Email campaigns & nurture programs
Smart Campaigns and engagement programs are powerful but slow, scripted in Velocity, and gated by database tier and API quotas.
What people actually say
✕Email layout and Velocity scripting are flagged as areas needing serious work, and the language itself is not the easy scripting layer marketers expect — there's a real learning curve before you can template anything non-trivial.
Source: Mavlers, Marketo velocity scripting ↗✕Heavy Velocity scripting — Custom Objects, sorting and filtering inside templates — adds processing time that can delay sends from milliseconds to several seconds depending on smart-list size.
Source: PurpleMeUp, velocity scripting and email delivery ↗✕Reviewers describe Marketo's UI as feeling years behind competitors and compare the experience to a Windows 98 computer — building a routine nurture is slower than it should be.
Source: Woodpecker, Marketo Engage review ↗
We wire sends through Amazon SES, Resend or Postmark and template emails in MJML + React Email — no Velocity, no per-template processing tax. Nurture flows live as typed steps in Inngest or Vercel Workflows, version-controlled in Git, so a copy change is a PR not a 'who has the certification' ticket. Send cost is fractions of a cent and scales linearly with volume, not with database tier.