Karyn_Hill

We're now using Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Some things are better (such as support!) but it's not as versatile as Marketo. The editor is better but what passes for automation is decidedly not. I really wish Marketo would re-join the race as it can be so much better than it is. Best of luck! If it were up to me, I'd switch back to Marketo if I had written assurance that the support problems were resolved and they were going to start fixing the worst parts of their lagging platform. ... View more

It looks like Sanford Whiteman has you covered in the other thread. It's currently at the point where I'd be feeling too stupid to continue so KEEP GOING! And remember that a person who knows how to do something really well will often forget to include basic steps and info because it simply doesn't occur to them.  It can be done without Velocity but it would be really complicated, messy, and require a whole lot of work when a new product is added, or someone decides they need to do something else as well. You're better off learning the new skill, which you will probably be able to apply to other situations in the future and save yourself a lot of annoyance. Good luck! ... View more

As a small non-profit, there are things that can be done in Marketo by a developer (someone with more than my fumbling novice attempts) that we simply can't afford, and likely never will be able to. But we can get those things already built in Marketing Cloud, and while the cost is roughly the same, we don't have to pay extra for SSL, we won't have to pay extra for a dedicated IP when our volume is high enough to warrant one, and the people who are building the day-to-day emails from our templates have a much better experience. Journeys are easier for people to understand and use than campaigns in Marketo are. And the analytics are light-years easier to use than those in Marketo. For a company who can have employees dedicated to Marketo and have developer experience, I suppose the experience is noticeably better. An awful lot of companies aren't in that situation, though. And 7 weeks, with still no resolution to a problem, is absurd. It's not hard for Marketo's engineers to improve the editor so that it's easier to use and more flexible. It's a marketing program; email marketing should be among the top concerns. It's great to have flashy new things to play with but the fact is that a marketing program needs to be easy to use for a non-developer who just wants to structure their email in a way the developer never thought of. And it shouldn't take more than 7 weeks to resolve an issue with something happening in the program that shouldn't. I miss Marketo, no doubt. But I really like how much easier Marketing Cloud is to use, even though it's not perfect. We can deal with it's imperfections far more easily than we can with those of Marketo. ... View more

The poor tier 1 customer support is one of the reasons we're switching to something else. A year ago it was much better than it is now. Even escalating a trouble ticket doesn't always help; it seems their engineers are so swamped that I had a ticket open for 7 weeks with the support engineer basically checking into things once a week and sending a new solution or request for info. It no longer matters because we've decided to switch and are doing so as rapidly as possible.  I was a huge Marketo fan in the beginning but the support experience the last several months has soured me on the platform, and the inability to do a few key things without the benefit of a developer means the cost isn't worth it for us. I'm still gobsmacked by the decrease in effectiveness and timeliness of support. It has been incredibly frustrating and copying in our customer rep barely moved the needle. It's such a shame. I love so much about the product but we're a business (non-profit, but still a business) and we need things that work as expected or can be fixed within a reasonable period of time. ... View more

Our designer is involved from the very beginning. She draws out what she wants and then I code it. She reviews it and we change as necessary. When someone needs a module that doesn't already exist, we follow the same process. We have a style guide that determines much of the look of things but she's the one who determines how it should all be brought together. To my understanding, this is the normal procedure in most places. Designers aren't brought in as an afterthought when everything has already been built; they're a member of the team from the start. I'm the only one where I work with any coding knowledge and we have only one designer so that may make the process easier to follow than it would be for most companies, but not by much. ... View more

That wouldn't have been more typing, it would have been less. I have nearly none of the knowledge a person needs to implement your solution, considering it's talking about all sorts of things that have to do with an external site and other things I don't know how to do. I can't upload a .js script anywhere, just to start with. What would be awesome is if someone (you or anyone else) could break it out into things non-coders could understand. It's cool if you don't have the time to create instructions for people who look at your solution and barely understand what's there. But if you aren't going to do that, please don't talk about how easy it is. I have no doubt you could do this literally while you're asleep. I don't even know where to begin. I'm not intending any offense but you come off as incredibly arrogant to those of us who are just trying to fix some problem that came up, through no fault of their own, but are working for a small, non-profit company that can't hire someone who knows how to do these things so instead sends the only person who knows HTML to try and figure it out. When you comment on a question I post, I leave the exchange feeling like a complete idiot. And you know what? I'm not one. I would love to use your solution but I can't understand it. You may now rest assured that I'm aware you're a billion times smarter than I am, and that I will go to my boss and say "some guy has a solution but I can't understand it," guaranteeing that I'll go home today feeling like a failure. Kudos. Where are the nice people, who actually want to help people solve their problems without having to make them grovel for it or feel like an idiot? ... View more

I read it just fine the first time around. Anyone else would have said something like "my solution for external sites works for that, too. You can find it in those other discussions about the pre-fill change." ... View more

It's not on an external site, it's on a Marketo landing page. ... View more

We have a custom field for member status, which uses our custom membership codes. It (usually) works just fine. I should have just said I submitted a case for something else about a form and they seemed aware of the pre-fill issue at that time. ... View more

I'm not sure if it's related but at some point in the last two weeks, our forms stopped displaying options based on a member status each person has. Regardless of member status, it only shows the options that should be displayed to non-members. I submitted a support case last week and they came back to me on Friday with the suggestion to turn off pre-fill. That didn't help my situation, but it leads me to believe Marketo was aware of the issue at least by then. ... View more

The way we've forced our current CRM (MSD) to bend to the weird way we do business has caused many headaches for us wherever it has to integrate with anything else. We're just about to move from MSD to Fonteva (Salesforce with a skin) and, to a greater degree than we have before, are de-customizing our way of doing things to better match the way it natively handles things. Not everything, but hopefully enough that we'll have far fewer headaches. Now if I can just convince people to segment people in a more useful way, we'll be doing a lot better! Good luck with untangling the mess you've been handed. I've seen a little more of what you're going through and I don't envy you the headaches you're working through! ... View more

Hi Ronn Burner​! How is this going for you? Have you gotten a solution? ... View more

I think at this point, it has just been the person handling our integration that has been pushing Pardot. I'll check into it so I can add a cautionary voice if needed, but my voice counts for little. I really would prefer to stay with Marketo. ... View more

Hi Grace, Thanks for your thoughtful response. The editor isn't the only reason we're considering switching marketing programs. We've run into a few issues since we started with Marketo, the first being a six-month delay in implementation where we had to continue paying for our previous program and Marketo. That started Marketo off with some ill feeling for management, who hadn't planned for the extra expense. There are several other things, all of which seem worse because of the negative start. The editor is a big one, though. There are enough marketing programs with drag and drop editors that are completely flexible, with no one needing to dream up all possible combinations in order for them to function as drag and drop. I personally think it's workable and wish I had the time to really dig into Marketo and prove it. I don't, though, and their thought is that we shouldn't have to have someone work that hard to make the program work the way we want it to. This is coming from people accustomed to other programs, which they report to be more flexible than Marketo. And we're switching from MSD to Salesforce (with an interface designed by a third party), and the person handling that integration is pushing hard for us to use Pardot instead. I don't know a thing about Pardot but it has them thinking of options other than Marketo. I would very much like to take you up on a call. I'm about to go on vacation and would have time to do it. If I can come up with a template that solves their problems with it, that would remove a large part of their desire to change platforms. ... View more

Hi Grace, You make excellent points, most of which I agree with. As the one person at my company that codes, when someone asks me to do something in an email that I hadn't yet thought of, I can create it in the template, save the template, and then create the email and I'm good. But there are six other people creating emails and if they want a module that doesn't yet exist, they have only one person to ask to do it. That then slows them down, pulls me away from another task (Marketo is only a part of my job), and then they have to start their email over again. What our company needs, and many other companies, it seems, is a drag and drop editor. You can make literally any combination of rows and columns, without knowing code and just by dragging over text boxes or image boxes or buttons or whatever else, and put them in the order and configuration you want. I happen to very much love Marketo. Our company is now considering moving to another platform and my instinct is to shout "Don't take away my Marketo!" But the fact that, among other things, it doesn't have a drag and drop editor is a part of why they want to switch. The delay in the work of two people when someone wants a module that doesn't yet exist is a big factor in the desire to make a switch. And that doesn't even take into account the landing page editor, which is far more limiting than the email editor. We're a small non-profit association. I'm all they've got as a coder but I've already got more than enough to do with my other duties. The editor Marketo has is far superior to what we've used in the past and if I were the only one creating emails, we'd be good. But I'm not. The others who do it don't know how to code and wouldn't have time to do it anyway. Their roles were created a long time ago and they didn't include needing to know how to code, and I doubt that need could be added into their roles any time soon. A drag and drop editor would solve this for us—and everyone else who has posted to this forum over the years lamenting the lack of a drag and drop editor. ... View more

I'll check into that. I'm not opposed to saving money! ... View more

That's our situation—we have services that are branded in very different ways, and emails need to serve a variety of purposes and be more flexible on the fly. I create any module that anyone asks for or that I can think to add but our users always come up with something different they need. With knak, they'll be able to do it without having to wait for me to create the module first. And they're hoping to have their landing page editor work the same way by the end of the year. I'm really hoping we go for it. ... View more

We're checking into knak, which has an excellent, flexible drag and drop editor and can be used by our end users who don't know how to code at all. They frequently have to ask me to make a module to do what they want it to do that doesn't already exist. With knak, they can just built it themselves. And it's not all that expensive, all things considered. ... View more

This is what we used and it works marvelously. ... View more

You're definitely not stupid! Marketo, like any other non-custom program, is created to be used by the widest number of people. Some of us need to do non-standard things with it, though, so things get sticky. We have councils and have a custom field on contact records that is populated with a guid that identifies which council they're on. I believe you already have custom fields that let you know which things people are subscribed to. In our emails, we have a sidebar that will pull the corresponding snippet(s) into it. Each snippet has particular information specific to that council. I don't know anything about Velocity script or how one would use it for this situation. I manually create any snippets needed, which thankfully don't change often. The snippets are assigned to the segments in the Segmentation area inside the snippet editor. These are the segmentations in the Database section of Marketo. I'm sure there are people who could help you create the same for your particular situation, which has a much higher number of combinations than mine does, since our people are limited to at most three choices. But this is the set-up, and it does require custom fields on people's records, with values that differentiate them from each other for the segmentation. We'll be changing our membership model considerably by the end of the year so I might end up having the same situation you do, but not sure yet. That decision is well above my pay grade! I'll gladly try to answer any questions you have, I just might not know enough to answer them correctly. If I don't, I'll let you know. I don't want to give you bad information. ... View more

Thanks again for your answer. Hopefully they'll come up with a way to let us know when a campaign is over. And I'll learn more about the ways to make it work until that happens. ... View more

I'm a bit annoyed at myself for not having thought of it. But yes, there's always a facilitator, and that person will always be marked as having attended. I'll have to manually go find who that is and then get their email address but it'll work for now. Until I can finally get around to learning how to use webhooks. That seems like the right way to do it, rather than this manual workaround. In too many places, I'm twisting the way Marketo is intended to work to suit the way we do certain things. If anyone else has to take over before I get things straightened out, they'll be very confused! ... View more

In trying to find how to use Random Sample (I've not seen it before), I wondered if the below configuration would work. I'm still going to figure out the Random Sample thing, but if I put in the email address of our facilitator, who will definitely be marked as having attended, do you think this will work? I have nothing against Sanford's solution but Marketo is only a part of my job and I've never had time to look into webhooks. I know I need to but something else is always more urgent. ... View more

I'll read up on webhooks and see what I can make happen. Thanks for the answer! ... View more

Yes, that would certainly get complicated quickly. You'd need to have a snippet for each option, and then in the email, specify to pull products the person is subscribed to in one section, and then products they're not subscribed to in another. It can be done but it would take time and careful planning. I don't know that it will be a better option than what you're working on there. But it would be a way to handle it all in one email, rather than sending them multiples and needing to suspend them. ... View more

Perhaps your best bet would be to use snippets? That way you could have one engagement program (or maybe the four groups you already have) and they get one email per day, with the snippets providing the product-specific information as many times in the email as they have categories for. We're currently using this strategy for on-boarding emails for our 22 councils, where we sometimes have people on two or even three councils. There's different information for each council. ... View more

Good point! I'll change it to cookies before I send out the email letting people know. ... View more

Thanks for examining it for me. Several of us click on links in forwarded emails a lot so that's probably it. I'm instructing people to clear their cache and let me know if that doesn't work. Thanks for your help! ... View more