1. Home
  2. Marketing Automation Software
  3. Salesforce Marketing Cloud Reviews
  4. User Review of Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud: As powerful as it is complicated
February 29, 2024

Salesforce Marketing Cloud: As powerful as it is complicated

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

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps us manage our multiple millions of contacts that we email daily, hourly, weekly through journeys. The drag and drop email builder helps us build emails quickly, and the contact manager helps us keep our data organized. We rely heavily on Einstein send time optimization to help ensure emails reach our consumers when they will be most likely to be read.
  • Offers flexibility with organizing the space
  • Easy email design - drag and drop editors
  • Maintains a large inventory of data
  • Setting up journeys to be automated
  • The email builder does not offer any way to catch/check bugs across different email service providers
  • Creating SQL is not as easy as drag-and-drop; a lot of technical knowledge is required
  • Salesforce Marketing Cloud is sold as a marketing tool, but to be honest, you need a LOT of technical IT support to run the tool
  • Einstein metrics are across the board; if you have multiple audiences in one instance of Salesforce Marketing Cloud you can't segment the data.
  • We have been able to create mature lead generation opportunities using Salesforce Marketing Cloud in conjunction with CRM.
  • We have had to spend much more in technical support
  • We have been able to save on costs of daily maintenance emails through automation.
If you have existing software/platforms for your website, social, data management, it will be hard to move everything into Salesforce Marketing Cloud to take full advantage of this multiple channel approach. It can be frustrating to see all the potential offerings in Salesforce Marketing Cloud but see parts locked down/not turned on/ not yet integrated for the full experience. If you start from SCRATCH Salesforce Marketing Cloud would give you a great multi-channel experience.
We use the send-time optimization the most as far as AI-driven capabilities. To have to switch between CRM and Salesforce Marketing Cloud to get certain reporting is not ideal as not everyone has the same access, so getting that holistic view is difficult.
The ability to personalize messaging is very high in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. There are many ways to create custom emails, but there are always downsides. For example, if you want to serve up a new content block with a link based on certain criteria you've set with dynamic content, but you use journeys to set up your experience, you will not be able to do a decision split based off that link click, AND that link will be treated as unique for each person, messing up your analytics.
Mailchimp is great for simple email use. It's straightforward and great for beginners in the email space. It does not offer nearly as much in the way of complexity as Salesforce Marketing Cloud does, so is limited with what it can do. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is much more powerful.

Do you think Salesforce Marketing Cloud delivers good value for the price?

Not sure

Are you happy with Salesforce Marketing Cloud's feature set?

Yes

Did Salesforce Marketing Cloud live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Salesforce Marketing Cloud go as expected?

No

Would you buy Salesforce Marketing Cloud again?

Yes

Salesforce CMS, Microsoft BI (MSBI)
To fully utilize Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you need a full team of IT engineers, SQL writers, email designers that know HTML, and customer experience strategists. A small team may be able to use it for the basics and do it well; but anything complicated requires a lot of technical knowledge.
I do appreciate the Salesforce Trailhead that makes learning how to use the tool fun and interactive - so learning how to use it feels more approachable.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is best used when you already are invested in Salesforce products - CRM and CDP. IF you want a basic email sending tool, this is not for you. If you have many complex use cases, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is what you need!

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Feature Ratings

7.6
WYSIWYG email editor
8
Dynamic content
8
Ability to test dynamic content
7
Landing pages
6
A/B testing
7
Mobile optimization
7
Email deliverability reporting
9
List management
8
Triggered drip sequences
8
7.8
Lead nurturing automation
9
Lead scoring and grading
8
Data quality management
7
Automated sales alerts and tasks
7
6.5
Calendaring
7
Event/webinar marketing
6
Not Rated
Social sharing and campaigns
Not Rated
Social profile integration
Not Rated
6.7
Dashboards
6
Standard reports
7
Custom reports
7
8.6
API
8
Role-based workflow & approvals
10
Customizability
10
Integration with Salesforce.com
8
Integration with Microsoft Dynamics CRM
Not Rated
Integration with SugarCRM
Not Rated
Third-party software integrations
7

Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud

40 - IT
Marketing
Operations
Communications
Design
38 - SQL knowledge
HTML knowledge
API knowledge
Writing skills
Design skills
Data science
Project management
Strategy
  • Email management
  • Data management
  • Audience management
  • Lead generation
  • Data on trends
  • Eventually want to build out the web capabilities, SMS capabilities
We've put too much time and effort in to back out now!

Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud

There's how to 'use' Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which you can get up and running pretty quickly. Then there's how to USE Salesforce Marketing Cloud. As soon as you actively start using it a million questions and problems pop up, and you are off to the races with researching, trial and error, and betting your IT partners to give you some resources.
ProsCons
Like to use
Unnecessarily complex
Difficult to use
Requires technical support
Not well integrated
Slow to learn
Cumbersome
Lots to learn
  • Drag-and-drop email editor
  • Drag-and-drop journey builder
  • Reporting
  • Testing
  • List/data exclusions/opt-outs
Yes - It's not very accurate when you compare it to your personal mobile device.