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Power User Sticking with Marketo for Now
August 09, 2014

Power User Sticking with Marketo for Now

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

Software Version

Standard

Modules Used

  • Marketo Lead Management

Overall Satisfaction with Marketo Marketing Automation

We use the Marketo Marketing Automation system mostly for email marketing. It is used by multiple people on the marketing team. It helps us to quickly pull lists to send emails to as well as segment our users for more targeted communications. We use the form and lead lead management features to manage inbound leads, but acquisition is not our primary focus. We mostly use it to build engagement with our current customers and channel.
  • Create smart lists that help to segment users and send targeted communications.
  • Manage inbound leads through drip and lead life cycle campaigns.
  • Connect sales activities in Salesforce with Marketo programs.
  • If you want to do more advanced design activities like customized email templates, landing pages or forms you will likely need some graphic design and development resources. Their out of the box designs and tools to customize them are fairly limited.
  • They recently made some UI changes, but it was mostly reorganizing the menu structure and didn't really make a big change. I am very experienced in Marketo so I don't really have problems, but it takes a while to get new team members up to speed since the UI is not that intuitive. I would like to be able to onboard new users more quickly.
  • It definitely increases employee efficiency. Because we need to segment and customize our communications, our sales team used to be responsible for communicating updates and changes. With Marketo, I am able to handle this for them.
  • We do not really use Marketo for lead conversion (which is not the standard use of the system). However, I think it has helped with customer engagement and loyalty.
I've evaluated Pardot but it has been about a year since I've seen it (right after they were acquired by Salesforce). They had a more advanced design studio with a many more out of the box templates. It seemed like that may help to limit design/development costs for templates. I would continue to evaluate them, but there is also a high cost of switching. So if you are making a decision about a Marketing Automation System, you should be prepared to use that system for at least 3-5 years to make the implementation worth it. It is not a short term solution.
I am fairly likely to renew, mostly because of the time it takes to evaluate, migrate our data and assets and implement. In the long term, I am open to other solutions.
For the price point, I think it makes sense for a lot of medium sized businesses. If I were looking for more of an enterprise level solution, I might look at a more costly product like Eloqua that has more advanced capabilities. Pardot is also at a similar price point. They came in a little higher than Marketo in their last bid, but I probably could have talked them down. There is a fairly large cost of switching (mostly in time, but potentially also in redesigning assets to be used in a new system).