What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a customer relationship management (CRM) and digital marketing platform that enables marketers to generate better marketing outcomes and ROI. Part of the Salesforce Customer 360 ecosystem, Marketing Cloud includes numerous tools and AI capabilities that yield real-time insights to help marketers segment audiences, engage leads and customers, and design personalized marketing messages and campaigns across the entire customer lifecycle.
What does Salesforce Marketing Cloud do?
Marketing Cloud incorporates integrated solutions for customer journey optimization and management, email marketing, mobile marketing, marketing automation, content creation, content personalization and marketing data analytics. These connected solutions empower marketers to drive customer loyalty with high-quality marketing campaigns, optimize investment, and increase ROI.
A campaign management tool called Journey Builder (within the Marketing Cloud Engagement component) helps marketers tailor email campaigns to customers' behaviors and needs, demographics and communication channel preferences. Journey Builder supports send-time optimization, engagement frequency and multi-variant testing to optimize email campaigns and results, and has prebuilt templates to help marketers quickly set up and send emails and mobile messages. The software also includes predictive AI to help marketers optimize personalized campaign variations and other aspects of customer engagement like send timing and frequency. They can also make better decisions about which channel is optimal for sending a given message to a particular customer.
What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud used for?
Marketing Cloud provides advanced tools and insights to help marketers achieve marketing goals and nurture exceptional customer-driven relationships. Through its integrated, data-powered, AI-enabled platform, marketers can send personalized content to customers through the right channel at the right time, to better engage with customers and earn their long-term loyalty.
With Marketing Cloud, organizations can use the combined power of CRM, data and AI to achieve all these objectives:
- Unify and activate first-party customer data.
- Drive better alignment between marketing, sales and service teams.
- Automate marketing campaigns across various channels.
- Streamline lead generation to capture better leads and engage with them effectively to encourage conversion.
- Capture marketing performance data, AI insights and marketing analytics reports to optimize campaigns and marketing spend and identify areas for improvement.
- Deliver real-time, cross-channel, one-to-one personalization at every touchpoint to boost ROI from marketing programs.
- Engage in account-based marketing to influence targeted accounts, build strong customer relationships and increase revenues.
In summary, Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive toolkit for organizations looking to strengthen their marketing stack to enhance customer engagement, customer relationships and customer lifetime value.
What does Marketing Cloud include?
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive platform for B2C and B2B marketing. Some of its components and capabilities that help organizations advance their marketing programs include the following.
Customer Data Platform
CDP is a Salesforce-native data platform that provides unified, real-time data from across the business and every touchpoint across the customer lifecycle. Marketers can use this data to understand customers better and leverage that understanding to deliver more relevant content, personalized recommendations and connected customer experiences. They can also tap the power of AI to deliver tailored next-best-offers and create personalized customer journeys. In doing so, they can potentially increase speed to market, boost conversion rates and reduce customer acquisition costs.
Personalization
With Marketing Cloud's personalization engine, marketers can personalize customer conversations and content across any channel and touchpoint. Everything from websites and product recommendations to in-app experiences and landing pages can be tailored with built-in machine learning and AI. Modern customers demand personalized experiences; Marketing Cloud makes it easy to give them what they want. Marketers can also trigger relevant experiences to move customers along their buying journey and use AI to determine how to engage with them at each stage. Sales and service can also be personalized to improve customer interactions, boost sales and provide more effective case resolutions.
Marketing Cloud Engagement
Marketing Cloud Engagement is a user-friendly platform with numerous tools to optimize email marketing, mobile marketing and advertising. With this tool, marketers can gain unified customer views and use this information to connect with the audience and deliver connected journeys and cohesive experiences across the customer lifecycle. Using real-time data and AI insights, they can ensure that every interaction, message or campaign is relevant to each customer.
B2B Marketing Automation
This marketing automation software enables B2B marketers to generate high-quality leads and align marketing and sales around every account with unified customer data. The software seamlessly connects sales, marketing and services teams so they can collaborate effectively to close more deals faster and drive growth.
Intelligence
Marketing Cloud's intelligence tools can help teams looking to optimize campaigns and marketing spend with real-time data. The tools help unify marketing performance data and provide AI-driven insights to guide decisions on budgets and campaigns. Marketers can access reports to guide next steps.
Benefits of Marketing Cloud
Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marketing teams can automate common or repetitive tasks and apply the time savings to more strategic efforts. A more productive team with higher morale can expand their reach, engage more effectively with prospects and customers, and close more deals.
Marketing Cloud facilitates personalized, connected customer experiences, even on multi-channel journeys. As a result, organizations can engage with customers where they are most active and boost customer loyalty and revenues.
With the insights and recommendations Marketing Cloud provides, marketing teams can optimize their strategies, campaigns, spends and ROI. Where necessary, they can improve audience segmentation and focus on better engagement and outcomes.
Marketing Cloud pricing and free trials
Organizations can purchase Salesforce Marketing Cloud products individually.
| Product | Key features | Price* |
| Marketing Cloud Engagement | Email marketing, content creation, analytics | Starting at $1,250 per org, per month |
| Marketing Cloud Account Engagement | Lead nurturing, lead scoring, engagement history dashboards, campaign reports and insights | Starting at $1,250 per month |
| Marketing Cloud Growth Edition | AI-powered emails and campaigns, multi-channel journeys, forms, landing pages | $1,500 per month |
| Marketing Cloud Intelligence | Marketing intelligence, visualizations | Starting at $3,000 per org, per month |
| Data Cloud for Marketing | Data ingestion and harmonization, identity resolution and activation, calculated insights (streaming and batch), predictions, data pipelines (streaming and batch), real-time profile API | $108,000 per org, per year |
| Marketing Cloud Personalization | Web and email personalization, audience segmentation, A/B/N testing, content recommendations, product recommendations, rule-based decisioning | Starting at $108,000 per org, per year |
Apart from these options, marketing teams can choose two other products under the Marketing Cloud umbrella.
| Product | Key features | Price* |
| Loyalty Management | Member administration, reward management, static benefit management, single program setup, one license for Tableau CRM | Starting at $20,000 per org, per month |
| Referral Marketing | Unlimited referral promotions, built-in templates, voucher management, referral tracking, data processing engine | Starting at $12,500 per org, per month |
Free 30-day trials of Marketing Cloud are also available in two versions:
- Starter Suite. A single CRM suite with integrated marketing, commerce, sales and service tools that marketers can use to deliver effective marketing content, send marketing campaigns, access marketing analytics, and nurture prospect and customer relationships.
- Pro Suite. An enhanced CRM suite with powerful automations and customizations plus scalable marketing, commerce, sales and service tools to help marketers do everything they can with Starter Suite and also prepare sales quotes and forecasts, engage in real-time chat and extend their capabilities with hundreds of apps on Salesforce AppExchange.
Follow these steps to ensure a smooth and eventless CRM adoption process. Compare the top marketing automation software, AI-powered CRM platforms and top customer data platform software products. Explore terms to know before creating a sales enablement strategy and digital marketing best practices for businesses. See ways CRM improves customer experience and steps for negotiating deals with Salesforce.
