Marketo Reviews

Marketo makes it easy to stay in contact with our base of customers, prospective customers, and partners. The ability to quickly build and automate complex scenarios, create dynamic lists, and analyze campaign results is invaluable.

With the increasing sophistication of anti-phishing and filtering software, we have seen a number of messages that return link clicks – even though links were not actually clicked.  A simple indicator of this, is when Marketo analytics show that every individual at a particular company has clicked on a link (usually the same one) in an email.  These “phantom clicks” can make it difficult to estimate the effectiveness of a particular email or piece of content.

This issue has been discussed extensively in the Marketo community, and the larger ESP community as well.  While there are several temporary works arounds, I would like to see a more proactive attempt at a long-term solution.  I do recognize that this problem is not limited to Marketo, and it certainly has not been a deal-breaker for our continued use of the platform.

Three years

I joined the organization after deployment, but am told it was a relatively smooth process. As with any automation solution, the real hurdle isn't in the deployment, it's in optimizing processes to take advantage of the product's unique capabilities.

Marketo is a solid automation platform with fantastic stability.

The scalability of the solution is virtually unmatched. We've expanded our operations (and database) greatly over the past few years without a hitch.

Customer service is prompt, friendly, and generally helpful.

Pricing depends on the size of your database and feature set.  Our experience with the renewal process has been frustrating.  Marketo bakes a substantial price increase into each contract which has required renegotiation every year.

Great ease of use creation for campaigns. Marketo enables the use of templated landing pages and emails to make it easy to create messages and landing pages.

The available analytics are sub-par.

No.

No.

Customer Service:

This is where Marketo falls short. Their customer service is awful.

Technical Support:

OK>

Yes. Switched with a new company.

Straightforward.

In-house and vendor.

Yes.

Email drip campaigns

Automated customer outreach from sign up to upgrade

Easier to create/modify graphic driven templates

Need automatic 404 reporting for links included in content

5 years

Takes time to setup and manage

None

None

Customer Service:

8 out of 10

Technical Support:

8 out of 10

Manual solution with Constant Contact - easier to manage multiple campaigns in Marketo

Architecture for the brand and organizing landing page domains/URLs took time

In-house

Saves .5 man/year

Varies

Hubspot

Pardot

Hire a Marketo certified consultant prior to install and launch.

- Relative ease of use - Advanced capabilities for closed-loop lead management - SFDC sync

- Can be more than what you really need - Wish it had a better user interface - Needs integration with marketing resource management

I like the integration with Salesforce.

We have a better alignment of sales and marketing. It allows me to do things in Salesforce without an admin.

• Speed to sync if you have lots of leads
• Attribution reporting

We have been using this solution for six years.

In terms of stability, it takes longer to sync with Salesforce than it should at times.

In terms of scalability, the more leads you have, the longer it takes to sync with Salesforce.

I would give technical support a rating of 5/10.

I have used Act-On, HubSpot, and Infusionsoft. Many clients switch due to cost.

To make the initial setup better, brush up on best practices and come up with a naming convention that starts with the year, month, and date in order to keep things consistent.

We evaluated Pardot, HubSpot, and Act-On.

Map out your processes and customer journey before you start building.

amazing interface, simple to integrate with SFDC, Love the metrics and analytics- that part completely blows away the other vendors including eloqua. They understand how marketing needs to deliver business data.

They should share best practice implementation- because there's so much variation in how you can set it up- you can do it wrong. So setting it up right the first time would be ideal. This solution also doesn't scale for the large enterprise- a huge downside for them.

This is the best marketing automation solution out there, for the ease of use, the amazing metrics, the integration to SFDC, and the price.

Marketo gives me the toolset necessary to create automated drip email campaigns to my customers and prospects. HUGE ROI! Great customer service and still (relatively) nimble dev team always willing to help, even in special, or "one-off" scenarios.

UI is a little dated. Pricing. It is NOT cheap, given the functionality of the product. Feels like I could be paying less. Still the results I get from it more than justify the price. Could also do with some better WYSWIG editors for landing page configuration. I also wish that they provided more testing capability and other metrics, like open time, in addition to the metrics they are currently providing. If you're in B2B sales, and are using Salesforce, you NEED Marketo! They provide a comprehensive toolset, that when configured properly, widens the sales funnel in its entirety. You can cut back on SDRs and improve the productivity of each one, which is perhaps another reason of why they charge what they charge. I would highly recommend that if you are considering a Marketo deployment (or similar), you go through the steps necessary to make sure the system is well implemented. Spend time planning out your workflow prior to the implementation. Lead scoring, in conjunction with marketing automation, make for POWERFUL TOOLS. Marketo is no exception, but we made the mistake of doing a partial implementation in the first go round, and it was not until I saw another company's deployment that I realized how much we were leaving on the table.

Use case that would be extremely relevant for a Marketo Deployment: Interested parties submit information requests. They are stored into Marketo, based on what actions they take (how long they spent on the site, looked at these white papers, etc). They will then get follow-on emails to help qualify the opportunity. Once they respond, and certain criteria is met, the system will pass the lead off to a Sales rep, significantly cutting down on higher touch "pre-qualified" communication.

Marketo has a great UI that's both easy to use and navigate.Set-up took a while but Marketo support offers extensive training for new users, both on-demand videos and a 4-day live training session online.I adopted Marketo after using Pardot for lead management and email automation and was very pleased with how easy it was to integrate 3rd party tools. The extensive integration with GoToWebinar and SFDC saved me tons of time following online events.Additionally, the Marketo Community offers extensive information as well as the ability to suggest and vote for new features. If I couldn't find my answer in the Community, the support team was always very helpful.

The design studio offers limited out-of-the-box features and we had to work with a developer to create new landing pages etc.Changing a campaign in progress (i.e. changing the wait period between emails) is unnecessarily complicated. We would have to create a new, nearly identical campaign, pull all leads out the initial campaign and move them to the new one just to change a wait step!The support team in Ireland is very helpful and always goes above and beyond. I wish I could say the same of the US based support team - when I spoke with them, it felt like the rep was reading a script and not listening to my question at all.

Overall - I am very pleased with Marketo for email automation and lead management. I recommend it as a tool but don't disregard the initial training they offer to new users. Not all features are intuitive and training sessions point you in the right direction.