Marketo is great for companies looking for robust marketing capabilities
Updated September 05, 2019

Marketo is great for companies looking for robust marketing capabilities

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

Modules Used

  • Marketo Lead Management
  • Marketo Sales Insight

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo

Marketo is used by our marketing and operations department to send emails to prospects and customers, qualify leads, and build or brand. Our different departments use Marketo differently, with marketing typically doing nurture programs and operations sending one-time emails.
  • Marketo allows for highly customizable emails through custom HTML, merge fields, and its programming platform velocity.
  • Marketo makes it easy to send emails based on segmentation, we you all use it t send the same email in many different languages.
  • Marketo integrates well with Salesforce, making it way to sync lead and contact information between the two systems.
  • Marketo’s HTML email editor has several bugs. You really have to mess with the formatting to get it just right.
  • The first level of Marketo support usually just sends you a knowledge article and you end up having to get your support resolved before you get resolution.
  • There is not great reporting for the sync between Salesforce and Marketo so when you do have sync errors you need to open a support ticket to understand the issue.
  • Product Launches
  • Upsell
  • Cross-Sell
  • Customer Service
  • Lead Management
  • Prospecting / New Business
Our goal is to increase our pool of MQLs for our SDR team. We also plan to streamline and reduce the operational communications coming from our company to our existing user base. Finally, we aim to increase brand awareness.
Marketo has more features than Pardot and is more robust. Marketo has better merge field capabilities, allowing us to customize the data we send to our customers and prospects.
Marketo is well suited for companies with complex marketing needs, supporting large pipelines and customer bases.

Marketo is overkill for smaller companies needing basic marketing.

Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings

WYSIWYG email editor
4
Dynamic content
10
Ability to test dynamic content
10
Landing pages
10
A/B testing
10
Mobile optimization
10
Email deliverability reporting
8
List management
7
Triggered drip sequences
10
Lead nurturing automation
9
Lead scoring and grading
7
Data quality management
6
Automated sales alerts and tasks
8
Calendaring
10
Event/webinar marketing
10
Social sharing and campaigns
Not Rated
Social profile integration
Not Rated
Dashboards
8
Standard reports
8
Custom reports
Not Rated
API
7
Role-based workflow & approvals
7
Customizability
5
Integration with Salesforce.com
8
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Not Rated
Integration with SugarCRM
Not Rated

Learnings & Advice

I've had a lot of success with complex email campaigns. Marketo allows you to setup smart campaigns you can use to set rules to send emails based on the criteria you setup. Marketo also integrates with Salesforce and other popular CRMs making it easy to send emails when needed, and to avoid sending emails when you don't want to send them.
We use Marketo send mass emails for our sales reps, similar to using word and mail merge. This saves them a lot of time. there are many times they are sending the same message to hundreds of prospects. Marketo allows us to set up a campaign to send these on their behalf based on trigger rules so the timing is what we want.
Marketo has a lot of functionality. I've found that it's good to focus on learning a couple of key aspects really well, rather than trying to be an expert on the whole system. If you get good at the parts you use the most you can always use the help center or reach out to the community for support on those parts you need help with.
There are often times many ways you can accomplish the same task. When you ask for help on the community you may get several different answers. It's helpful to get different perspectives so you can determine which method best aligns with you. I recommend using the community to get to know power users who can be a great resource when you need it and have time to wait for a community response.
I recommend you take the time to learn a few key skills in Marketo, that you will use regularly. For me that was learning how triggers work with smart campaigns so that I can build complex marketing programs. We have a landing page expert in our organization, and an expert on managing our database. It will take too long for one person to learn it all. If you are new to Marketo find ways to share the responsibility of learning with others on your team.