Medium-sized business with fairly complex automated email campaigns and triggers.
Updated September 25, 2019
Medium-sized business with fairly complex automated email campaigns and triggers.
Score 6 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Modules Used
- Marketo Analytics
- Marketo ABM
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo
Marketo is used to run all email marketing at my company. We have around ~20,000 current customers and roughly ~40,000 contacts in our lead database. We send all emails to both of these audiences using Marketo. We use automated campaigns triggered by a variety of data sources as well as one-off and manually loaded and sent campaigns.
- Easily base email campaigns off of triggers that come from Salesforce.
- Easily edit email templates once they are set up and ready to go.
- Easy to build one-off email campaigns and trigger the start at a given date and time.
- The reporting can be confusing, and getting to see what you want (like the statistics for a single email vs. a campaign) can take a while to learn.
- Campaign structures are pretty rigid, so there's not a ton of flexibility to change campaigns if they're currently running.
- Dynamic email content can be a real pain to put into a template that has decent branding. They need to be very basic.
- Product Launches
- Upsell
- Cross-Sell
- Customer Service
- Lead Management
- Prospecting / New Business
- Other
We have three main goals with Marketo:
Current Customer Communications: things like product launches, new help content, upsell campaigns, etc. Marketo works great for this because they're usually not auto-triggered and can be very tightly controlled by staff.
Sales/Onboarding Communications: Once someone gets into the pipeline, all communication is run out of Marketo -- almost 100% auto-triggered. They're great if they don't need much maintenance and work, but once they do, lots of things in Marketo are intertwined, so it takes time to QA small changes.
Lead Database Communications: These are also more straightforward and don't take a lot of campaign track changes, custom information, etc. Marketo works great for this use case.
Current Customer Communications: things like product launches, new help content, upsell campaigns, etc. Marketo works great for this because they're usually not auto-triggered and can be very tightly controlled by staff.
Sales/Onboarding Communications: Once someone gets into the pipeline, all communication is run out of Marketo -- almost 100% auto-triggered. They're great if they don't need much maintenance and work, but once they do, lots of things in Marketo are intertwined, so it takes time to QA small changes.
Lead Database Communications: These are also more straightforward and don't take a lot of campaign track changes, custom information, etc. Marketo works great for this use case.
I like HubSpot more if the business isn't as complex as ours is. The email marketing structure when I used HubSpot was much more straightforward, did not have as many automatic triggers, and we rolled up the landing page and form submissions from HubSpot directly into the email campaigns. For that business, it was just what we needed. For my current business, we needed more complexity, and Marketo is much better at this.
25,000 to 100,000
Adobe Marketo Engage Feature Ratings
Learnings & Advice
Marketo has helped us automate a pretty large amount of emails for prospects, leads, and current customers that would probably take 2-3 full-time positions to handle manually. It's allowed us to focus more on email strategy and less on tactical email sends. The most important lesson is to always take a step back and look at the larger plan and amount of activities before setting up workflows. Changing them can take more time and energy after they've been set than just taking more time to plan correctly from the very beginning!
We have a lead flow/conversion path that has roughly 8-10 different touch points (before they become a customer). Many of these also depend on a sales person to work in Salesforce and mark particular fields to indicate interest or needed follow up. Marketo is our communication engine with data coming from Salesforce at every stage. Sales rep follow up and manual communication sending is at an extreme minimum because of our comprehensive list of workflows built in Marketo. It's reduced our need to spend time communicating with customers A TON.
Plan, plan, plan. Talk to other departments to see how they could benefit from having automatic communications and get a list of requirements from each one. Then, take that information and prioritize multiple phases to your rollout and growth for the product. This will help make sure that your team doesn't need to field last minute requests and things that can put wrenches in your roll out plan.
The Marketo community answers a lot of one off questions that you think might be specific to your business but through the answers you get, realize that your use case might not be as unique as you thought and there are a lot of people out there that can help you with very niche questions.
I don't actually have many tips and tricks for Marketo use. It's a pretty straight forward system that doesn't need a ton of workarounds. There are things that are a bit painful now (like looking at HTML code for an email and trying to edit it in the window) that require an accessory program or plugin to help, but no real tricks to learn.