Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Vorteile

I’ve spent more than 3 years administrating/ consulting for many companies on salesforce implementation and continue to find ways to make it work even better. Salesforce provides one of the most well-integrated, predictable and feature-rich CRM that I’ve worked with and implemented. There are so many ways that I can tailor Salesforce to businesses. This product is one of the most robust platforms out today and is great for any sales team. This CRM helps companies by keeping track of all sales related information. It also offers custom reports which is one of the best features, This will provide companies with business analytics to understand where we need to improve sales processes. I will say as an administrator of this product there is a little learning curve to help a company utilize all of the functionality of this product, but once you have a grasps you will see a huge difference in company sales!!!

Nachteile

This CRM can be expensive for small-scale business. There are a lot of customizations that would be needed in the implementation process, which adds to cost of development. I would recommend hiring a SalesForce Administrator/Developer for your team for the implementations process and general maintainenece. This would help cut down the cost by not using SalesForce to do it for you, plus I do think their customer support is lacking.

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

The first email platform I worked on was SFMC. Definitely the strongest features of the platform were the ability to customize so much through the use of Ampscript functions, content areas, and data extensions, as well as the ability to segment and cohort large amounts of user data with the power of having a full on SQL editor to do so.

Nachteile

The platform was hacked together on the backend, and whoever headed up product did not do a good job of making the UX/UI cohesive. Extremely slow to execute queries on large data sets, and until they moved it into Automation Studio, there was no way to know when your query finished running, or what the error was if it ran into one. On the UX/UI side, who the heck made the decision that Emails and Data Extensions could be shared across Business Units, but User-Initiated Sends/Queries/Scripts, etc can't? It's not consistent, random items can be shared, while others can't and must be manually copied over to the other Business Unit.

Vorteile

This is an outstanding product for 1:1 engagement with an existing audience. We're still somewhat new to it, but are quickly coming up to speed. Best modules are open APIs, Journey Builder (basically pulls the entire suite together to build repeatable workflows), Audience builder (works hand/glove with Journey Builder), and Mobile Studio. It will take time for us to gather enough behavior and other attribute values to really put this to work. But it has plenty of horsepower and data tools and really get us to advanced personalization and performance analysis.

Nachteile

The suite is a set of modules cobbled together via the original product (ExactTarget) and new apps purchased by SFDC (e.g., Social Studio, which as Radian 6). This makes it cumbersome to assemble an entire campaign because you're constantly pinging back and forth through different modules (via a tabbed interface) to get things done. It's probably too late now for a truly unified, campaign-based UI, so it will have to do.

Vorteile

As a provider of digital marketing automation (email, social, ads) and analytics, is great when it comes to connecting the dots between what you know about customers and what marketing materials you should send to them. The Journey Building feature is incredible for this. This also allows you to set triggers and make intelligent automation decisions.

Nachteile

Make sure you have an infrastructure in place that will allow for the immense amount of data entry and data maintenance necessary to keep the CRM up-to-date and allow intelligent marketing insights and automation to even be possible. You don’t want to make marketing decisions based on an accurate CRM information.