Marketing Cloud is an AI-powered, cloud-based digital marketing platform within the Salesforce Customer 360 ecosystem. Marketers can segment their audience, deliver personalized messages, track campaign performance, engage leads and accounts, and optimize strategies based on real-time insights.
$1,250
per month
Everest (Return Path + 250ok)
Score 10.0 out of 10
N/A
Everest is an integrated email success platform providing crucial insights and deliverability guidance so users can reach more people, increase engagement, and improve efficiencies of their email programs. Everest helps to improve email deliverability by getting complete visibility into email marketing metrics and sender reputation, understand the audience and deliver content that is timely, personalized, and functions flawlessly on any device, and get a holistic view of a company's…
Pardot is a player in that it is one of the older products on the forefront of email marketing. This is good and bad in that it has been established but bad in that it isn't as robust as some of the other products on the market. Adobe can be good but is new to the market and …
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.
Every new or established brand should be using Everest. It doesn't matter what you're trying to say in your emails—if they're not reaching the inbox, no one is listening or reading. Everest gives you the insight you need to understand your inbox placement, reputation and so much more.
Inbox placement data using seed list: It tells you about your inbox placements, spam, missing, and complaints. Very useful data that tells you that you are on the road!
Sender score for all I.Ps: Tells you quickly about your I.P score, helps you work fast as you know everything is fine, saves a lot of time.
Online support: Support from specialist, have an expert to guide in tough times to suggest options or to support your action strategy.
A good tutorial on how to leverage it would be helpful. Navigating is easy, but there's a lot of information and it takes a while to understand what everything means.
The reporting feature is intimidating, creating anew one isn't as user-friendly as the rest of the interface.
I understand what seeds are, but for new users, a very basic tutorial on what they are and why they are used would be helpful. Right now you have to have a baseline understanding of them before using it.
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.
Return Path helps us stay ahead of the curve and are a partner in helping us optimize our email program. They also keep us up-to-date on email laws and the changing ecosystem so that we are prepared and ready for changes, whether they're behavioral, legal or technology-driven. I definitely consider Return Path a necessary ingredient to sustaining a healthy email program.
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.
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.
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
Absolutely fantastic support. It runs circles around the competition. They regularly reach out and chat, even if it's just to see if there's any issues we need to discuss. They clearly want the business and don't forget you once you sign the contract which is an issue with other similar services.
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.
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.
I joined my company after the implementation was nearly complete. We used the Return Path tool as we slowly increased our send volume in Marketing Cloud to monitor IP reputation and inbox placement.
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.
Like I said before, Return Path is really the budget bundle. You get a lot of service for how much you pay. Since I am currently at an early stage startup, we could not afford Litmus, so having Return Path is crucial. The partnership with Salesforce also allowed us to get it at pretty low cost.
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.
Return Path has helped me enable better email delivery for our global partners e.g. some of our applications that send email to consumers in Australia or Europe.
Some of the functions that we utilized with Return Path were proving to be costly based on what the business needs were for us. That is why we cut back on some of the services we utilized.
