Salesforce Journey Builder Review

PROS: The power comes from being able to update and reference any object in Salesforce you like for use in decision splits. The user interface is fairly simple, and I like that it has the capability to incorporate SMS into Email streams.

CONS: I'll touch on a few big pain points for me: Qualification: Maybe you want someone to re-qualify for your journey after a certain period of time. This is not easily achievable in journey builder. It's strange that it's not easily possible to inject both leads and contacts into the one journey by default. It's possible to add leads and contacts into a Salesforce campaign then reference that as a journey entry source, but there are many other standard use-cases where Leads and Contacts should receive the same content as each other. So, having to build two separate journeys doing essentially the same thing seems like a very cumbersome way to work around it. Usability: It's very clunky and slow to build things (compared to other tools in the market) It's drag and drop and very simple in design if you want to send a couple of emails, but it's not built for larger scale lead nurturing where you want to make several decisions based on one action. If you try to make your journey include engagement splits and resends of emails if someone doesn't open, and lead activity updates in Salesforce, then your journey will become HUGE and very confusing to follow and read. Engagement splits: What use is an engagement split if you have to wait a period of time before you check if they've engaged? Why is it not possible to trigger activities the moment the customer has actually clicked? The problem with having to use a wait step for an Engagement Split is if someone decides to open or click after the wait step you've specified then you miss out on engaging them in the preferred way. I swear other Marketing Cloud customers who give Journey Builder a 5-star rating have never used another marketing automation tool before because many others out there (eg. Marketo) does real engagement splits such as; trigger an action when someone is Sent and email, Opens, Clicks, Unsubscribes, Bounces, and almost anything else you would logically think should be possible. Also, Engagement Splits don't allow you to select dynamic links, meaning if you have any AMPscript variables (like email address or ID) in the link, the Engagement Split won't recognise it. Troubleshooting: Want to know what record was sent the email or opened it or clicked a specific link or unsusbcribed? Goodluck trying to find that information easily within the History tab of Journey Builder. Plus,