October 16, 2017

SFMC has a Ferrari engine under the hood. Unleash the power via AMPScript and/or pair it with the Salesforce CRM to deliver awesomeness to your Marketing and Sales teams!

Item: Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Rating: 8
Author: Bogdan Enache

Bogdan Enache

Digital Marketing Lead & SalesForce Marketing Cloud Administrator

TELUSTelecommunications, 10,001+ employees

Score 8 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

The SFMC is used as the platform of choice for TELUS Business to:
- Build and deploy communications for Marketing and Sales online initiatives
- Automate various emails based processes
- Generate leads into the SFDC CRM via build and hosted web pages (with lead generating web forms).
- Synch, update and get updates with and from SFDC data (contacts, leads, cases, surveys, etc.)

Pros and Cons

Tight integration with SFDC - easy to create, update and retrieve records information from our CRM of choice (Salesforce).
Customization power - through the available AMPScript language you can really take the customization to the next level for all your data capturing, tagging and reporting needs.
Intuitive interface - it offers a good user experience for its users whether they are seasoned developers with direct access to code or less technical folks that prefer drag and drop or WYSIWYG editors.

(Lack of) Web Tracking - it offers minimal tracking capabilities for web visit(or)s and the ones that are in place don't provide an easy way to allow you to use that data in building reports or automation.
No Web Forms - if most of your marketing campaigns include a call to action pointing to a web form submission, the SFMC doesn't have a "web form asset" per se that you can build. You could still achieve the same functionality by deploying cloud pages and/or microsite AMPScript pages that use Data Extensions as tables to hold data but that doesn't come out of the box.
Customization brings Complexity - OK, maybe this is not a con but sometimes it feels like one. In order to build your own custom way of segmenting, importing, filtering data, having triggered sends, etc. you need to create a lot of assets on the platform. Think of it like small Lego bricks that you need to build first then combine them in a larger brick that is part of an even larger construction.

Return on Investment

Positive - better ROI from "bundling" the Salesforce products; getting the same features for less money or even getting more features for the same money compared to other platforms choices.
Positive - customization power. Through the use of AMPScript we can now offer to marketing and sales teams technical solutions and features that are not available out of the box or even possible by using other email marketing platforms.
Negative - lack of web tracking that can be used in lead scoring made us look at other platforms to achieve that functionality (i.e. Pardot)

Alternatives Considered

Marketo, Callidus Channel, Pardot and Oracle Eloqua

We looked at 3-4 platforms before deciding on using SFMC; we grouped the criteria used into 5 main categories: Budget, Features, Architecture, Support and Analysts/Roadmap (we actually used this site's feedback as part of the Analysts score).

The finalists were SFMC and Oracle Eloqua and while Eloqua edged SFMC in out of the box Features and Analysts reviews, the total score was higher for SFMC as it better aligned with our technical Architecture, was cheaper and the Eloqua support wasn't what we expected.

Number of Contacts (List Size)

250,000 to 1 million

Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud for B2C or B2B marketing

Both

Other Software Used

Salesforce Communities, Clicktools, Dropbox for Business

Likelihood to Recommend

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform is well suited for companies looking to deploy and automate Marketing and Sales communications in general but where it shines is in the scenarios where you need a cross platform solution between the Sales and Marketing Clouds because your need involves either capturing data in the Salesforce CRM (email metrics, leads, etc.) or using some of the CRM data as part of the campaign itself (i.e. segment your audience, dynamic email content with CRM data fields or logic).

Its weak point is the web tracking capabilities if your web tracking needs go beyond displaying some charts of visits and visitors (aka use web metrics as part of your email automation, lead scoring, etc.)

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Customer Support Pros and Cons

Pros	Cons
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response	None

Premium Support

Not Sure

Bug Resolution

Yes - There were a couple of situations where I reported what could be considered a bug:
- An update disabled a feature that we were using and the fix was quick in the form of a roll back
- A lack of options when importing data was deemed a feature not a bug, so I was invited to submit an "Idea" for Improvement. I won't hold my breath on it though :)

Support Rating

They're fast and knowledgeable. You will always know what's the status of your request and they usually follow up with phone calls to ask you questions or provide updates. Sometimes it takes them a couple of days to investigate, especially if you have custom "situations" like my company usually does but at least they are very good at managing time expectations.