Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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.

Cons

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.

Pros

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

Cons

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.

Pros

This software makes it easy to build professional looking emails that add all the information you need with drag and drop

Cons

IT is sometimes hard to organize and sort files