Email marketing isn’t just about using tools to generate leads. It’s also about using tools to help your sales team close deals. So, you need and email marketing plugin that integrates with Salesforce. Sales reps can easily import their leads and opportunities into the email marketing tool of their choice, then send targeted campaigns to close revenue. This way all your leads and opportunities are in one place for your salespeople and marketing department.
Marketing automation and email marketing software that integrates with Salesforce gives the marketing department a unified data source for its email campaigns, lead nurturing and lead scoring programs, along with prospects’ engagement throughout their entire buyer’s journey. It also brings vital business intelligence to back-end departments such as sales, helping salespeople to respond more efficiently to marketing programs and better serve their customers
Salesforce is a hugely popular and powerful CRM. There are many tools that integrate with it. However, not all of them provide the level of value that you might need. The purpose of this article is to help you create an email marketing campaign that integrates with Salesforce, so that you can improve your sales.
Email marketing software that integrates with salesforce is a great way to improve your business. By integrating the two, you can streamline your email marketing process and increase the effectiveness of your email campaigns. But with all the options available, it’s difficult to find which tools are best. In this article, I highlight some of the top tools that integrate with salesforce and provide additional information on each one.
Automated Email Marketing Advantages
There are a number of overlaps between customer relationship management (CRM) systems and automated email marketing. CRM is designed to collect, store, and analyze customer data so that your sales teams and other authorized users can easily create a personalized customer experience. Automated email marketing likewise depends upon analysis of relevant customer data, so that the right kinds of emails can be sent to the right people, at the right time.
Automated email-marketing systems provide users with powerful and accurate platforms from which to implement profitable email marketing strategies. While automated email isn’t appropriate for every customer interaction, there are many instances where automated emails can not only save time, but also give clients exactly what they’re looking for. Here are a few examples:
- E-commerce sites. A well-crafted page embedded in an email can direct traffic to your website and give you many opportunities for sales with little effort. Once those customers visit your site, automated emailing can be used to send out friendly welcome emails, relevant special offers, and reminders about items that may have been placed in the shopping cart, but never actually purchased.
- Newsletters. If your clients care enough about your brand to sign up for an ongoing newsletter, your marketers can take the opportunity to keep them interested. Updating your audience on developments in your business can keep your name at the forefront of their minds, which is why 83% of B2B marketers use email newsletters as part of their marketing strategy. Automated newsletter emails can also collectively engage your audience in your messaging and maintain your relevance, while providing easy links back to your product pages. Write it once and send it to everyone.
- Remarketing. By maintaining detailed records of individual customer history, interests, and sales quotes, an automated system can send out reminders and special offers at the most appropriate times. This gives potential and former clients a more concrete reason to commit. 30% of consumers feel positively towards retargeted advertisements (vs. the 59% who feel neutral and the 11% who dislike retargeting).
- Completed transactions. It can be easy to see a completed transaction as being the end of the customer journey. With automated email marketing, it doesn’t have to be. Upon completion of a sale, an automated system can send out an email to the customer, thanking them for their patronage, and ensuring them that the order is being handled quickly and professionally. This helps to establish an actual relationship between customer and seller, and is useful in maintaining records as well.
Finding the Right Automated Email-Marketing Software
To get the most out of your automated email-marketing campaigns, it is critical for you to find the right email-marketing software for your business. Here are certain features that the best automated systems share:
- Useability
Automated email marketing software works for you, while you can concentrate on other tasks. To this end, automation should be simple to set up. Most marketers aren’t developers, so they shouldn’t need a computer science degree to operate their marketing tools. - Ease of Integration
In true CRM fashion, your automated email-marketing solution will be most effective when it can function in tandem with your other systems and processes. This will allow you to build a more complete picture of your customers, and will cut down interdepartmental miscommunications. If you’re already using CRM software, be sure your automated email-marketing solution will work alongside it. - Flexibility
You probably wouldn’t be comfortable having an automation tool in charge of composing your marketing strategy. This is why it’s important to find an email automation solution that is flexible enough to fit your needs — no matter what those needs may be. The system in question should allow for in-depth customization, and should be capable of scaling alongside your business. - Analytics and Reporting
Smart businesses collect and analyze all available data, and automated email-marketing software can assist. This will allow you to create trackable campaigns, identifying strengths and weaknesses in real time, and adapting your efforts accordingly. The system should also be able to deliver clear, interactive, visual-based reports at a moment’s notice, so that decision makers always have reliable information on which to build company strategy.
Email Marketing
The basic function of an Email Marketing application is to send mass email messages to your targeted email lists. Email Marketing applications are less expensive than full Marketing Automation solutions (see below) and are most often priced on a per email basis. If the 5,000 email limit is your primary concern or constraint with the native salesforce.com marketing functionality, then an add-on Email Marketing application may be all you need. The following are some of the additional features, enhancements and bells and whistles to look for from Email Marketing applications:
- Mass Email – volume is a key consideration; how many names in your list; how many names to mail in a single blast.
- Opt-Out/Opt-In Management – all good programs should have the ability for users to opt-out of mass mailings and many offer opt-in solutions as well.
- Deliverability Management – includes deliverability tools that can analyze your content in order to minimize your message being treated as spam; bounce management handles the ability to auto-remove bad emails from your list or identify why a message was bounced
- List Cleansing – ability to identify and remove duplicates and invalid email addresses
- Reporting & Tracking – expect basic functionality to include tracking of open rates and click through rates. More robust reporting is available on more powerful solutions.
- Survey Capabilities – some of the applications offer the ability to create email surveys.
- Template & Content Creation Functionality – ability to easily create template-based emails with various styles, layouts and features
Email Marketing Applications Pre-Integrated with Salesforce (prices shown are entry level pricing disclosed by vendor; consult vendors for volume discounts and other pricing considerations based on volume and features desired):
- ConstantContact (starting at $20/month)
- emma (starting at $89/month)
- iContact (starting at $12.75/month)
- JangoMail (starting at $90/month)
- MailChimp (starting at $9.99/month)
- VerticalResponse (starting $11/month)
Keap
Description: Keap, previously Infusionsoft, offers small businesses access to a marketing automation platform and CRM. The small business approach is emphasized as it only includes one user account in the base product. Keap offers collaboration with an onboarding expert to initiate setup for clients new to marketing tools. The platform provides a centralized view of customer data that enhances campaign automation and reporting. Keap helps users understand how audiences respond to campaigns and help them make modifications when necessary. They also provide hundreds of business apps, so you can craft the platform that fits your needs.
ActiveCampaign
Description: ActiveCampaign offers email marketing, marketing automation, CRM, and Sales Automation. Users have complete control over their email campaigns and have access to solid data collection and automation capabilities. Precision targeting takes the stress out of planning, as contacts are segmented into unique groups based on behavior and other important demographics. Its user-friendly interface and simple visual overlay allow quick onboarding and a shallow learning curve. ActiveCampaign also offers social media analysis and deep site tracking.
GetResponse
Description: GetResponse offers a suite of simple and robust solutions that can be scaled and customized for small and large organizations. The company’s marketing solutions include automation, CRM, webinar software, email design, and more. Marketers can easily use the automation tool to create complex workflows, and the software allows for hundreds of customer journey scenarios with real-time updates. Meanwhile, the customer profiles features include tagging and scoring to build detailed segments.
Constant Contact
Description: Constant Contact works with small businesses, nonprofits, and individuals across various industries by providing them with the marketing tools they need to build their brand, attract customers, and improve their online business. For Salesforce users, Constant Contact offers an integration that allows companies to sync contacts, accounts, leads, and more, all of which can be automatically synced bi-directionally between the two platforms. Constant Contact’s marketing automation features focus on email marketing and help Salesforce users improve prospect, client, and partner engagement.
SharpSpring
Description: SharpSpring, from Constant Contact, offers a marketing automation platform for businesses and agencies. Its behavioral-based tracking tool helps users understand what motivates each click. It also enhances email automation, as customers are tracked after the click for increased personalization. SharpSpring’s visual workflow builder includes branching logic to engage leads correctly. Users can customize buyer personas to improve segmentation. The detailed data collection allows critical marketing decisions to be made with logic and efficiency.
Act-On
Description: Act-On offers a platform that eliminates many of the monotonous tasks marketers deal with. Various analytics and insights allow users to collect a large amount of data to inform and improve marketing techniques. With the collected data, Act-On then automates nurturing based on user preference. It even segments customers and leads into various categories. Act-On offers integrations with several CRM solutions, and the vendor also provides professional services to clients that need help building an effective marketing strategy.
Maropost
Description: Maropost Marketing Cloud provides tools for building complex customer journeys. The platform gives marketers the ability to connect with customers across email, web, mobile, and social media channels. Users can create and automate workflows from a simple dashboard on every channel and lifecycle stage. Event-driven workflows nurture visitors on a path that reflects their behavior. Machine learning tools utilize data to make personalized recommendations on your website. The Maropost dashboard includes a single customer view that combines all available data on a customer. This creates deep segmentation functionality based on both manual and automatic data.
Pardot
Description: Pardot is the B2B marketing automation solution from Salesforce. It directly integrates with Salesforce’s CRM to harness all available data. This helps align marketing and sales to generate leads and keep them engaged. Since Pardot focuses exclusively on B2B, users can prioritize valuable leads through scoring and grading. It captures prospect activity and provides real-time alerts telling salespeople when to contact leads. The solution also gives marketers the ability to build and segment email marketing campaigns.
Autopilot
Description: Autopilot offers a marketing platform with a focus on integration. The platform connects customer information from a variety of tools and systems. Users get a single view of all their customer data to make automating the marketing journey easier. These insights also create deep personal journeys that change based on customer behavior. Individualized messages will be sent to new customers based on their site behavior and engagement, like signing up for a webinar.
Marketo
Description: Marketo offers marketing automation as an application. All of Marketo’s applications can integrate with their Engagement Marketing Hub. The marketing hub also includes LaunchPoint partner applications so that users can build an optimal marketing platform for their needs. The automated marketing application lets users create and scale automated marketing campaigns across channels. It also provides nurturing options that can be as persistent as needed. Each customer journey can be customized based on collected data, and each campaign is tracked for efficiency. Adobe acquired Marketo in September of 2018.
dotdigital
Description: dotdigital offers a platform with simple drag-and-drop functionality for communicating with customers. It has multichannel capabilities to target customers efficiently. Users can harness analytics to send messages at the right time, in the right place, and on the right channel. Collected data includes customer identification and tracking. Lead scoring can be customized to focus on relevant data sets like purchase history, email opens, clicks, page views, and more. dotdigital can also work directly with users through managed and creative services.
LeadSquared
Description: LeadSquared brings marketing automation to key time-consuming areas, so marketers and salespeople have time to focus on substantial projects. This is accomplished through automating engagement with leads and customers. The software easily captures lead and activity data across channels, making each engagement meaningful and targeted. LeadSquared helps more than just marketers, as salespeople can easily access critical data to find sales-ready leads to target. The platform uses machine learning to forge a deeper understanding of conversion attributes. LeadSquared also integrations with popular CRMs like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics.
iContact
Description: iContact began as an email marketing company for SMBs before becoming a larger marketing automation and consulting entity. They offer detailed email marketing tools to help marketers deliver personalized messages. Delivery of messages is further enhanced by advanced tracking and reporting. Users can learn what’s driving a campaign’s success or failure. Depending on your team’s skills, iContact offers access to a strategic advisor to help build personalized campaigns with ease. Advisors have a detailed understanding of the platform and help make your email marketing goals a reality.
Native Salesforce vs. Add-On Marketing Applications
When considering if you should use the native functionality of Salesforce CRM marketing or an add-on, here are some of the issues to consider:
- Included with Salesforce – you’ve already paid for Salesforce, so if you can live within Salesforce’s limits, you might want to do so.
- Leads vs. Contacts – Salesforce can send mass email to both Leads and Contacts, but you must do so in separate blasts; external programs often allow a single blast to a combination of both leads and contacts, simplifying your marketing process.
- Volume Limits – Salesforce limits the maximum number of mass emails you can send to external addresses to 5,000 per day per org. In some cases, Salesforce may be willing to increase these limits. Talk to your account executive if you have questions.
- Templates – Salesforce offers text, HTML (with and without using letterhead) and Visualforce templates as options. The user-friendly text and HTML with letterheads are clean and easy for any user to create, but are somewhat limited in layout capabilities. The HTML without letterhead and Visualforce require extensive knowledge of HTML or Visualforce respectively, but can expand layout options significantly.
- Merge Fields – Salesforce allows you to include fields on the Lead/Contact record as well as any parent account or master-detail relationship; however, if you need fields from a number of other objects (tabs), you will be out of luck unless you create Visualforce templates. We recommend the Conga products if you have more complex field merge requirements.
- Email Sender – Using Salesforce to send mass emails, all emails in the blast will come from the sending user. With third-party applications, you are often allowed to have it appear that each email is coming from the owner of that particular record.
- Limited Automation – if you need the system to automate a multi-step campaign or automate mass emails, you will have to look to one of the third-party applications described below as the native mass-email capability of salesforce.com requires a user to manually trigger an email (although you can schedule it for future delivery).
Conclusion
Although there are many email marketing platforms that have built in Salesforce integration, it can be hard to find the best one. Each email marketing software that integrates with Salesforce platform has different features.
Email marketing is a marketing tactic that helps you stay connected with your audience. If you rely on email marketing to grow your business, then you will find this article useful. You will learn how email marketing can boost your sales and which email marketing integration is the best to use inside Salesforce.