Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs. Marketo for Client Onboarding Emails

[Marisa_Rybar]

Hey everyone,

We are currently undergoing an enterprise level transition off of our rickety old crm (that no one has ever heard of) onto Salesforce. It's a big transition that is going to take the better part of a year, and of course one of the conversation points is automating new customer onboarding messaging. I believe they're trying to wrap all customer facing retention emails into this as well. (Note: We're not currently doing any of this because not only is our Marketo instance not currently connected to that old crm, but we also don't have one source of record for who our customers are, which means I've only been able to use our instance for lead gen up until this point.)

In our meeting last week, it was suggested that we use Salesforce Marketing Cloud to be the source of record for these automated customer facing communications, and I'm not sure I agree. However, I didn't speak up at the moment because I don't have a strong enough reason why not, plus I am the only person managing our Marketo instance so from a bandwidth perspective, I can't really argue if they want to take that off my plate.

All of this to say...I could use your insights and help so that I can create a case for why I think we should build this in Marketo instead of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, or if you think SMC would be the better option given my bandwidth challenges, which will be the case for one more year.

Thoughts?

Thank you!

[Darrell_Alfons2]

Hey Marisa,

1 system versus 2 systems will be better from a reporting standpoint, as well as data management.

With Marketo you can wrap these customer communications into a program and define what success looks like. Then you can have your prospect emails and existing customer emails reporting in the same place.

From a data management perspective, you can use segmentations to make sure your clients aren't in the prospect list, prospects aren't in the client list, so you aren't sending mixed messages.

With 2 systems (unless you have a pretty slick setup) I imagine you will be importing and exporting a lot to compare data, and there will be a high probability of error.

[Marisa_Rybar]

Thanks, Darrell!

If everything is syncing through SFDC though, what do you envision I would be importing and exporting? The biggest things I would worry about if we used SFDC Marketing Cloud would be being able to see email performance and program performance. What other gaps do you see here in my thinking? (The more you can think of the better! )

[Darrell_Alfons2 · Accepted solution]

Sorry lag.

I guess if you have your SFDC syc thoughtfully setup, you should be fine.

I was initially thinking about unsubscribes lining up in both systems, but of course you can have both systems stamp the email opt out box in salesforce.

One thing to think about, is unless you have marketo and marketing cloud plugged into a BI tool, you will have to export to compare data from both (unless you don't plan on comparing programs against each other, then I suppose you won't have to).  Out of the box, you won't be able to see email performance metrics in Salesforce, like opens, clicks, and soft bounce information (usually it's a good idea to mark hard bounce in salesforce). So that info will have to be in the 2 separate email platforms.

[Marisa_Rybar]

Thanks, Darrell!