Marketo Review
Updated August 13, 2019
Marketo Review
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Marketo Lead Management
- Marketo Analytics
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo
Marketo is used as our marketing automation platform for executing multiple marketing campaigns including email sends, landing page and form creation and stores all email preferences. It is used exclusively by our marketing department.Our instances is intergrating with our CRM and we plan to integrate with Salesforce in the upcoming months.
- Marketo is good at letting you create very detailed lists of your customers. The ability to categorize based on demographics and behavior is new to our department and already one we are taking advantage.
- Marketo allows you to plan in advance well. We can schedule campaigns to run weeks ahead without having to do anything on the day it goes live. It allows us to work ahead.
- Marketo has a great community and support forum. I can find the answer to the majority of my questions there.
- Customization is easy as well. You have the ability to create custom fields, channels, statuses, etc. that allow you to customize your instance to make sense for your business initiatives.
- Marketo's "How To" docs aren't super helpful. I think they would benefit from putting more info there.
- At first, Marketo is hard to acclimate to. Not all the features are intuitive and takes some practice to feel comfortable.
- Product Launches
- Cross-Sell
- Lead Management
- Prospecting / New Business
For product launches, our main objective is to clearly and effectively communicate the new product, which in turn will generate demand for our sales team or b2c customers.Cross sell/lead management campaigns are designed to increase revenue within our current database and/or communicate updates/new benefits. Generating new business is primarily lead generation and nurture efforts in hopes of driving sales with new leads.
We are also constantly trying to increase customer/member retention.
We are also constantly trying to increase customer/member retention.
We were previously using an email platform that did not have automation capabilities.
250,000 to 1 million
Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings
Learnings & Advice
We've been able to automate a decent amount of our workflow as well as build out templates for common use cases to create efficiencies. We've learned it's much easier to set everything up correctly and with the foresight to adapt to your business changes. We did not set up our instance correctly the first time, so it required a lot of rework that could have been avoided initially.
We've created a complex template for all our seminars that is completely tokenized so team members don't have to edit any individual asset. We've replaced everything from email copy, to images, to tracking UTMs with tokens. We've also created a custom field that is updated via our API to track registrations as they are collected on a non-Marketo form. Using this field we're able to trigger reminder and follow-up emails.
Utilize the Marketo support forums. I was completely new to Marketo when I inherited our instance and I would not have been able to get our instance in working condition without these forums. I've also been able to bring a large amount of information to my team and trained multiple employees on how to work in our instance.
See previous response. Outside of a few courses, all of my Marketo nuggets of information have come from the community. If you have to troubleshoot an issue, have a question about setting up a campaign, etc. - it will be on the forum with someone who's experienced the same issue.
Always test your emails. We've had some instances of the Marketo preview (especially on mobile) look great, but in a test send the email doesn't look as promised. Also, keep your data clean. Pulling in tokens and using dynamic content can go wrong if your data is polluted.
Using Marketo's core features
- Channels
- Programs
- Email Templates
- Forms
- Landing Pages
- Smart Campaigns
- Lead Scoring
- Lead Sourcing
- Segmentation
- Lead Nurture
- Reporting/Analytics
- Smart Lists - with great ease, you can slice and dice your database with great precision.
- Dynamic Content - although we don't use this feature very frequently, it is super easy to set up and allows to save a ton of time by only creating essentially one email for multiple audiences
- Choices in flow steps - allows you to streamline the number of smart campaigns you have to build while still delivering different emails to different audiences. This has saved me tons of time.
Tokens - at first, I was intimidated by them, but they aren't hard to use at all for just about anything you want to customize in emails/landing pages.We've built out entire programs using tokens and have a variety of use cases for them.
The Marketo Community has helped me troubleshoot numerous issues and introduced me to many tricks/how-to's. We built our entire email preference center in Marketo with many guides available on the forum.
I believe the Marketo Community is the true value add that the platform has. Countless resources for new and advanced users.
Basically everything in the Database area. System smart lists give me a good idea of my overall database.