What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud? Products, Pricing & Real-World Use Cases Explained

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is the #1 AI CRM for marketing that helps you tailor your marketing efforts as per your target audience at every step of the customer interaction lifecycle. 

It unifies all your customer data across various communication channels, enabling you to send the right promotional message to the right audience at the right time through email, SMS, social media, advertisement, and more. 

With its wide range of marketing automation, analytical capabilities, and AI-driven insights, you can create better marketing strategies that attract and result in maximized marketing outcomes and ROI. 

This blog is your guide towards the intricacies of Marketing Cloud. Let’s get started! 

Products of Salesforce Marketing Cloud 

Data Cloud for Marketing 

It is a platform that consolidates customer data from multiple sources into a single, unified profile, providing a complete 360-degree view of each customer. This data helps you design impactful marketing campaigns that drive customer relationship success. It offers:

User-Friendly Segmentation

With AI-powered tools, it helps you segment your audience based on specific attributes and behaviors, so you can personalize targeting for each segment. Einstein Lookalikes, one of its features, identifies your high-conversion customers and helps you reach similar new customers within a few clicks.

Calculated Insights

Understand customers better without integrating any external analytics tools. Instead, use Calculated Insights like the lifetime value to track segmented marketing campaign’s performance. Visualize them through pre-built dashboards and optimize campaigns across channels like Google Ads.

First-Party Advertising 

It allows you to directly activate first-party audience data across Google, Meta, Amazon, and LinkedIn, ensuring that the ads reach the right people. Your wasted ad spend is reduced by suppressing your ads when engagement is unlikely or when ROI is not being achieved. 

Marketing AI

It is a suite of built-in AI-powered marketing tools available in every Marketing Cloud product that helps you with detailed customer insights. It allows:   

Lead Generation Scaling 

AI-driven automation helps you identify high-quality leads faster. It can predict customer intent and optimize outreach, scoring leads based on their likelihood to convert. 

Content Creation and Messaging Insights

Generative AI tools assist in generating brand-specific copy and visual content in real time by seeking first-party, brand, and customer data. It analyzes customer interactions to detect engagement gaps in promotional messages so that marketing teams can quickly adjust campaigns to maintains peak performance.

Personalization through AI-driven event triggers 

Identify the customer’s next-best action by analyzing their data. These triggers convert customers’ browsing behavior into personalized offers by automatically recommending products based on purchase history and intent. Further, it launches personalized journeys across email, mobile, and ads. 

Marketing Cloud Personalisation

This product delivers real-time and cross-channel personalized customer experiences using real-time data and AI. It allows businesses to: 

Personalize Website and App Experiences

It uses machine learning and AI capabilities to personalize webpages, CTAs, in-app interfaces, product recommendations, and content like banners and pop-ups based on individual visitor’s behavior and historical data. This tailored experience helps you acquire and retain customers.  

Enhance Sales and Service Interactions

It analyzes your customer interaction data across different business touchpoints and feeds live engagement data directly into your sales and support channels. This allows your business teams to have more informed and context-driven conversations with customers.

Offers Real-Time Email Personalization

Personalize email content as per the customer’s journey and interactions, even at the exact moment when the recipient opens it. This ensures that each message reflects the latest customer context, making it more appealing. 

Marketing Cloud Engagement

A B2C marketing automation platform that helps you automate and personalize customer interactions across multiple communication channels, such as email, mobile, social media, and the web. It offers: 

Journey Builder

It automates the roadmap creation of customer interactions, from first-time engagement to its completion. This identifies specific touchpoints in the customer journey where you gained or lost the customer, helping you optimize your marketing campaigns. 

Audience Builder

It categorizes your target audience based on specific characteristics such as age, location, purchase history, behavior, etc., helping optimize targeting.  

Personalization Builder

With personalization builder, you create and manage marketing content for an individual customer by inputting the customer’s name, location, and other details into your marketing campaigns. 

Email Studio

It creates, customizes, and delivers targeted email campaigns from simple newsletters to complex, dynamic campaigns.

Mobile Studio

Helps you reach customers via SMS, push notifications, and messaging apps, driving improved mobile app engagement. 

Advertising Studio

Links your marketing campaigns and activates market segments with platforms like Google, Facebook, and LinkedIn for targeted ads, allowing you to enhance your customer reach. 

Content Builder

Build everything from professional emails and SMS to social media ads and landing pages. Manage, organize, and store all your content in a single place. 

Analytics Builder

It analyzes your marketing data and extracts unique yet valuable data-driven insights from it. Measures the engagement and performance of your email campaigns and collects contact’s behavior, such as clicks and purchases made. 

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement

Formerly known as Pardot, it is a B2B marketing automation platform that streamlines and scales your marketing efforts by unifying customer data and aligning sales, marketing, and service teams on a single page. It comes with: 

Lead Generation and Nurturing

Capture leads at the initial contact, segment, and nurture them with tailored, automated, cross-channel journeys.

Cross-Channel Engagement

Interact with prospects across various channels such as email, webinars, surveys, and SMS. It automates actions such as registration and follow-up emails that can be triggered as a part of your marketing campaigns.

Account-Based Engagement

Leverage the AI capabilities to identify and prioritize those accounts having the highest chances to convert and nurture them by aligning marketing efforts with sales.  

AI-Powered Insights and Real-Time Alerts

Einstein AI evaluates leads and accounts based on customer behavior and engagement. Real-time alerts notify sales teams when a lead is ready to convert, prompting timely follow-ups.

Integrated Analytics and Attribution

Comprehensive dashboards and multi-touch attribution models offer clear insights into how your marketing activities are impacting revenue and pipeline, enabling campaign optimization and measuring marketing ROI.

Customer Loyalty Management

It streamlines loyalty initiatives by managing program setup, member engagement, rewards, and promotions on a single unified platform for both B2C and B2B environments. It covers: 

Centralized Program Management

Easily execute and run multiple loyalty programs across various brands or campaigns by activating your market segments across multiple channels. 

Personalized Rewards and Promotions

Use customer behavioral data to deliver personalized rewards and tailor promotions that resonate with individual members.

Optimize Re-engagement Campaigns

Use predictive analytics and prebuilt dashboards to gain insights over your campaign performance. Identify at-risk members and implement effective re-engagement campaigns to bring them back. 

Integrated Partner Management

Seamlessly onboard and manage your partnerships and common marketing programs on a single platform. Allow your customers to earn and redeem loyalty points associated with your partner brand. Therefore, expand your reward options and boost program participation. 

Referral Marketing

Salesforce Referral Marketing is a component of Salesforce’s Loyalty Management solution that helps you turn your most loyal customers into powerful brand advocates. What it offers:

Quick Launch

A guided setup wizard enables you to quickly launch referral promotions, complete with tailored emails and cross-channel widgets that match your brand’s look and feel.

Advocate Identification

It uses customer information across your organization to identify high-value audience segments that are your top brand advocates and are most likely to recommend your products and services to others.

Comprehensive Tools

The platform offers additional features like refer-a-friend templates, referral-sharing widgets, voucher management, and powerful referral tracking that enhances your referral game like never before. 

Marketing Cloud Growth Edition

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Growth Edition is designed to help small businesses expand their reach and streamline their marketing efforts. Here’s how it helps:

Campaigns and Automation

Integrated generative AI capabilities help in drafting email content for quick campaign deployment while reducing manual efforts and accelerating the time-to-market for your campaigns.

Multi-Channel Journeys

It consolidates data across your business domains, such as sales, service, and commerce events. Using this, you can create automated and personalized journeys across email and SMS, simplifying customer engagement over channels where they are most active, with timely follow-ups. 

Enhanced Customer Engagement and Faster Sales

Target the right customers at the right time by leveraging trusted data and AI-powered insights that improve customer relationships, lead to faster deal closures, and ultimately drive revenue growth.

Marketing Cloud Connect

It connects Salesforce marketing cloud to Salesforce CRM, allowing an easy flow of data and insights in real-time. This tool tracks the full customer lifecycle, from marketing engagement, like an email click, to sales outcomes, such as closing a deal, all in one dashboard.

Marketing Cloud Connect updates CRM records with marketing-related interactions and offers a two-way data exchange. It ensures that sales and service teams are in sync and constantly updated with customer data across all touchpoints. It enables them to provide smarter, faster, and more unified customer experiences.

How is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Helping Businesses? Real-World Examples

Spotify 

A globally renowned audio streaming service delivering music and podcasts to millions. It leveraged Salesforce marketing cloud to automate the collection of seller activity data, creating one accurate source for advertiser information. This simplified the process, allowing data to flow into the marketing environment in under seven days. 

Spotify displayed customized buttons and banners based on visitors’ behavior, using various personalization tools, leading to a 53% increase in click-through rates. The company saw 95% faster client data queries for campaigns and 19% year-over-year advertising revenue growth. 

It empowered Spotify to run marketing campaigns five times more frequently and maintain a 360-degree view of its advertising, ensuring the targeted ads reached the right audience at the right time.

HCG 

Healthcare Global Enterprises Ltd. is a leading network of 25 hospitals specializing in cancer care. With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HCG was able to gain a comprehensive patient view with visibility into every case history, treatment plan, and patient preferences. It helped in segmenting patients and delivered personalized healthcare tips, appointment reminders, and post-treatment follow-ups. This strategy helped HCG maintain connectivity with over 75% of patients post-treatment.

It not only streamlined HCG’s operations but also significantly enhanced the patient experience by delivering personalized, proactive care at every step.

IDFC Asset Management Company Limited 

It is a leading mutual fund provider, with over one million investors across 46 cities. Leveraging Salesforce Marketing Cloud enabled IDFC AMC to: 

• Create and schedule targeted email and SMS campaigns that delivered personalized content to diverse customer segments that increased their gross sales by 2.5x.  
• Einstein analytics capabilities within Marketing Cloud allowed them to gain insights from previous customer interactions to personalize customer journeys. 
• They sent timely reminders and follow-up messages that enhanced customer engagement. 
• Using Social Studio, they were able to craft and publish compelling content across social platforms. 

Overall, their unsubscribe rate was reduced to 0.06%, reflecting the relevance and quality of the communications delivered through Marketing Cloud. This transformation deepened customer relationships and also positioned IDFC AMC as a forward-thinking digital leader in the competitive mutual fund market.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Pricing

SFMC offers differentiated pricing for various products it offers. You can choose between different pricing plans as per your business requirements, be it of basic or advanced features. 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement pricing 

Editions	Pricing	Offerings
Professional	$1,250/org/month	– Create, target, and send personalized emails – Design high-quality content that boosts engagement – Intelligent analytics capabilities that empower decision-making – Offers integration with Sales Cloud to unite the best of both approaches
Corporate	$4,200/org/month	– Map customer journeys – Gain intelligent insights into customer lifecycle – Reach customers via mobile channels
Enterprise	Request a quote	– Everything from professional to corporate edition – Manage customer journeys across various brands and geographies

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement 

Editions	Pricing	Offerings
Growth	$1,250/month	– Offers you interactive landing pages, forms, and search tools – Generate high-quality leads – Target the right audience, with increased chances of conversions
Plus	$2,750/month	– Advanced automation options to effectively optimize workflows – Deeper insights across your marketing and sales efforts through analytics – Measure the performance of your campaigns
Advanced	$4,400/month	– Everything included in the Growth and Plus plans – Multiple developer sandboxes – Manage multiple business units – Enables intelligent marketing and sales insights
Premium	$15,000/month	– Includes everything, from the Growth to the Advanced edition – B2B marketing analytics – Advanced analytics capabilities – Premier product and customer support

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Personalization 

Editions	Pricing	Offerings
Growth	$108,000/org/year	– Offers testing and reporting capabilities – Real-time recommendations based on what your customers are interested in – Create a website that offers personalized experiences – Leverage email marketing equipped with segmentation rules that help you target your audience more specifically
Premium	$300,000/org/year	– Includes everything from the Growth plan – AI capabilities to foresee the next best action or offer based on customer interactions – Mobile app experiences tailored to customer preferences

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Loyalty Management

Editions	Pricing	Offerings
Starter	$20,000/org/month	– Create, target, and send personalized emails – Design high-quality content that boosts engagement – Centralize member profiles – Track and allocate rewards – Oversee fixed perks – Get loyalty analytics and insights – Launch targeted offers faster
Growth	$35,000/org/month	– Automated point accrual and redemption – Comprehensive perks oversight – Real-time, flexible campaigns – Seamless external partner integration – Advanced loyalty analytics – Unified single loyalty program structure
Advanced	$20,000/org/month	– Automate rewards distribution – Oversee complete loyalty perks – Integrate partner benefits – Drive analytics with advanced insights – Manage multiple loyalty programs

Data Cloud for Marketing

Data Cloud for Marketing: $108,000/Org/Year 

• Unify and connect data to promote personalized interactions.
• Build strong connections with data-driven advertising.
• Measure, analyze, and track all the marketing efforts.

Salesforce Referral Marketing 

Salesforce Referral Marketing: $12,500/org/month

• Support up to 100K loyal customer promoters.
• Run endless referral campaigns.
• Use prebuilt templates for referrals.
• Easily share referral links.
• Manage reward vouchers seamlessly.
• Monitor campaign performance in real time.
• Automate data collection and cleaning.
• Process large volumes of data efficiently.
• Automate reward rules and actions.

Final Take

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful platform that can transform your customer engagement and drive business growth like never before. 

If you’re looking to tap into its full potential, hire Salesforce Marketing Cloud developers from Smart IT Staff. We are an IT staff augmentation firm that offers Salesforce-certified experts. Whether you are looking for an entire team or one professional, our experts can customize and integrate Marketing Cloud as per your unique business needs, seamlessly in your business, taking your marketing efforts to the next level.