EZ Texting vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud

For what we use EZ Texting for (Emergency contact system), it does what we need and is very easy to manage and keep up to date. The team always reaches out to see if there is anything more we need, which is kind as well. I can't speak to its features as a whole, however, as its use is very narrow in scope in our business.

Incentivized

I rated this a seven because I love Salesforce, and it is excellent on the sales side. However, the marketing side has some pros and cons. It is terrific for keeping track of lead, customer, and dealer information, but it is not easy to automate workflows, integrate other software, or create well-designed emails. It is also straightforward to generate reports, which is very helpful in keeping track of lead progression to better market those leads and turn them into customers.

Incentivized

• I appreciate the detailed delivery reports.
• The support team’s quick responses are appreciated.
• The automation feature is incredibly handy for instantly messaging leads right after they sign up.
• The onboarding process is straightforward.
• Genuine customer inquiries show up in the inbox, organizing important messages in one place.
• You can avoid the email spam folder by using ez texting!
• Opt-outs resolve themselves.

Incentivized

• Filter relevant content so you can priorize those that are more relevant and resolve it first
• Measure the traffic in the different social networks, as well as the response rate, average response time and other relevant metrics
• Configure automation rules to order the work of those who must interact with the customer

Incentivized

• Drafts don't save well, seemed like I kept having to redo the same text because a draft wouldn't save.
• I want to be able to click and update users quickly, but there were too many steps to add/remove people from lists.
• The app didn't work if I used google SSO - i couldn't ever get signed in.

Incentivized

• The email builder does not offer any way to catch/check bugs across different email service providers
• Creating SQL is not as easy as drag-and-drop; a lot of technical knowledge is required
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud is sold as a marketing tool, but to be honest, you need a LOT of technical IT support to run the tool
• Einstein metrics are across the board; if you have multiple audiences in one instance of Salesforce Marketing Cloud you can't segment the data.

Incentivized

We're excited about EZ Texting and what it does for us. We want to get more into automation with campaigns dealing directly with web sales so a more robust solution will likely leave EZ Texting as our event activation partner and only be used during select times of the year.

Incentivized

As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch

I think it is straightforward to use. UX is always challenging, and the platform does an excellent job of making it easy enough to use. However, it's not 100% intuitive and takes just a bit of figuring out, so I gave it an 8 / 10. It's easy enough as is, but of course, it could always be better.

Incentivized

You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.

Incentivized

We have never needed to use the system and it be unavailable. They seem to schedule their server maintenance perfectly (at least for us!).

Incentivized

Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.

It works pretty well but sometimes things don't work the way you would assume, IE marking messages as read is not as intuitive

Incentivized

Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.

EZ Texting "gets it"! When I have had something I needed customer service to help me with, they returned my emails and calls promptly. I have a smaller business and they came through as if I was a huge corporate entity. They really care about all sizes of customers!

Incentivized

They are really responsive and more than not solve the problem or give you insight to how you can manage the solution yourself. I do find however sometimes a long delay on the more complex issues when they need to loop in other departments. but overall a good experience with support

Incentivized

The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.

Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.

The most important aspect of implementation was selecting a valuable keyword. When we first started using EZ Texting, we were able to grab a simple, easy word to use to connect people to our texts. That proved invaluable in our marketing and selling people on using the service. If we didn't have a good word, I would imagine it wouldn't have been as successful.

Incentivized

From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.

EZ Texting has a much better user interface and better support. At first I wanted to "pay as you go" so switched from EZ Texting to BulkSMS. BIG MISTAKE. After 2 hours of banging my head against the wall, I went straight back to EZ Texting and paid the little extra monthly and it was like light from Heaven shined down upon me

Incentivized

I think that all of the marketing platforms I have evaluated and used in the past serve different markets and purposes. Salesforce Marketing Cloud was more palatable to our team because of our existing tech stack where we had Salesforce CRM already deployed and in use. Compared to Marketo and Hubspot, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a bit dated in terms of the UI/UX and the overall experience but still meets the needs of our organization. Mailchimp, however, isn't even playing in the same arena and is meant for small organizations and companies that don't have a need for a full fledged offering that SFMC brings to the table.

Incentivized

We have been grandfathered into our old package, but I wish there were better package options offered now.

Incentivized

was not involved with this part but i have not heard about clompaints

Incentivized

We haven't really utilized it for this purpose but it does seem like there are a lot of great options you can utilize.

Incentivized

Prior to this, we had no solution and literally were doing things on paper in a world where technology is outpacing paper. Having this process optimized has made it easier for the sales and marketing people to change information. From the training perspective, it has allowed us to see holes in where we could create additional support training, so the ROI here has been a lot more than just the optimization of a process.

Incentivized

easy access

Incentivized

• Customers, as well as potential customers, do not seem to have any issue, providing their phone numbers for text messages as opposed to receiving countless emails.
• Upselling items has improved considerably due to our ability to notify customers of new products and specials that we are offering in the store.

Incentivized

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to more efficiently reach out to a higher number of prospects.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to nimbly communicate important messages in a timely fashion to facilitate conversion.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows us to track who is opening our messages so that we can stop sending to those not interested and focus on the most engaged audiences.

Incentivized