Salesforce.com pioneered the software-as-a-service distribution model with their namesake CRM platform. The company was founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff, Parker Harris, Dave Moellenhoff and Frank Dominguez. The initial platform focused on sales force automation, launched in the same year as the company’s founding, and since then the platform has grown considerably through further development and acquisitions. Today, Salesforce.com offers solutions in several broad categories relating to sales, marketing and customer service over various channels and for different types of companies. Their services include Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Data Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cloud, App Cloud and IoT, often with subcategories, subscription levels and optional add-ons. Salesforce.com is listed on the New York Stock Exchange as ‘CRM’. According to their 2015 Annual Report, Salesforce has over 150,000 customers (with multiple subscribers per customer) across their services and a market value over $55 billion.  

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Pricing and Services

Intended Customers Small to Midsize Businesses, Enterprises

Free Trial No

Features

• Email Marketing
• Mobile Messaging
• Marketing Automation
• Campaign Management
• Journey Builder
• Predictive Content
• Social Media Marketing
• Reports & Analytics

All Available Plans & Services Salesforce offers four subscription plans for its Marketing Cloud platform. Numerous features are available as a paid add-on. For details on pricing, you must first request a demo from Salesforce.

Editor’s Bottom Line of Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce has a pertinent solution related to essentially anything in the CRM space. Marketing Cloud is their B2C marketing automation platform (its B2B counterpart is the Salesforce-owned Pardot) and provides email, mobile, web and social marketing automation as well as reporting and analytics. There are multiple sub-packages to the Marketing Cloud; users can subscribe to the email, mobile and web marketing features and the social media suite separately with four subscription tiers for each. Salesforce requires prospective customers to contact them for plan and pricing details; as Salesforce is the de facto CRM standard, it stands to reason any prospective customer would at least get in touch for a price check. Be prepared - Salesforce services tend to price fairly high, as their name recognition and sheer breadth of functionality gets them into virtually any conversation about solutions. However, you get what you pay for. The Email, Mobile and Web Marketing bundle starts to hit its stride with the Professional plan - users gain predictive content for emails, email tracking, priority email messaging, web and mobile analytics, among others (and a few features of the Corporate plan available as paid add-ons). The Basic plan features are a too bare-bones for a robust marketing strategy - while you gain the core elements of an email marketing services, including templates, a content builder, segmentation, dynamic content, and triggered messaging, businesses are limited to 5 users, 1GB of storage with no automations or contacts. At that point, you’d be better going with a dedicated email marketing solution rather than the Basic plan for the Email, Mobile and Web Marketing package alone. Of course, a major advantage to the diverse Salesforce ecosystem is the synchronicity of data and features across packages and platforms. If you were also to subscribe to the Marketing Cloud’s Social Media Studio, the potential for seamless integration between your marketing functions without the need to navigate two separate platforms might be worth the premium. It’s highly contingent on your needs, preferences and budget. That said, the Social Studio’s Basic plan is by far a larger investment than its Email, Mobile and Web Marketing counterpart. However, with it, you get dashboards tailored for major social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, 5 built-in language options for the user interface, an incredibly expansive social listening function over 39 languages, an iOS mobile app and mobile quick search for any listening query, the ability to build and publish macros on various channels and a unified interface for social media interaction - among much more. My opinion is the Social Studio’s basic plan provides the tools to cover the social media needs of any one business - the only element not provided is the in-house talent to make use of the platform. The Basic plan is limited to two social accounts; the next higher plan, Pro, offers 10 accounts and improved workflows but costs $3,000 more per month. In all, Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud is a powerful B2C marketing automation option from the world’s largest and best-known CRM vendor. By virtue of their size and presence, most Salesforce solutions end up as a yardstick for the industry; whether your business has a need for such breadth or depth of functions, and the budget, is always contingent on the individual use case.