DashThis vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

It's great if you have to provide reports (either internally or for clients) on a regular basis. It takes a little time to set up your structure (surely comparable to the time you'd spend in another tool and definitely faster than doing it manually), but then it saves so much time on an ongoing basis. It's also really important when you want your reports to look good -- which is pretty much all the time! No more Word documents here and Excel spreadsheet there with mismatched formatting all over the place. Now you can have one streamlined look, which allows you to view the data more easily and not get tripped up on the report itself. Honestly, I think it's appropriate in pretty much any situation! I guess maybe if you were just pulling one report one time, then it might not be worth the time it takes to set up, but even then it depends -- you still have the benefit of one clear, streamlined look for all your data. And it's less error-prone.

Incentivized

At least for us, what we noticed is the best use case is that it replaces the use of cloud teams, which has a more complex platform to navigate; since we are already using Salesforce, it was just more straightforward to allow the teams to continue to do that as opposed to giving them a new system. This also works for us because they are both selling the same product in different ways. Any team collaboration is where this product shines.

Incentivized

• Simple drag and drop interface. No complex programming or integrations needed.
• Custom options for advanced users. The baseline graphs and charts are very helpful, but depending on what point you're trying to get across it's easy to create your own for maximum understanding
• Easily accessible. Save time, trees, and money. Every month we simple forward a dashboard link to our clients. No complex reports necessary.

Incentivized

• Filter relevant content so you can priorize those that are more relevant and resolve it first
• Measure the traffic in the different social networks, as well as the response rate, average response time and other relevant metrics
• Configure automation rules to order the work of those who must interact with the customer

Incentivized

• Currently it's missing Amazon Ads integrations, which I have submitted a request for.
• There should be options to transfer dashboards to other accounts, as needed. For example, when a client engagement ends, being able to transfer the dashboard to the client account would be cool. I'm sure the capability exists.
• Offline-reporting capabilities or sending PDFs through email of the dashboard may be very valuable to people reviewing data that don't currently have internet access.

Incentivized

• Automation studio is very hard to use. We need to create a Data extension with all required fields before we can run SQL. So it takes a lot of time.
• Query Studio is much easier to use but it often gives an error while running the same SQL in Automation Studio works fine.
• We were not able to set up SMS messages as SFMC is not supporting MMS which is a big problem.

Incentivized

We are happy with Pardot. It has made our jobs easier and installed some reporting functions that have increased our ROI with the company. We have worked hard to set-up the functions in Pardot and it has taken time, but paid off.

You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.

Incentivized

Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.

Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.

I always get a same day response to my questions and they reach out enough that I feel like I can ask questions but not too much that I get annoyed.

Incentivized

They are really responsive and more than not solve the problem or give you insight to how you can manage the solution yourself. I do find however sometimes a long delay on the more complex issues when they need to loop in other departments. but overall a good experience with support

Incentivized

Training program is not very well established. There is very little documentations. More often than not it's in-person training. I wish there were more video tutorials so that somebody can learn the system quickly. Their documentation is very much like an RFP. Long and very technichal. They should definitly improve on this area.

Incentivized

Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.

From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.

Either the reporting was too complex or too basic. I didn't want to spend months and months learning how to integrate new dashboards with all different platforms. Additionally, the other dashboard companies don't allow for enterprise reporting. I have some clients with 50 Google Ads accounts, and you cannot pull all that data into 1 dashboard.

Incentivized

We use Salesforce Marketing Cloud for lead management, generating reports, tracking customer and dealer information, inputting orders, and more. I prefer HubSpot for email marketing and automation because it is easier to use and the emails are designed much better. We currently use Salesforce and HubSpot, and we are very happy to have both, as they have different pros/cons.

Incentivized

Salesforce Marketing Cloud does a great job at what it is designed to do. There are several SaaS products in the Marketing Automation arena and SFMC is one of the top providers. There are several things it does well, such as email marketing and automation, leads generation/segmentation/qualification, and reporting/analytics. There are a few areas of improvement when it comes to the product and they surround legacy systems and architecture, outdated UI/UX, as well as targeting data in the activity logs for reporting and segmentation.

Incentivized

• DashThis has reduced the time I spend on reporting by about 50%
• Visualizations are simple and easy to understand -- Clients like them very much
• Reduced dependency on files as archive of all dashboards/reports are available online

Incentivized

• We have been able to create mature lead generation opportunities using Salesforce Marketing Cloud in conjunction with CRM.
• We have had to spend much more in technical support
• We have been able to save on costs of daily maintenance emails through automation.

Incentivized