Email Marketing With Salesforce

Salesforce owned Email Marketing Platforms

Salesforce has three email marketing platforms.

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud - Previously known as ExactTarget, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC for short) is a powerful email marketing platform that can market across email, SMS and in app messages.
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement - Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is most often referred to as Pardot or Account Engagement. It's marketed to B2B marketers, and features a toolset to help sales teams.
• Marketing Cloud Growth - This is a similar platform to Marketing Cloud aimed at small businesses. It is more integrated with the core Salesforce experience than other platforms and uses the flow builder to send emails.

Third Party Applications

At the time of writing there were over 40 Email Marketing Platforms that connect to Salesforce listed on the AppExchange. Some commonly used platforms include:

• Mailchimp
• Active Campaign
• Autopilot
• Campaign Monitor
• Hubspot

 Which Marketing Platform is right for your business?

That is going to depend on a number of factors:

• Budget - Salesforce Email Marketing tools tend to be more expensive than third party platforms integrated via the app exchange, even when you consider the additional licencing costs and integration fees.
• Scope - Some platforms like MailChimp require very little configuration, whereas more specialised platforms can take longer to implement, and require dedicated skillsets to implement and manage.
• Business Size - Larger businesses will often have larger and more technical marketing teams. The tools that they use need to account for this, and include functionality like granular permission sets and the ability to work with established release cycles. 
• Data Sources - The data sources that you are connecting too will also determine what platform to use. Some platforms will have limited connectivity with Salesforce, and may, for instance, be restricted to data coming from the Lead and Contact Object. Other platforms like Marketing Cloud allow for integration to third party data sources, meaning that this data can be used for journey logic and within emails.
• Channels - The marketing channels that you are active on should also be considered when looking at an email marketing platform. While most platforms can send messages out via Email, some platforms have the ability to send messaging out via SMS, Whatsapp, Social Media and even in App push notifications. 
• Technical ability - Generally speaking, the more functionality a marketing platform has, the harder it will be to setup and implement. Consider your teams technical abilities when thinking about which platform you want to use.
• Implementation costs - When choosing a Marketing Automation Platform, some businesses choose to go with a third party consultant to set it up, while others will choose to implement in house with their existing IT and / or Marketing teams. Using your inhouse team to setup and configure a new marketing automation platform may seem like a good idea, but it can often lead to issues like a reduced marketing output, technical debt and poor configuration due to having a poor understanding of the platform, or not enough time to implement it properly. 
• Track record - Finally, you'll want to consider the track record of the Marketing Automation platform you are adopting. Newer platforms may offer cutting edge functionality at reduced costs, but you are taking a risk as to weather that platform will still be around in a years time.

Here are a few scenarios that you might encounter and tools that could be recommended.

Enterprise Scale Businesses

Enterprise scale businesses will typically have these types of requirements:

• High contact volumes and send volumes
• Multiple data sources
• Multiple marketing channels (e.g. Email, SMS, App)
• Many different journeys
• Different territories or brands
• Pre-existing release processes

For businesses like these, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a great option. It's built with enterprise clients in mind. Features for enterprise clients include:

• A granular permission system
• Multiple business units that can be used for different brands, territories or regions, or as a quasi sandbox
• Dedicated IPs
• Approval processes for emails
• The ability to send emails, SMS and push notifications
• The ability to integrate with almost any data source
• Extensions that enable additional functionality such as Marketing Cloud Personalisation or Marketing Cloud Intelligence

Retailers and E-Commerce

Email and SMS are incredibly important channels for E-Commerce businesses. They also need to be able to integrate to many different data sources.

Again, Marketing Cloud is a great solution for these businesses. The email template builder is incredibly versatile and customisable, and the journey builder offers extensive functionality.

All of that functionality does come at a cost though, and some smaller businesses will struggle to justify the cost of Marketing Cloud or complexity involved in setting it up. In those situations, tools like ActiveCampaign and Autopilot can be a great alternative, as they offer many of the same features at a much more reasonable price tag.

B2B, SaaS and Service Based Businesses

B2B, SaaS and Service Based Businesses typically have a Sales Team who need visibility into Marketing Activity. They'll be working directly from Salesforce and will want any advantage to improve revenue.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (Pardot) is a great fit for this use case. Pardot has a much tighter integration to Salesforce than any other platform I've encountered and features a number of tools that you don't see in many other Marketing Automation Platforms such as:

• Website Tracking - get insight into when someone has visited your website.
• Lead Scoring and Grading - easily understand who the right people to contact are and when.
• Form Handlers - Easily configure your existing forms to integrate with Salesforce
• Campaign attribution - See which assets led to leads
• Files - Keep marketing and sales collateral up to date
• Engage Licences - Let sales teams put contacts and leads directly into engagement campaigns from Salesforce
• Visibility in Salesforce - Sales teams can see lead and contact activity in Salesforce

One thing to note is that Pardot can be more difficult to configure and use than other commonly used marketing automation platforms.

Smaller businesses

For smaller businesses, budget, implementation time, complexity and user experience should be front of mind.

The price tag on Salesforce's inhouse Marketing tools puts them out of reach for most small businesses.

Marketing Cloud Growth could be a good option in these cases, as could third party tools like Mailchimp, Campaign Monitor, Active Campaign and Autopilot.

Not for Profits and Charities

Scale comes into play here. Enterprise scale non-profits and charities could get a lot of value from platforms like Marketing Cloud or Pardot.

Smaller companies who just need to send the odd newsletter would benefit from platforms like Mailchimp or Campaign Monitor. 

Fundraisers would get value from platforms like Rais.ly which offer dedicated fundraising capabilities and the ability to do things like integrate with pedometers for things like funruns.