One Man's Thoughts on Marketo
May 08, 2015
One Man's Thoughts on Marketo
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Standard
Modules Used
- Marketo Lead Management
- Marketo Sales Insight
Overall Satisfaction with Marketo Marketing Automation
I am currently implementing and maintaining an instance of Marketo for a client. All departments are using it. Without a CRM, Sales is using it to communicate with contacts and track their progress through the pipeline. HR and Operations use it to communicate with staff and track open rates to make sure their messages are being heard. Marketing is of course using Marketo traditionally.
Marketo allows the client the ability to improve their communication with HTML emails and landing pages. At this point in the implementation, the focus is on communicating with current customers, but being able to see open rates, etc. has greatly improved their visibility of their messages. Our next phase is to focus on content and inbound marketing. The ability to measure campaigns on hard data is something that they have lacked and are excited to implement.
Marketo allows the client the ability to improve their communication with HTML emails and landing pages. At this point in the implementation, the focus is on communicating with current customers, but being able to see open rates, etc. has greatly improved their visibility of their messages. Our next phase is to focus on content and inbound marketing. The ability to measure campaigns on hard data is something that they have lacked and are excited to implement.
Pros
- Marketo has a great ability to really select only the leads you want to reach when creating Smart Campaigns or Smart Lists. Many more options than other competitors that I have worked with.
- Once you've acclimated yourself to the system, Marketo is very easy to work with. There are many ways to perform a task.
- So much more functionality, even in the Spark edition. For example, being able to create a quick Email Performance Report on an email send. There are some platforms that don't have this ability.
Cons
- Usability is not as effective as it could be. For example, when there is only one text box on a page, why not have the cursor auto populate so that the user can just start typing? Instead, you have to move the mouse over and click. Minor issue, but when doing this over and over, it becomes superfluous energy.
- I've noticed this in my experience, but have heard from longer users that the speed of page loads has increased quite a bit. It's not zippy, but given the amount of stuff going on, it's understandable.
- User Accounts are tied to a license. This is an issue when you are a consultant, or get another job. All of your history, and certifications are tied to the old account. It would be nice to extract that from the license and allow people to have their accounts move with them.
- Implementing Marketo has shone a light on the participation levels of both staff and customers that my client has not had before
- Sometimes a company does something 'just because', but implementing a system like Marketo forces you to look at those processes and really analyze them for what they are and make improvements. For example, it was determined that a key process in on-boarding a new customer was being handled by 36 people with almost little to no oversight in the main office. It wasn't efficient, nor being handled correctly. While implementing Marketo, we were able to identify this as an issue and move the process to one person who now has a full grasp on the system. This has lead to increased customer service.
- By implementing a Lead Sourcing program, we were able to help a client better identify where leads were coming from and the better allocate their funds.
All of the companies, in my opinion, are lacking in the ability to really dissect the data to get what you really want. For example, you want to send an email to someone who clicked a website multiple times with the specific URL parameter of 'source=facebook'? I don't think that's possible in others. Additionally, Marketo's ability to use AND's and OR's easily. In Marketo, you can say show me (1 and 2 and 3 and (4 or 5)) and 6. If I remember correctly, in Hatchbuck, you would have to create 3 lists (tags in their case) in order to do that. All Hatchbuck fans, forgive me if I am wrong in this assertion. I has been a while since I've used it.
100,000 to 250,000
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