Item: Adobe Marketo Engage
Rating: 8
Author: Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Marketo for email marketing, newsletter deployment, lead nurturing, and inbound campaigns. Switching to Marketo has vastly improved our marketing automation and data processes. Campaigns are more scalable and precisely targeted. The robust CRM integration is an advantage as well, allowing sales insight into marketing initiatives.

Pros and Cons

Marketo's smart campaign functionality is highly flexible - an advantage for marketing campaigns, lead scoring initiatives, and data processing.
Smart lists (the built-in querying function) are a powerful feature for creating and segmenting audiences.
Tokens and dynamic content allow us to easily standardize and scale marketing programs.

Reporting is limited, with an outdated interface.
The user experience for batch email sends is problematic - it's easy to forgot to approve email content, leading to embarrassing mistakes.
System performance and email deployment speed need improvement.

Using Marketo to Support Sales Goals

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

Marketo allows us to attract new prospects, retain current customers, and communicate about our digital product offerings. We use Marketo for marketing and transactional emails, webinar hosting (in conjunction with our webinar partner), newsletter deployment, and inbound campaigns such as social audiences and landing pages. It has allowed us to consolidate several previous systems into one central hub.

Alternatives Considered

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio, Higher Logic, Mailchimp, Pardot, Acoustic Campaign (formerly IBM Watson Campaign Automation), Adobe Campaign, HubSpot and Campaign Monitor

Marketo had the best balance of customizability and usability. It matched our need for advanced data capabilities, marketing automation, and a native Salesforce integration.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

1 to 5 million

Using Adobe Marketo Engage for B2C or B2B marketing

B2B

Likelihood to Recommend

Marketo is an excellent choice for large/sophisticated teams. If you have web and API resources, there's little that you can't do. The learning curve is significant, so it is less suited to small businesses and teams without a dedicated system admin. For implementation and onboarding, I recommend investing in professional services and training for your power users. This will ensure that the system is customized in an optimal way from the beginning.

I Love Smart Campaigns

Modules Used

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo