount, a tool like Autopilot or Mailchimp will be a much better choice.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

250,000 to 1 million

Using Adobe Marketo Engage for B2C or B2B marketing

Both

Likelihood to Recommend

Marketo is extremely proficient at implementing complex automation and integrating with third party services. This is a great value-add for businesses with complex email operations. However, it requires a lot of dedicated resources to set up, configure, and manage. At a minimum, one full-time email marketing specialist should be managing the Marketo instance.

For highly technical startups, I would recommend implementing email automation internally. I believe the biggest value of Marketo is enabling people who aren't software engineers to implement extremely complex segmentation and automation. If engineers are managing the email automation, it will be much cheaper to implement the automation internally. If non-engineers are managing the email systems, then Marketo is very useful.

Lessons for Success

Marketo's robust API and flexible features have allowed us to implement extremely complex campaigns and automations. With a combination of smart campaigns and programs, pretty much any conceivable automation is possible. We also utilize the webhooks to communicate back to our backend for important campaigns like adding credits to accounts or putting the fact that a user unsubscribed from marketing emails in the customer service dashboard. A huge win with Marketo compared to other email tools is how much you can customize the unsubscribe page to allow people to edit the parameters of the emails they get instead of only offering unsubscribe functionality.

Special Use Case

We created specialized automation campaigns in Marketo with a winback component that utilized their webhooks functionality. For example, we may have had a cart abandon email series where a $5 expiring credit was added to the users account if certain conditions were met. We could build and dynamically adjust these conditions and then use webhooks to implement the credit add. This allowed us to decouple the functionality from the engineering team, giving a wide range of flexibility in adding credits across all types of automated campaigns.

Onboarding Wisdom

Marketo is an extremely advanced tool with a lot of functionality and a steep learning curve. I would learn the ins-and-outs of Programs and Smart Campaigns. I would pay attention to Triggered Vs Manual Campaigns and the kinds of triggers you can utilize. If you need BI/ETL capabilities with the raw data, I would advise to budget ample time/money to interface with Marketo's API as it is rather advanced compared to several other B2B SaaS vendor data exports I've implemented.

Learning from the Community

The Marketo community is very mature and has a lot of quality content. I've searched through the community extensively and have also asked questions. Possibly as a side effect of the certification program, there are a lot of smart people in the community that can answer very obscure questions. I think the documentation is very sparse but the community and search functionality makes up for the poor documentation, in most cases.

Tips & Tricks

I would make sure that if you are using a non-email address deduplication field, make sure that no records with duplicate email addresses make it into the system. If you ever try to send by email in the future, Marketo will be unable to send to any of the duplicated records.
If using the API to send transactional emails with custom tokens, it is very useful to become familar with the limitations of using tokens in the Program and Campaign. For example, you can't use these tokens in campaign logic, only to display information within the email template.

I've Used Marketo In Several Organizations

Software Version

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo