10-second breakdown:
Catering to large companies who want powerful marketing platforms, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud can live up to the challenge. It’s a reliable, solid solution that scales as large as you need it to get that packs in more features than any other software on this list.
Marketing Cloud is used in enterprise companies (1,000+ employees)
The good:
Marketing Cloud literally tracks every interaction a customer has with your company. This ‘customer journey’ is then mapped and gives you a wealth of data to improve your business.
Although specifically for enterprise users, they do offer a flexible subscription model. Four distinct subcriptions with a lot of additional features that can be added on for a price.
The Social.com advertising subscription lets you scale your advertising effort over a variety of platforms such Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
The bad:
There is a learning curve. The user interface takes a while to get used to and can be frustrating to navigate.
Users report that the system isn’t quite compatible with certain web browsers such as Google Chrome, which can make it seem glitchy.
How it works:
Originally founded back in 2000 as ExactTarget, they consistently grew for twelve years before going public in 2012 and the next year Salesforce came in and acquired them, integrating their system with Marketing Cloud. You may see the phrase ExactTarget used if you look up Marketing Cloud on the internet, it’s interchangeable with Salesforce Cloud Marketing.
Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud is a power product focused strictly at enterprise clients. The user interface is definitely not for the faint of heart, it’s cluttered with features and buttons all over and little explanations for what they do.
There’s a method to the madness though, the reason they filled up the screen is because they don’t pull any punches with features. When you’re running an enterprise sized company, you need a finer control of all of your marketing channels, and Salesforce understands that.
All of the normal email service features are present, but Salesforce adds a few details to make them enterprise-ready. For instance, their advertising campaigns can be general or highly specific. Want to target only men in a small geographic area, and A/B test it to see which email title gets better results before you scale it out to the entire country? Go for it, you have the power!
Social Cloud’s social features are unmatched by any of the competition as well. The program handles all of your social media accounts and allows you to listen, analyze, engage your customers or publish content to your accounts. There’s also a utility that assists you in posting social ads to boost user engagement and your revenue along the way.
In a very big brother sort of way, Marketing Cloud can listen to over 650 million different sources on the internet for mentions of your brand name. You can look at what customers are saying about you, your products, and even your competitors.
Salesforce has an ace up their sleeve that other brands can’t touch, they call it ‘Mobile Studio.’ For all other email service software suites, you can reach out to your customers through email, and sometimes social media depending on the software in question.
Salesforce takes it a few steps further and gives you the capability to send out text messages, push alerts for apps and group messages as well. You could use that to send out a notification about a sale to an entire group of people or drill down and tell just one person to let them know that their package has shipped.
All of this can be automated, and there are even text message templates if you’re not sure how to start your message. Marketing Cloud can collect data on mobile messages, after you fire off a mass text to everyone near your stores, you can run a report to see what the clickthrough rate was for the ad or hopefully watch the local revenue soar.
The only real downside to Marketing Cloud is that the advanced interface and many features will take time to get used to. Even if you’re coming from a competitor, the way the system navigates is going to be different and there are suddenly a lot more options popping up everywhere.
Salesforce has a pricing page on their website but it’s a little counter-intuitive, you won’t find any prices. They do list out all of their packages and have a link to submit your information so they can schedule a call and discuss your business needs though.
There are 4 plans offered on the pricing page, but you can ignore two of them. They aren’t relevant to email marketing, Salesforce slid them in there as package deals to showcase other products they offer.
The first package we care about is simply called ‘Email, Mobile, and Web Marketing.’ It includes all of the normal email marketing features, the mobile phone messaging we discussed above, marketing automation and more. It’s the closest package Salesforce offers to the rest of the competition, without bundling in unrelated but possibly useful features like CRM and sales funnels.
The second package Salesforce offers that’s relevant to email services is their ‘Social Media Marketing,’ It only includes the Orwellian social listening and social content marketing. Although it’s considered a separate package, it can work in conjunction with the first plan if you want all of the features on the table. When you do call them, be sure to inquire about support hours, there’s no mention of it anywhere on the website.
Although the interface is going to scare off users that aren’t technically savvy, stick with Marketing Cloud and you receive the most advanced and powerful email service on the market, empowering you to not only draw customers in, but keep them engaged as well.
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