Constantly finding faults with Marketo

Hey Regina, every implementation of Marketo is unique, but what type of specific problems have you been running into? Did you migrate from another MA tool or are you starting fresh?

As far as escalating things, if you have support tickets open you should be able to escalate directly through the ticket -- but I would definitely look at the things that you're having issues with. Can you provide more insight there?

Hi Regina,

What do you mean by "faults" ?

There is no reason why you should not be able to send emails. Some of our customer produce thousands of emails per year, each of them being sent to literally tens of thousands of contacts/leads.

There are some annoying hitches in Marketo, as I listed a while ago here: Just do it! Marketo so-called minor missing features , and there is surely room for improvement (give a look to the ideas section) but honestly nothing that prevents the work to be done.

Have you had enough training? Help from Marketo real consultant (someone with real experience)?

When migrating from other MAP, the logic of Marketo can be a little difficult to get. Especially the complete separation between assets (emails, forms, landing pages) and actions (smart campaigns), which makes it very different form most of the other solutions on the market, but also so much more flexible.

-Greg

I experienced similar issues. My company has been with Marketo for a few months and all of our initial email sends had poor deliverability due to the IP address. We were able to get switched to a better IP address and that resolved the issue. Also experienced similar issues as you with the ability to setup support tickets. One day I could set up tickets and the next day I couldn't. The issue finally got resolved.

The support ticket issue was minor; not being able to deliver emails to customers was a huge issue. Thankfully both are now resolved. Hopefully Marketo is watching and considers making changes to their on-boarding of new customers since we have faced similar issues.

When our company first on boarded Marketo, we were experiencing the same deliverability issues with Marketo. The shared IP address was blacklisted by many of our customers. With a ton of back and forth, we were able to get a dedicated IP address which solved our issue completely.

I also get frustrated by functionality that I think should work better but (at the time) just does not.  Most of us marketo admins share that pain from time to time. I've discovered that thoroughly searching the community for posts from others who have had that problem often leads me in the right direction to a solution (whether it be on my (admin) end or Marketo's (provider) end of things).  Also, I've had success filing support tickets early on in my troubleshooting and getting good direction from support on technical issues for a faster issue resolution.

All that being said, I still haven't seen a product that blends a powerful feature set and an easy to use UI as well as Marketo has done. So at the end of the day, I'm still a fan (just a sometimes frustrated one).

Hi Regina,

I have been experiencing the same deliverability issues and lack of help from Marketo to solve them. Like you, our SPF and DKIM is properly set up and we even moved to the preferred sender IP range, yet our customers still complain about not receiving our emails. We’re in the process of redesigning our website so my attention has been shifted away from our deliverability issues. However, as soon as the site is launched, I will be turning my attention back to deliverability. I will be sure to let you know what steps we take to solve our issues.

As far as my experience with Marketo, it’s definitely a love-hate relationship. When the tool works, it’s fantastic, but the deliverability issues and the lack of help from Marketo support has been beyond frustrating.

I hope you get your issues sorted out and please let me know if there is any additional information I can provide to help you.

If you have other issues with the system, we can help, as Jessica suggests. If you are having challenges with the Community, Liz Oseguera can help here.

You may also want to look at the many agencies out there for free help on their blogs or to consider having an expert guide the implementation. There are right ways, and wrong ways to do this. Marketo is a very free form workflow tool, so it can easily become complex if not designed well. They leave a lot up to you. Once you get the hang of it, you'll find it is very powerful.

Regina, I have had all of these issues as well and I have not gotten any real concrete help or support after months of trying to escalate. The one thing that I am grateful for is that the team at Marketo ignores my very senior male boss just as much as they ignore me. Initially I thought they might be ignoring me because I am a more junior employee and I'm female, but that is absolutely not the case. I can't even calculate how Marketo has impacted our traffic and the health of our email list. My condolences to you!

Also -- I was very intrigued to see the original post go out in a Marketing newsletter from Marketo. Is this the most positive customer feedback they've gotten lately?

We've had numerous issues; in fact we've recently had tickets open for 3 months where they've acknowledged defects in Marketo. Almost weekly we are submitting new cases--and considering their most recent outages--there seems to be some real issues going on. I've asked a few times for an explanation on why suddenly there seems to be so many problems and haven't gotten any real explanation.

And yes, we have a complex set-up with a number of custom objects syncing over from SFDC.

Hi Regina,

I am a new user and feel exactly as you do.  I purchased additional hours from Marketo to extend my launch pack, which helped a little bit, but It got so bad one that I just sat down and cried!!!!  I too was the strongest supporter of Marketo and swayed my company away from Pardot in favor of Marketo - my job and reputation were on the line.

I too hope this will get easier at some point.  I have had to hire a 3rd party consultant to be available to me as my support.  You may need to do the same.

we are running into Marketo/SFDC sync errors.  Unfortunately, Marketo points me to our SFDC Admin, but she too needs better support from Marketo and is not getting it.

I know I did not help you in any way, but I wanted you to know that you are not alone.

I wish you the best and hope things get better for us both.

Terry

I have also experienced many bugs. Marketo does not have the font that is in our branding guidelines, the email templates are aligned improperly and the CTA buttons are having problems now too. The account manager I work with is often unresponsive and I have to send many reminders. Campaign Monitor was much easier to use and the analytics features were easier to explore and refer to as well.