Not even close...
June 12, 2017

Not even close...

Leigh Nolan | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio

We needed an HIPAA-compliant platform for our company. Our only choices were Eloqua and Salesforce/Marketing Cloud. We use Marketing Cloud as our automated marketing platform, for marketing only.
  • Secure data
  • Bad User Experience. June 2017 and it reminds me of a Microsoft Wizard tool from the 90s. It's clear that the functionality is several different companies/platforms mashed together with very little thought to the end-user's day-to-day needs, or any concept of integrating the separate functions.
  • Expensive & difficult to set up. Do not think you can set this up yourself in a day and get marketing (unless you have dev/Salesforce admin training). This tool is overly-complicated.
  • Reporting needs to be configured. Don't think that your automated email programs will automatically report on key campaign KPIs for you or that Marketing Cloud will create a slick homepage dashboard. Nope. You need to pay someone to do that for you. Or spend a few hours in dev tools trying to build it yourself. Even then, it looks like I've traveled back in time to 2008.
  • Doesn't use HTML5. For some very stupid reason, someone thought it was a great idea to not use standard, internationally accepted code. Think that you'll be able to upload a CSS folder and all of your email templates will pull your email style? Think again. Unless you create locked templates, every time you add a CTA button, you'll have to re-select your brand colour from the default blue. Over and over.
  • Link tracking is dumb too. Again, someone really smart decided that instead of a normal tracking parameter, MarketingCloud will actually redirect/interupt your URL to track the click/conversion. So, device detection is gone. If your link is going to either open an app or open a web page - you'll need to turn OFF MarketingCloud tracking. (God I miss MailChimp)
  • How-tos are still outdated. Dev Tools & How-to demonstrations are outdated with old screenshots and some even use Exact Target wording. MarketingCloud wants you to spend money with their 3rd party partners in setting it up, so they don't make set-up easy.
  • Unsubscribe Default Page. Ready to laugh? Do you know that their default unsubscribe page still asks for your customers if they want to opt-in to HTML or text only? Like this is 2008 or something... Also, this page isn't really 'brandable'. You'll opt for the "BrandBuilder" option. That basically means that your logo appears on 2 pages. That's it. You can't update the fonts, upload a CSS file for styles... nothing like that. BrandBuilder means your logo will appear in the top left when you log in, and on your Subscription Preferences page that your customers see.
  • Couldn't afford a Salesforce-certified dev team to set up, so it's been an expensive and lengthy process to get marketing. Took too much time to get to bare minimum viability.
  • CloudPages is buggy, and the marketing team are not developers. Consistently get 505 publishing errors which cause pages to be offline/unavailable.
  • Mobile rendering isn't ideal. Consistent Gmail rendering issues with tables.
Unless you 100% need the top-of-the-line data security, don't opt for Marketing Cloud. They will tell you what it can do, but not how expensive (or how hard) it is to set it up perfectly.

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