Constantly finding faults with Marketo

[Anonymous]

I know most of you here are Marketo evangelists, but I have had nothing but issues with them since our signup about two months ago. My account manager is great, but there are SO many technical bugs and problems that no one seems to be able to provide an answer for - to the point that we have only been able to send one email in the past two months.

Is this common, and is there hope, or has it been consistently getting worse (for those users who have been here for a while)? I'm so frustrated because I was Marketo's biggest advocate internally, and I just feel like I hit a wall every time I try to show off a capability that *should* be working. 

Please can you tell me your experiences with them, and do you have any recommendations on how to escalate things - I'm just at my wits end.

[Anonymous]

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.

[Anonymous]

Hey Jenny, as Dory mentioned, the font thing is annoying, but not unique to Marketo - it just keeps your emails uniform across all of your recipients, as you can't control what fonts they'll have on their computer...  I have had issues with the email template alignment and the CTA buttons not appearing properly, for example, long rectangle with rounded edges in the editor, square with sharp edges in my actual inbox...

Sorry your account manager is rubbish - just keep hounding, it's the only advice I can offer!

[Dory_Viscoglio]

If you're looking for a platform to simply send emails, then yes! By all means! Campaign Monitor is a better platform. But, if your company is in a position where they need a true marketing automation platform, then you really do need something more advanced -- and Marketo is a front-runner in the MA space. They will all have their strengths and weaknesses.

Also, as far as fonts, are you referring to landing pages or emails? For emails, Marketo only uses standard fonts that will render well across all email clients. This is not unique to Marketo. For landing pages, you can use ANY font, as long as you reference it.. There are a ton of questions on this: Using Fonts in Marketo Landing Pages

[Anonymous]

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

[Anonymous]

Hi Terry,

Thanks for your response. I can completely empathise with you - I have had nights where I'm in the office past 9 pm, just trying to do the most simple thing in Marketo with tears in my eyes from frustration because I can't get it to work properly. Now the email editor has changed, and things aren't appearing in my inbox the same way they do in the editor, and on a whole, it has been radio silence from them since complaining about this.

While it is nice to know I'm not alone, it's horrible to hear that so many people are having this identical experience - and still, Marketo are doing nothing to remedy it!

It is a shame that you have had to extend your launch pack and hire outside help just to get the product working - it really shouldn't be that way, and I'm digging my heels in because I refuse to pay extra to just get it to do what it says on the tin.

Hoping things improve for you soon! x

[Anonymous]

Have you considered using Infusionsoft? I had success with them in the past working with a different company? https://www.infusionsoft.com/

[Anonymous]

Yes, I did look at Infusionsoft, but wasn't impressed with their features, and really, really couldn't stand the American surfer-bro voice everyone there had. They couldn't answer any of my questions, and just sounded high every time I spoke to one of them. I know that's a silly reason to dismiss a solution, but I couldn't bear it.

[Anonymous]

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.

[Anonymous]

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?

[Josh_Hill13]

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

[Anonymous]

Hey Josh Hill

FYI you tagged my non primary account (sorry that is even a possibility, you're impossible to tag!). Liz (Courter) Oseguera  is my primary.

Regina Bluman Josh is right, I'd be happy to help with anything to make your experience better, whether that be in Community or I am happy to fid the right person to help you be successful with Marketo. Please let me know if you'd like to hop on a call.

Best,

Liz

[Anonymous]

Hi Liz,

Thanks for your response. I think it's gone a bit beyond the community help though, my original post was more of a vent to see if I was the only one who seemed to be having these issues. I've since had calls with the Director of Customer Experience or Success or something like that, for EMEA and all of our Senior Account Managers, and Senior Support and Head of Support and anyone and everyone else. My issues are *slowly* being addressed, but I have to say I'm still pretty shocked and disappointed that I've had to wait this long and escalate it to this point to start getting an acceptable response and to finally start getting issues resolved.

[Anonymous]

In a similar position. I still have multi-month old cases.

Sent with Good (www.good.com)

[Anonymous]

I wish I could say it gets better mate, but I have nothing of hope to offer you, sorry!

[Kenneth_Law]

Hello Regina Bluman​ and Mark Budzyn (Prod)​.

Our team will take a look into your cases, but I wanted to let you know that if you aren't happy or are concerned with how your support case is being handled there are a few channels in the Marketing Nation that give you the ability to escalate your case or to request a contact from one of our Support Managers.

To request a Contact from a Support Manager, this button from Support​ will open up the Support Manager Contact form. 

If you need to escalate an existing case, from within the Case Detail in the CaseConnector there is an Escalate to Manager button that will appear for case escalation following support case response.

[Anonymous]

Hi Kenneth Law,

I tried for months to get my issues escalated (using the methods you suggested above), with zero improvement in response or resolution. I'm not whinging about something when there is an easy fix - when I posted this, I had exhausted all of the normal channels available to me, so while I appreciate you taking the time to respond, I'm afraid this is the exact type of response that drove me to posting in the first place - acting like I've missed something obvious, when in fact the failings are on behalf of Marketo.

As I have said above, my issues are finally being resolved through the most senior support person in EMEA (apparently) and the Director of Customer Experience (or some ridiculous title), but it's still pretty poor that it's taken me this long to get an acceptable response (and we're nowhere near a resolution yet), and it's even more poor that there seem to be a lot of other people here who share my experience, and perhaps aren't getting the attention that they need because they're not as... "vocal"... as I am.

[Anonymous]

Hi Regina,

I totally understand. Please let me know if there's anything I can do to help.

Best,

Liz

[Conor_Fitzpatri]

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.

[Anonymous]

Cheers Conor, good luck with the website redesign - possibly the only thing more frustrating than Marketo

[Josh_Hill13]

Many delivery issues are self inflicted. If you have a clean list and are actively keeping it that way, then you can push Marketo to get you on a better IP range. Does everyone need a dedicated IP? no. But even with a dedicated IP, I get blacklisted all the time and it's because of my list, not Marketo. I was at a pretty small firm for my first implementation and we had a dedicated IP because we cared about our reputation. It's not that much money.

To OP Regina, outside of Delivery, yes, I've had bugs with Marketo and feel that their dedication to maintaining the code base is waning. I am usually able to get these fixed with help from Support and Engineering. Most of the issues, however, are the UI, not the backend. Most of my tickets are to find out what crazy things we did though.

Does that mean I hate Marketo or want to switch? No. I want them to get better and keep me happy. From what I hear in the world, the other systems all have similar problems in different ways...to paraphrase Anna Karenina, each MAP is dysfunctional in its own way. Marketo is the least dysfunctional, IMO.

The biggest reasons for cancelling on Marketo are

• too much power for your level of marketing, so you never use 90% of the features (sales/RFP issue)
• poor implementation so you blame Marketo instead of whoever did it.
• the CMO wants a different system.