Integrate Your Email Marketing Software with Salesforce
Whether you’re a small business owner or a marketing expert at a multinational corporation, you’re probably familiar with the struggles of marketing automation. If you want to optimize your marketing and sales efforts, it’s essential to have an integrated marketing automation platform.
The problem is that many businesses struggle to find a solution that integrates with their current systems. One of the most popular platforms for managing customer relationships is Salesforce. And it’s also one of the most difficult to integrate with other systems, including email marketing software.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to sync your email marketing software with Salesforce so you can maximize your sales and marketing efforts!
Email Marketing Software That Integrates With Salesforce
As marketing automation continues to grow and evolve, more and more solutions are being developed worldwide. No matter the size of your business or the industry you operate in, it’s highly likely your company is using marketing automation, at least to some degree. Still, marketing automation on its own is not enough to guarantee the success of any business.
Many organizations have turned to Salesforce, a large and well-known provider of many different types of enterprise technology. When you’ve already dedicated yourself to a particular vendor, finding other solutions or tools that integrate with your chosen vendor, such as Salesforce, can be challenging. Luckily, many marketing automation companies have developed integrations and connectors to work with Salesforce and continue the growth of your business.
The editors at Solutions Review have developed this resource to assist buyers in search of the best marketing automation solutions for Salesforce. Choosing the right vendor and solution can be a complicated process—one that requires in-depth research and often comes down to more than just the solution and its technical capabilities. To make your search a little easier, we’ve profiled the best marketing automation solutions for Salesforce and put them all in one place. This list isn’t static, and vendors may be changed as the market evolves.
The Best Marketing Automation Integrations for Salesforce
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.
best email service for salesforce
There are a number of solid email service providers to choose from. How do you decide which is the best for your team, user base, and budget? This lesson will give you insight into the vendor landscape and walk through some key considerations when it comes to selecting an email tool.
News about email’s death has been greatly exaggerated. Yes, email is one of the oldest digital marketing channels (the first email blast was in 1978!), but the email service provider (ESP) landscape still has a lot of innovation to offer.
Maybe you’ve pulled together enough user emails for your list that personalizing your messages via Gmail isn’t cutting it anymore. Or, you’ve been in the email-slinging game for a while, and you’re ready to upgrade your solution. Either way, congrats on hitting your email milestone; you’ve come to the right place to understand the next steps you should take.
How email has changed in the last decade
In the last 48 years, email marketing grew from a cheeky stunt in the ’70s to a bona fide fledgling industry in the ’90s to the massive ESP industry we know today. The last 10 years, in particular, have been eventful, and the major trends are important to take into account.
Larger vendors have cemented their grip. Overall, the major consolidation moves happened a while ago; now, the big players like Oracle, Salesforce, and Adobe dominate.
Oracle bought Eloqua in 2012.
Salesforce bought ExactTarget in 2013.
Adobe bought Marketo in 2018.
Email tools offer less specialization in exchange for broader appeal. Email service providers for small businesses, like Campaign Monitor, have added pricing options for larger businesses. At the same time, others that were highly specialized, like SendGrid that was focused on transactional auto-response emails, now have more mainstream features.
Up-and-comers shaking up the market. Technology outside of the ESP realm threatens to change how the end consumer interacts with their email. For instance, HEY, a new email provider, is looking to filter out unwanted emails, while Front wants to corner the customer communication market.
Yes, email is still a big deal
As we mentioned above, there have long been bold predictions that email might die. Five years ago, John Brandon at Inc. predicted by 2020 it would be time to “stick a fork in your email.”
Of course, that hasn’t happened. But email still has a bad reputation as being a spammy, unhelpful marketing channel. While that can be the case in specific circumstances, it’s just not true in the aggregate.
Two shining examples of why email is a viable communication channel include:
The rise of Substack, proving that people still read email if it’s valuable and relevant to them. In fact, the Washington Post says that “More than 100,000 people pay to subscribe to writers.” People still read email—and they enjoy it.
According to HubSpot, throughout 2019, marketers saw an overall 78% increase in engagement. In general, people find email a helpful and necessary part of their daily routine.
- Considerations for choosing an email service provider
Zoom with margin - Size of contact list
In this lesson, we’ll share which ESPs are best suited for various contact list sizes—ranging from smaller ESPs for small and medium-sized businesses (like Mailchimp) to massive enterprise ESPs (like Salesforce). The size of the email contact list usually coincides with the number of features the ESP has. Tools that can handle large lists are usually very sophisticated with complex drip-nurture and trigger-based logic, while smaller tools may focus on user-friendliness. - B2B vs. B2C
Besides the size of the contact lists, the other big differentiator is the ESP’s target audience. B2B-focused ESPs tend to center on lead nurturing, while B2C-focused ESPs put an emphasis on events, sales, announcements, and more. - Cost and ease of use
Naturally, it’s also prudent to look at the cost of the ESP, as well as how much time your team will need to invest in learning all the bells and whistles. As mentioned above, Mailchimp is known for user-friendliness but lacks deep trigger-based logic. Salesforce’s Pardot, on the other hand, is much more technically advanced but requires some HTML knowledge to design the emails exactly how you want them. - Integration within your tech stack
Look for an ESP that plays nicely with the tools you already use. In particular, pay attention to how well it integrates with your customer relationship management platform (CRM). This is such an important factor that CRMs and ESPs are often blended together into one product, like HubSpot and Braze.
9 top email service providers
- Twilio SendGrid
Like Segment, SendGrid is a subsidiary of Twilio and is one of the most trusted platforms for transactional email and email marketing.
Two of the biggest benefits of SendGrid are deliverability and scale. Their deliverability features (domain authentication, proactive ISP outreach, etc) help businesses record an open rate improvement of over 6 percentage points. This can also be performed at significant scale. The SendGrid platform sends 70 billion emails every month with 99.999% uptime so you can rest assured your email will reach your recipients.
Top features:
Purpose build Mail Transfer Agent that can scale to billions of emails
Powerful email marketing automation via SendGrid Automations
Artificial intelligence that continually adapts to changing ISP rules
Multi-channel messaging (SMS, MMS, WhatsApp, and chat) via the Twilio platform
SendGrid is great for:
Developers and marketers
Promotional and transactional email
High volume senders – reliable email delivery at scale
- Braze
Braze (formerly Appboy) first established itself as a mobile-first CRM with powerful text and push-messaging features. With recent enhancements to its email marketing functionality and the addition of a visual journey builder, Braze has become a lifecycle engagement platform with an emphasis on highly personalized, targeted customer messaging across many channels.
Top features:
Push and SMS notifications
Visual customer journey builder called Braze Canvas
Automated multi-channel messaging
Strong customer support
Braze is great for:
Marketers using push notifications and email
Mid-market to enterprise businesses of any industry, but Braze is especially useful for push-centric B2C brands
Contact lists of any size
- Customer.io
Customer.io is a data-driven marketing platform for newsletter creation, transactional emails, SMS notifications, and customer profile-triggered messaging. Its focus is to provide a flexible and easy-to-implement solution for data-driven startups and SMBs.
Top features:
Flexible customer behavioral data mapping
Integration with Shopify’s open-source Liquid logic
Sophisticated activation and retention-oriented email campaigns from real-time triggers on customer behaviors
Orients around the user and how they’ve interacted with sent messages
Customer.io is great for:
Marketers looking to implement a seamless plug-and-play tool for customer messaging
Ecommerce SMBs and startups
Contact lists of any size
- Drip
Drip is an email marketing automation platform well suited for B2B marketers. The visual campaign builder offers customizable triggers, actions, and integrations to create automated campaigns based on customer behavior.
Top features:
Ease-of-use
Workflow builder
Can resend emails with a different subject line to users who didn’t initially open
Integration with Shopify, WooComerce, and Magento for a unified ecommerce experience
Drip is great for:
Marketers looking for advanced marketing automation with a lean team
SMBs and startups of any industry, but particularly those focused on ecommerce
Relatively small contact lists to mid-sized lists
- HubSpot
More than just an email service provider, Hubspot is a full-blown CRM that also helps manage social media, lead generation, and content. As the original and self-proclaimed “Inbound Marketing Platform,” HubSpot helps marketers both create demand through content and nurture leads through email campaigns. HubSpot is known for being easy to use and navigate and, as such, is appropriate for large and small businesses alike. However, the pricing model is dependent on the total number of contacts in your database, so it becomes cost-prohibitive for very large-scale businesses.
Top features:
Many built-in API integrations
Visibility across additional touchpoints on social media platforms
Lead-generation identification capabilities
Integration with inbound marketing and demand-generation processes
HubSpot is great for:
Marketers looking for a full suite of marketing automation solutions and tools for inbound marketing
B2B and B2C companies of any size, but HubSpot can become cost-prohibitive for large B2C lists
Contact lists of more than 25K
- Iterable
Iterable is a multi-channel customer engagement and marketing automation platform. It focuses on offering less-technically savvy marketers access to intuitive yet powerful drag-and-drop automation flows, dynamic personalization, and segmentation features that would typically require more in-depth engineering support and resources.
Top features:
Ease of use
Multivariate testing
Omnichannel campaigns
Deep personalization capabilities
Iterable is great for:
Marketers looking to unlock multi-channel marketing automation with minimal engineering support
Mid-sized B2C companies, though B2B companies might find use for Iterable
Contact lists of more than 100K
- Mailchimp
Mailchimp is a fan favorite for many startups with small marketing teams. Not only is it quick to get up and running, but the templates are intuitive and straightforward to navigate, too. Though it still lacks some features, such as allowing the creation of automated A/B split tests into subject lines, it has recently added new functionality along with its rebrand.
Top features:
Quick to set up
Easy to use
Built-in design templates
Doesn’t require a developer or designer
Mailchimp is great for:
Marketing teams looking to deploy an easy-to-use email marketing tool
Small to mid-sized businesses of any industry
Contact lists of more than 100+
- Marketo
Often thought of as the 10,000-pound gorilla in the email marketing automation space, Marketo became an early market leader for multi-campaign email management. However, more functionality means a higher price tag and sophisticated users to operate it. Marketo is great for mid-market to enterprise-level B2B customers already on the Adobe suite. It might not be appropriate for very small businesses due to the cost or the advanced skill level and training required to operate it. That said, we are a fan—Marketo is what we use here internally at Segment.
Top features:
Deep Salesforce integration for advanced lead scoring
Easy-to-use user interface and templates
High level of functionality and integrations
Tried-and-true name brand
Ability to manage sensitive lists requiring privacy in the financial or healthcare spaces
Marketo is great for:
Marketing teams looking to automate email marketing and integrate with CRMs
B2B companies of any size but must be spending at least $3-$5M per year in marketing
Contact lists of more than 100K
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful CRM and marketing automation platform with ESP capabilities designed with the enterprise in mind. The ESP portions were created with the acquisitions of ExactTarget (for B2C) and Pardot (for B2B). It’s a big investment that will require some work to get set up, but once Salesforce is up and running to your specifications, it can be very powerful.
Top features:
Very comprehensive
Automation and routing
Great for companies that can deploy developers for deep customization
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is great for:
Marketers looking to use one of the most comprehensive email suites available
Large B2B and B2C enterprise businesses
Large contact lists of more than 100K
A few more to consider
SendGrid for communication automation within the ever-expanding Twilio ecosystem
User.com for heavy personalization capabilities
Oracle Eloqua for integration with dynamic cross-channel campaigns
Klaviyo for companies that use point-of-sale data to inform email marketing
Choosing an email service provider
These days, the ESP industry is fairly mature, and, as such, each vendor will cover the basics and has a solid roster of customers that you can learn from. While certain tools are much better suited for certain sized businesses and industries, each tool will be able to accomplish the basics of engaging with your user base at scale in personalized ways. This is especially true if you’ve set up your analytics with a tool like Segment.
Conclusion
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