Item: Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Rating: 2
Author: Abby Perfetti

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I used Salesforce Marketing Cloud for about six months when I worked for a popular county tourism agency. We had very high hopes for its email platform, but were disappointed. I used it to email our list of about 12,000 people twice a month (people across the country who signed up for our e-news), and another smaller email list once a month (locals in our industry). My team was under the impression that we could use all sorts of automation features, dynamic content, and other tools that would increase our capabilities and marketing effectiveness. Instead, we found that the interface was difficult to use and quite outdated for 2016. Every task took tons of research, even though our entire team was quite tech-savvy, and we were constantly paying more than we expected.

Pros and Cons

Pros

They make a good sales pitch.
I think for really large companies that sends huge emails every day to consumers, it could be more useful.
They have many types of products to offer.

Cons

The interface was really challenging to use because it was out of date and not user-friendly. It doesn't even compare to any of the other platforms I've used (MailChimp, Constant Contact, or Emma).
Emails did not look like they did in the editing phase, so things turned out unattractive and out of our control despite having a designer on our team with plenty of coding skills.
Dynamic content turned out to be way harder to set up than we were told, so we couldn't use it, and that was the main reason we signed up for the Marketing Cloud.

Return on Investment

Negative: Less efficiency because everything took too long to create.
Negative: More expensive than we anticipated.
Negative: We had such a bad experience that we switched to Emma.

Alternatives Considered

We selected it because of dynamic content and supposed features, but were disappointed. Emma seems to be the best option out there, but I've also had decent experiences with Constant Contact and MailChimp. I would recommend any of them over the Marketing Cloud.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

10,000 to 25,000

Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud for B2C or B2B marketing

Both

Other Software Used

MailChimp, Constant Contact, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Acrobat DC

Likelihood to Recommend

It is probably better suited for very large retail companies that send lots of emails daily, with dynamic content depending on data like what users have bought, what their interests are, etc. It is not a good fit for smaller companies. It's too expensive, the interface looks like it was designed in 2001, and the features are really challenging to use even for someone who uses new technologies all day.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Feature Ratings

Comments

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