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Anonymous

Question

Constantly finding faults with Marketo

Forum|Forum|9 years ago
September 21, 2016
11 replies
10998 views

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.

Marketo

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Dory_Viscoglio

Level 10

Hey Regina, every implementation of Marketo is unique, but what type of specific problems have you been running into? Did you migrate from another MA tool or are you starting fresh?

As far as escalating things, if you have support tickets open you should be able to escalate directly through the ticket -- but I would definitely look at the things that you're having issues with. Can you provide more insight there?

A

Anonymous

I have been having issues with the IP we're sending from being blacklisted due to another customers mailings - literally every time we try to send a mailing - meaning our spam filter/mail client (and the one we sell to the majority of our customers, who we're trying to communicate with) it is blocked, so they never get through. I would expect this to happen very occasionally, but this has happened every single time bar one that we have tried to send a mailing. It seems like a ploy to get us to pay for a dedicated IP, but we don't send enough volume to have one. I've managed to get on a "trusted ip" list, so we'll see if that solves that one problem, but that's just the beginning.

I couldn't access the support portal for the first three weeks of having the programme (even though I was the only registered account user, and the account admin), and I couldn't set myself as the support contact - that was all a massive mess, which was finally fixed.

I still can't access the University page - I have escalated this to T1 and still have yet to receive a solution for this.

I can't add other admins to the instance.

I consistently have trouble logging in, where it says my user name and password doesn't exist, can't reset my password, so have to email support for that.

The IP address was the big one, which is hopefully fixed now (after three weeks), but I was just wanting to see if my experience is a common one, i.e., is Marketo actually riddled with faults that no one finds out about until after you've bought the product, and the support is horrendous and we're all in this together, or am I just hugely unlucky? I'm not sure which answer would make me feel better

Dory_Viscoglio

Level 10

These definitely seem to be unique problems... One question regarding your sends: Have you set up SPF and DKIM (properly)? I know @Sanford Whiteman knows a lot about this. This will help with your deliverability, if you haven't already set it up.

As far as everything else, I would really push back hard on your account manager. Even if they're great, they aren't helping to get these problems solved -- which is a huge part of their job.

Hopefully once these initial bugs are worked out you will feel like you can be successful with Marketo, as it is a very robust platform. And while there are definite improvements that Marketo could make, bugs aren't something that you should be running across. Best of luck!

Grégoire_Miche2

Level 10

Hi Regina,

What do you mean by "faults" ?

There is no reason why you should not be able to send emails. Some of our customer produce thousands of emails per year, each of them being sent to literally tens of thousands of contacts/leads.

There are some annoying hitches in Marketo, as I listed a while ago here: Just do it! Marketo so-called minor missing features , and there is surely room for improvement (give a look to the ideas section) but honestly nothing that prevents the work to be done.

Have you had enough training? Help from Marketo real consultant (someone with real experience)?

When migrating from other MAP, the logic of Marketo can be a little difficult to get. Especially the complete separation between assets (emails, forms, landing pages) and actions (smart campaigns), which makes it very different form most of the other solutions on the market, but also so much more flexible.

-Greg

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Anonymous

Faults as in problems that prevent me from using it as it is being marketed. The biggest problem preventing me from sending was detailed above has hopefully been fixed now, but only after countless hours of emails and phone calls.

No, I probably haven't had enough training, as I can't access the University portal to receive extra training, and they don't seem to be bothered by that... My consultant has been fab when it comes to best practices, but the technical issues (obviously not her remit) have been the things plaguing me.

It's not the actual practical use of Marketo I'm struggling with - it's actual technical errors that seem to be prolific across the platform.

Jessica_Kao3

Level 7

Hi Regina,

I'm really sorry you have had such a difficult time getting up and running. There are some nuances with Marketo, but I've been using it for many years and sent out millions of emails by now and it does work. I know some things can be frustrating, but the community is a place to get help and you are not alone. Also you should check out your local Marketo User Group. That's how I learned most everything, by befriending folks there as well.

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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.

Vlada_Prasolova

Level 5

we've been with marketo for 5 years, but recent email performance is a disaster, indeed. It took marketo 2,5 hour to send a relatively easy-to-set batch blast for 250k that we've been sending monthly since 2013

What did the support said? - Oh, it's normal, we don't see any problems there

Ayan_Talukder

Level 4

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.

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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

Level 4

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.

Luis_Paez3

Level 2

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

Level 8

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!

If it doesn't look cool, you're probably doing it wrong.

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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.

Conor_Fitzpatri

Level 5

Hi Regina,

I have been experiencing the same deliverability issues and lack of help from Marketo to solve them. Like you, our SPF and DKIM is properly set up and we even moved to the preferred sender IP range, yet our customers still complain about not receiving our emails. We’re in the process of redesigning our website so my attention has been shifted away from our deliverability issues. However, as soon as the site is launched, I will be turning my attention back to deliverability. I will be sure to let you know what steps we take to solve our issues.

As far as my experience with Marketo, it’s definitely a love-hate relationship. When the tool works, it’s fantastic, but the deliverability issues and the lack of help from Marketo support has been beyond frustrating.

I hope you get your issues sorted out and please let me know if there is any additional information I can provide to help you.

Josh_Hill13

Level 10

Many delivery issues are self inflicted. If you have a clean list and are actively keeping it that way, then you can push Marketo to get you on a better IP range. Does everyone need a dedicated IP? no. But even with a dedicated IP, I get blacklisted all the time and it's because of my list, not Marketo. I was at a pretty small firm for my first implementation and we had a dedicated IP because we cared about our reputation. It's not that much money.

To OP Regina, outside of Delivery, yes, I've had bugs with Marketo and feel that their dedication to maintaining the code base is waning. I am usually able to get these fixed with help from Support and Engineering. Most of the issues, however, are the UI, not the backend. Most of my tickets are to find out what crazy things we did though.

Does that mean I hate Marketo or want to switch? No. I want them to get better and keep me happy. From what I hear in the world, the other systems all have similar problems in different ways...to paraphrase Anna Karenina, each MAP is dysfunctional in its own way. Marketo is the least dysfunctional, IMO.

The biggest reasons for cancelling on Marketo are

too much power for your level of marketing, so you never use 90% of the features (sales/RFP issue)
poor implementation so you blame Marketo instead of whoever did it.
the CMO wants a different system.

Conor_Fitzpatri

Level 5

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.

Josh_Hill13

Level 10

If you have other issues with the system, we can help, as Jessica suggests. If you are having challenges with the Community, Liz Courter can help here.

You may also want to look at the many agencies out there for free help on their blogs or to consider having an expert guide the implementation. There are right ways, and wrong ways to do this. Marketo is a very free form workflow tool, so it can easily become complex if not designed well. They leave a lot up to you. Once you get the hang of it, you'll find it is very powerful.

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Anonymous

Hey @Josh Hill

FYI you tagged my non primary account (sorry that is even a possibility, you're impossible to tag!). Liz (Courter) Oseguera is my primary.

Regina Bluman Josh is right, I'd be happy to help with anything to make your experience better, whether that be in Community or I am happy to fid the right person to help you be successful with Marketo. Please let me know if you'd like to hop on a call.

Best,

Liz

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Anonymous

Hi Liz,

Thanks for your response. I think it's gone a bit beyond the community help though, my original post was more of a vent to see if I was the only one who seemed to be having these issues. I've since had calls with the Director of Customer Experience or Success or something like that, for EMEA and all of our Senior Account Managers, and Senior Support and Head of Support and anyone and everyone else. My issues are *slowly* being addressed, but I have to say I'm still pretty shocked and disappointed that I've had to wait this long and escalate it to this point to start getting an acceptable response and to finally start getting issues resolved.

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Anonymous

Regina, I have had all of these issues as well and I have not gotten any real concrete help or support after months of trying to escalate. The one thing that I am grateful for is that the team at Marketo ignores my very senior male boss just as much as they ignore me. Initially I thought they might be ignoring me because I am a more junior employee and I'm female, but that is absolutely not the case. I can't even calculate how Marketo has impacted our traffic and the health of our email list. My condolences to you!

Also -- I was very intrigued to see the original post go out in a Marketing newsletter from Marketo. Is this the most positive customer feedback they've gotten lately?

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Anonymous

We've had numerous issues; in fact we've recently had tickets open for 3 months where they've acknowledged defects in Marketo. Almost weekly we are submitting new cases--and considering their most recent outages--there seems to be some real issues going on. I've asked a few times for an explanation on why suddenly there seems to be so many problems and haven't gotten any real explanation.

And yes, we have a complex set-up with a number of custom objects syncing over from SFDC.

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Anonymous

Hi Regina,

I am a new user and feel exactly as you do. I purchased additional hours from Marketo to extend my launch pack, which helped a little bit, but It got so bad one that I just sat down and cried!!!! I too was the strongest supporter of Marketo and swayed my company away from Pardot in favor of Marketo - my job and reputation were on the line.

I too hope this will get easier at some point. I have had to hire a 3rd party consultant to be available to me as my support. You may need to do the same.

we are running into Marketo/SFDC sync errors. Unfortunately, Marketo points me to our SFDC Admin, but she too needs better support from Marketo and is not getting it.

I know I did not help you in any way, but I wanted you to know that you are not alone.

I wish you the best and hope things get better for us both.

Terry

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Anonymous

Hi Terry,

Thanks for your response. I can completely empathise with you - I have had nights where I'm in the office past 9 pm, just trying to do the most simple thing in Marketo with tears in my eyes from frustration because I can't get it to work properly. Now the email editor has changed, and things aren't appearing in my inbox the same way they do in the editor, and on a whole, it has been radio silence from them since complaining about this.

While it is nice to know I'm not alone, it's horrible to hear that so many people are having this identical experience - and still, Marketo are doing nothing to remedy it!

It is a shame that you have had to extend your launch pack and hire outside help just to get the product working - it really shouldn't be that way, and I'm digging my heels in because I refuse to pay extra to just get it to do what it says on the tin.

Hoping things improve for you soon! x

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Anonymous

Have you considered using Infusionsoft? I had success with them in the past working with a different company? https://www.infusionsoft.com/

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