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.

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

That second bullet point though

[Anonymous]

Thanks for your contribution Jenn

[Jenn_DiMaria2]

I've worked at three companies where this happened with me. It wasn't directed at you.

[Anonymous]

Josh, the dedicated IP is not about the cost - we don't send enough to keep it "warm", so it would be wasted. Our list is clean, it's other people who are on the same IP as us that are causing the issue. I understand everyone will have some problems with their lists at some point, but as said above repeatedly, it's Marketo's refusal to acknowledge the problem that is the issue. Especially as prevalent as it seems to be based on this thread, you'd think they would at least know how to resolve the issue. Instead, I spent a month going back and forth with them arguing about my SPF/DKIM setup.

[Anonymous]

Regina,

If you don't sustain the volume for a dedicated IP, but your company has good marketing opt-in practices, etc., you can ask to move to a Trusted IP. These are IPs shared by customers who have exhibited good sending behavior and they tend to have better reputation and deliverability. There are a few minor requirements but it's free of cost. Just ask your support or implementation person and they can give you the form to complete.

Kristen

[Josh_Hill13]

Yeah, I get it. I've had the same run around because SPF/DKIM is the standard script for new setups and the top support people only get on big accounts. Par for the course at any firm.

Global Executive Leadership Team - Marketo

Contact Alan Banks: Alan Banks Appointed Managing Director for EMEA at Marketo /PR Newswire UK/   find the UK number here

Contact Information & Global Office Locations - Marketo

and ask to speak with him directly, if you haven't yet. I don't mean to be condescending, but you may want to bring in the highest person on your side to make it clear to Alan how serious you are.

I don't know the regular escalation path for Marketo UK. I know a couple of local experts if you wanted to hire them.

Usually if I get the right people on the phone, my problem is solved by Engineering in these atypical cases.

[Anonymous]

Hi Josh, appreciate the info. I am the highest person on my side - I'm the one who signed off the purchase, and I'm the one who has to be accountable for this product to my board, hence my anger.

I appreciate the offer for local experts, paid for help, etc., but I shouldn't have to resort to outside consultancy to just get a product running at it's basic function level. I understand there are more complicated aspects of Marketo that may benefit from a more experienced person behind the wheel when setting up, but to sell something that can't even send a bloody email - that's pretty poor. 

[Conor_Fitzpatri]

I agree that most deliverability issues are self-inflicted and admit that we contributed to some of our own problems. The lack of official support in diagnosing the issue is my chief compliant. We moved to the preferred sender ip range, yet issues still persist. As for a dedicated ip, our email volume is too low to qualify for one. Currently, we only use Marketo to communicate with our customers (with plans to expand to inbound marketing in Q1 17) so our list is clean.

Marketo is a great tool with an outstanding community, but my experience with getting official support on such a critical issue has been less than stellar.

[Luis_Paez3]

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).

[Joe_Reitz]

I think this is fair. I generally subscribe to the mantra "it's a poor workman who blames his tools," but occasionally there are weird hiccups. I'm not quite willing to let Marketo off the hook for some of the things I've seen – from general slowness to timezones being represented wrong to RCA reports never being able to be pulled for... reasons – BUT there's no other platform out there that is a truly viable hub for all digital marketing strategies & tactics. So yeah... It's frustrating sometimes, but I still love it deeply.

Oh lawd... I just realized I'm practically married to Marketo...

In fairness, I think a lot of what we're seeing now is growth and server strain. I think that can only improve, but a healthy and honest dialog like this can only help speed it along!

[Anonymous]

Agreed - at the end of the day, it was still going to be Marketo against all of the other solutions, but it just would have been nice to be given realistic expectations when I joined, rather than being told it was basically the most perfect thing on earth. Because they weren't honest about the faults, I'm now in the uncomfortable position of having pushed very hard for Marketo and vouched for it to the board to get sign off, and now having to stand up and explain why, after three months, we've only sent three campaigns, and why we're out thousands of pounds for a sub-standard product.

As I've said above, it's good to hear it's not just me in this situation, but would be good for Marketo to take notice as this is obviously not an isolated issue, and it will only get worse the bigger they get if they don't start listening.

[Joe_Reitz]

I mean, we all agree salespeople are evil, right?

[ChristinaZuniga]

Hi Regina,

You've sent three campaigns three months after you...signed the contracted? Finished your implementation with a consultant? Or are you still in your Launchpack?

I've heard of implementations taking 2 years and having to completely restart (deleting their original marketo instance and starting from scratch). Depending on the complexity of your instance I'm not surprised that it's 3 months with so few campaigns. If a sales person sold it as up-and-running in a few weeks that's horrible and inaccurate.

I can only speak to my own experience, but Marketo is by far the easiest system I've used. A previous MA solution that I worked on wasn't able to do munchkin website tracking - they said they could, but the product didn't actually work - and it was almost impossible to calculate ROI (or even guess at it!). Marketo isn't exactly easy, but they deliver a good product especially compared to the rest of the market.

[Josh_Hill13]

I've had clients with this exact phrase. There could be many reasons only 3 campaigns are out the door.

Sadly, what the salespeople don't tell you is how much setup goes into it. It took me 3 months to learn and nearly 3 months to launch the first time...and it worked.

[Joe_Reitz]

if an imp is taking 2 years... good lawd, you might be doing something wrong. More likely, we're not operating from the same definition as to what is a "completed implementation," though.

[Dory_Viscoglio]

Yea, hopefully we're talking along the lines of Josh Hill​'s maturity model...

[Josh_Hill13]

Yes. Implementation is roughly 90 days or less. If you meant that you didn't achieve the promised vision, then that's a project issue as Dory alludes to. I've definitely seen people blow up old instances. There are tons of reasons and not all are related to poor planning.

[Ayan_Talukder]

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.

[Anonymous]

Thanks Ayan, good to know I'm not alone in this, but disappointing that it seems to be such a common problem, and yet still takes so much work to a) convince them of the problem and b) have them suggest a solution.

[Ayan_Talukder]

You are absolutely right, Marketo has been growing at an exponential rate the last several years. I feel like with the overwhelming demand from customers, it is impairing their customer service. I hope this is a focus point for them for the next fiscal year.

[Anonymous]

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.