Salesforce Marketing Cloud Erfahrungen

Vorteile

Das Tool hat unser Marketing auf ein neues Level gehoben und sehr viele Prozesse vereinfacht.

Nachteile

Es ist recht teuer und die Implementierung ist aufwendig.

Vorteile

The first thing you'll notice is how great the UI is. In all honesty, I have never struggled too much with grasping the system or procedure. The availability of customization options is also excellent.

Nachteile

It's on the pricier end of the scale, and getting the complete team up and running is a significant drain on our resources, but other than that, everything seems OK and is the greatest product around.

Vorteile

The best thing about Salesforce Marketing Cloud is its comprehensive suite of tools and its ability to automate customer interactions. The platform integrates a variety of marketing channels, including email, SMS, social media, and web, making it easy to create and track campaigns. Additionally, its segmentation and personalization features help marketers deliver a tailored experience to customers. Finally, the platform provides detailed performance metrics, allowing marketers to measure and optimize their efforts.

Nachteile

One of the drawbacks of Salesforce Marketing Cloud is its cost; the software can be expensive for small businesses. Additionally, the platform can be difficult to learn and requires a lot of time and effort to master all its features. Finally, some users have reported that the software can be slow and unresponsive at times.

Vorteile

It’s capabilities once it’s configured which takes a significant amount of time and money by hiring outsourced vendors to help set it up. SF offers little or no support and sends links in response to your questions.

Nachteile

They sell the product speaking in terms of monthly payments hen switch it to annual payments when you purchase the product. They do what’s in their best interests not the client’s. They sell you products that you don’t need but you won’t figure that out until you learn how to use them and set them up which takes a few months with the help of a consultant that you must pay for separately because it’s nothing included in the price and the products are not intuitive by any means. You will also need at least one employee dedicated to setting it up and maintaining the program. The very consultant that SF recommended that I hire at an extra fee to set up the program told me that I didn’t need six of the accounts that SF insisted I needed. They simply do not care if you ever use the products or are satisfied with the products until it’s time to renew your contracts. There are too many other alternatives from companies that actually care about having a long term relationship who will sell you what you need now and help you build the platform as you grow. SF has no such interest. I will not be renewing with them.

Vorteile

We use the Marketing cloud every day for our email marketing efforts. We use a platform native to salesforce called Pardot to send out our actual emails, but build the campaigns themselves, whether they be webinar or email, in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It's super easy to make new campaigns by just cloning old ones with mutual fields so it takes no time at all.

Nachteile

It's a pretty comprehensive platform, so it performs a lot of features. This can be overwhelming at first and hard to pick up initially but isn't a con necessarily.

Vorteile

It is a brilliant software for email marketing, email automation, social media marketing, leads generation, email management and for effective generation of email.

Nachteile

I didn't find it any features useless. However, it should be updated with new version.

In Betracht gezogene Alternativen

Warum Salesforce Marketing Cloud gewählt wurde

Zuvor genutzte Software

Gründe für den Wechsel zu Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Vorteile

I like that Send Time Optimization was included, this was extra with the previous e-mail marketing product we used.

Nachteile

First, we ended up in Google's black hole even when following the plan laid out by our integration partner. That you need an integration partner to get a small business setup should have been a huge red flag, but we thought we were stepping up to a more powerful e-mail product.

There are bugs everywhere. Our integration partner had many tips like making sure to unselect an e-mail reselect it and stop and start a trigger to make sure the new e-mail is used, these are things that should be handled by the UX and not tribal knowledge. We used alias in our e-mails to aid in reporting, but sometimes they show up in the report and sometimes it shows the original URL. We opened a ticket and months later it was closed with no resolution, because there's a back end bug in their system that they believed was causing the issue.

There's a lot of duplicated functionality that has different features. Want to manage your data extension you can do it in Email Studio or Contact Builder, BUT the features are different between the two. You can only easily add records in one of them so you have to remember which one you can do a specific action in.

Their reporting is limited on Journey's and you'll need to extract all the data to do any deep dives. You'll need to use Journey's if you want to use send time optimization or any of the AI logic, so you're guaranteed to have to build your own reporting in your own tools. We needed this to realize we were in the Google black hole.

Vorteile

The best features of SFMC is the integration with SFDC and the flexibility in creating audiences. It allows us to use SQL to build audiences in a very data driven manner vs a drag and drop (which SFMC does have) feature to create lists.

Nachteile

The speed for SFMC can sometimes be questionable. Some days it moves faster than others. The other feature that tends to be frustrating is the speed or actions when having multiple splits in their journey builder.

Vorteile

CRM and MAP are fully integrated. Ease of integration with ABM platform

Nachteile

CMS and In-built Email functionalities are not great

Vorteile

In addition to being able to import a distribution list, this product integrated with our CRM (Recruit) so we were able to send to segregated lists and it showed what emails were sent in Recruit. This made it easier for our reps to see when correspondence went out to their pipelines. It is rather simple to create and distribute emails.

Nachteile

Some of the functionality was a bit wonky, and emails viewed differently between various email clients. Line spacing was the biggest thing that varied quite a bit. Everything would look great in SFMC, but when an email was received in Outlook, Mac Mail, or Gmail, all three would display it just a bit differently. Not sure who's problem this is. It also doesn't embed video either. The workaround is to create a screenshot as a graphic, then add a link to it.

Vorteile

It allows me to be able to plan my day without forgetting to follow up and I save time!

Nachteile

The only thing is if I don't remember to enter a call ( which I don't do ) I would have a problem because I depend on the app

Vorteile

Nothing! Absolute worse platform there is

Nachteile

Everything! It's terrible platform, not intuitive, requires marketer to act like IT, clunky, minimal support, all in all feels like a sales tactic scam

Vorteile

The personalization options are pretty cool. But when you use them (with AMPscript) the Journey Builder is pretty much useless as Engagement Splits don't work with them.

Nachteile

Where to start.
- Extremely buggy system. We had multiple issues with the Journey Builder that resulted in a number of our subscribers receiving thousands of emails which put us on the spam list for Gmail.
- The Journey Builder is extremely rigid. You have to create new versions if you want to make even the smallest edit. Then you'll likely need to double check every single step because things break super easily.
When you update emails that are used in Journeys in Content Builder, you need to go into these Journeys and manually update these emails again to make sure the changes take effect. You can try to solve this with Reference Content but then Engagement Splits don't work because it cannot see the URLs. Same goes for using Dynamic Content. Also, current subscribers in the existing version of a journey cannot be placed into the new version of the journey. Lastly, you can only add subscribers to retargeting audiences but NOT REMOVE them from these retargeting audiences. You'll have to create ANOTHER retargeting audience (for which you have to pay extra) to exclude these in e.g. Facebook. Compare that with a cheap tool like ActiveCampaign and you're just amazed how bad Marketing Cloud is. Especially Journey Builder is the worst app I've ever come across.
- The platform is basically not usable without Salesforce CRM. This creates a number of problems, e.g. not being able to simply send a realtime response email when someone fills a form on your website. Also, even though it's the same company, the integration between Salesforce and Marketing Cloud is complex and just basically terrible.
- Cloud Pages Smart Capture forms are useless. It doesn't accept people that are already in the data extension that is connected to a particular Smart Capture form but it does not warn you about this in any way. Also, if you use Salesforce as your DoR you can't use Smart Capture forms but are forced to build custom AMPscript code due the ContactID being created in Salesforce (not possible in Marketing Cloud).
- As I mentioned above, functions don't work well with each other. This because they just bought a bunch of different companies and tried to tie it together. This also makes it very difficult to navigate as some functions overlap while others are completely incompatible. The system is also very slow. Loading times are not rarely over 10 seconds. This makes working with it daily a true torture.

There are numerous other smaller bugs and annoying things that I don't have time for to write down but if I can summerize, if you want your marketing team to be lean, flexible and successful then do yourself a favor and pick any other system.

Vorteile

As with all things SalesForce you can expect nothing but the top level of customer support and options. We currently run a Salesforce website, so the integration is flawless and easy. There's not much additional setup or any big learning curve to start using it.
The Marketing Cloud is a great way to easily manage our social media accounts, facebook posting, and email automation solutions. Because this platform is integrated with our website, it's still very easy to have outside vendors and software solutions that integrate with it. An example of that is that we still use Mailchimp to help manage our email channel even though the Marketing Cloud offers an email solution as part of their software.

Nachteile

The main disadvantages of using this software are pretty much the same disadvantages of any of the Salesforce platforms and/or integrations. For the uninitiated those are:
- Some of the most costly software that accomplishes the same tasks as other platforms
- Can be a bit complicated to navigate due to the sheer possibilities + abilities you have using the Salesforce platform.

If you understand both the expenses associated with using Salesforce and have people who can either learn it, or teach it, then i'd say there's no other real disadvantages to using it!

Vorteile

Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrates seamlessly with Salesforce CRM, providing a comprehensive view of customer interactions across multiple channels and offers advanced segmentation and personalization capabilities, allowing businesses to deliver targeted and relevant content to their customers it also provides a comprehensive platform for multi-channel marketing automation, including email, mobile, social media, and web.

Nachteile

Can be expensive for small businesses and startups, as it is primarily designed for enterprise-level businesses, it may have limited integrations with other tools.

Vorteile

Awestruck by the platform. My marketing campaigns were set up and customised without much difficulty because to the user interface's excellent usability and intuitiveness. Particularly helpful has been my ability to divide up my audience into several groups and tailor the content for each one. The Salesforce CRM connectivity is one of my favourite features. It enables smooth data analysis and transmission, which has improved my ability to target customers and develop a deeper understanding of them.

Nachteile

As it is among the most effective in this sort of industry for the functions it provides and is also fairly simple to comprehend and include into business equipment, I have nothing unfavourable to say about it.

Vorteile

Salesforce is a powerful CRM tool that is widely used in a variety of industries. It has a lot of features and integrates with many other types of software.

Nachteile

Data entry can be cumbersome. The system is not intuitive and neither is the layout of screens, though some of that can be customized. When it comes to running reports, there are a lot of pre-built ones, but most of those aren't useful. I usually find myself having to build my own, and that process is cumbersome and not at all intuitive. There are many different types of reports and it's hard to find the one needed to get the data that I seek. Also, it does not do a great job of tracking contacts who are associated with multiple accounts (such as a representative of multiple companies), and there is not a way to show affiliations between multiple accounts (such as divisions of a large company).

Vorteile

This product poses itself as top of class, but that's only in pricing. It is complicated and not marketing friendly. The interface is not userfriendly and the tool does not support multiple brands without a heavy pricetag.

Nachteile

The price, the user experience, the lack of multibrand use. When I threatened to take my business elsewhere we had one call with the VP but then he stopped responding to calls and emails.

Vorteile

Salesforce offers a tons of flexibility. Salesforce allows you to build anything you can imagine.
The CRM can perform some serious heavy lifting and integrates with practically all programs on the market.
Tasks let you keep track of ongoing discussions or tasks with clients and prospects, whilst reporting lets you monitor how your team is performing.

Nachteile

Sometimes it is slow to use
However, that is just how CRMs are, I've looked at many different CRMs available, and Salesforce has so far proven to be the finest.

Vorteile

Features are good in concept. Support takes at most a day to get back to you on cases. Support can usually help you, but not always.

Nachteile

Documentation is poor and almost always not descriptive enough and outdated. The system itself is very buggy. The typical response from support is "Just start fresh" in regard to whatever you're working on. We have a Sales cloud integration which does not work well with Marketing cloud. The connector is antiquated and it's impossible to leverage synchronized data extensions in journeys and other marketing content.

Vorteile

This software is an online SAAS, and is some of the most powerful Marketing Software on the planet. The software is best used in an environment where personalized, but mass email communication is needed--typically for B2C situations. Pardot is an ideal product for B2B solutions. Although the product can be configured and used by end-users, it is best to work with a partner.

Nachteile

There are many updates needed in order to make the software work in a more user-friendly fashion, particularly when compared with less powerful solutions, like Constant Contact, MailChimp, etc. A Salesforce partner will cost additional money to implement the solution, but it is a good investment.

Vorteile

My overall experience with Salesforce Marketing Cloud is really great, because it is user friendly and easy to use marketing automation platform available in the market and with the help of it I am able to create Email campaigns, SMS campaigns, Direct mail campaigns and push notification campaigns. We also have purchased its Email studio, SMS studio and Push studio license.

Nachteile

I do not have any dislike for this platform.

Vorteile

I like nothing other than the fact that I now know how to use Salesforce Marketing Cloud, which apparently is a great accomplishment. I'd personally rather use ANY other ESP.

Nachteile

The UX is absolutely terrible. Can't make segments easily, everything is so unbearably slow. I cannot believe SFMC is so "talked about" in the industry. It's awful.

Vorteile

The email builder is very easy to use and the ability to specify a preheader was greatly appreciated.

Nachteile

Hard to pick what was worst - terrible customer service, despite paying for Premiere Support it often took days to get problems solved (and updates were constantly causing new problems), or the fact that the answer to every question was either no or an upsell.

Vorteile

Very robust system. I use the email studio platform the most, followed by SMS studio. These platforms provide enterprise level email and sms deployment and campaign management.

Nachteile

Very expensive to implement and use, but at the enterprise level, it is one of, if not the top player.