noticing. Salesforce Marketing Cloud has made great strides in the last year with the day-to-day service teams, but the company must continue to encourage a service mentality throughout the organization. Many clients raved about their team, yet were quick to point out that escalating issues in the organization can be a challenge. Salesforce Marketing Cloud has always been known for educational resources and an intuitive, easy-to-use interface and these attributes continue to garner client attention. Not surprisingly, the company’s omnichannel capabilities get high marks across the board.
What’s innovative for the marketer? In
2015, the company will allow clients to do predictive customer journeys. Using these predictive models, marketers can create optimal omnichannel customer journeys on-the-fly and automatically prescribe, plan and prioritize interactions based on customer preferences and behaviors.
The Relevancy Ring Award – A measure of client satisfaction: Tied for Gold Award-Infrastructure Stability, Tied for Silver Award-Integration, Tied for Gold Award-Educational Resources.
About the Company: ExactTarget began servicing email marketing in 2000.
Salesforce acquired ExactTarget in 2013 and has since rebranded the offering as Salesforce Marketing Cloud. The company has six offices in North America, including four U.S. locations and two offices in Canada. Additionally they have nine global offices that service email marketing. A third of their clients are enterprise, one third are mid-market and one third are SMBs.
Primary and Ideal Industries: Retail, Travel & Hospitality, Financial Services, Media & Entertainment and CPG & Technology.
WHATCOUNTS
WWW.WHATCOUNTS.COM
TRG Analyst: WhatCounts loves email. As a stand-alone mid-market player, they strive to provide clients with technology,
services, human support and even a full-service agency to help them succeed in email. The company’s full-service agency AgentsOfEmail.com is platform agnostic and will service clients on any ESP platform. WhatCounts offers a cloud-based solution, an on-premise appliance or the ability to host a dedicated appliance. Every client automatically gets an account manager. For a fee, the account manager can be exclusive. WhatCounts misses as an omnichannel platform as they are exclusively an email solution. The platform does not always get audience counts in real-time and lacks dynamic content reporting. However the solution provides an easy to use application that suits the email marketing requirements that are not overly complex.
Client Take: WhatCounts’ clients just might be the most enthusiastic clients of any ESP. They love the user interface and they place a lot of trust in their account service teams, whom they frequently refer to as “ extensions” of their marketing departments. If there were one particular thing clients would like to see WhatCounts address, it would be their ability to send mailings quickly with no performance impact on other campaign functions such as reporting, list loads or segmentation.
What’s innovative for the client? Pre-built lifecycle campaigns. These include welcome series emails, re-activation campaigns, post purchase triggers and browse behavior insights which will help keep customers organized and allow them to holistically compare campaign performance.
