What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC)?

Many of you may already be familiar with the Salesforce company in some way. Marketing Cloud is one of many products under the Salesforce umbrella, focused on efficient digital marketing campaigns through automation, artificial intelligence, and analytics.

If you’ve ever wondered how Company X knows to send you a birthday email on your actual birthday with a coupon for their store, or Company Y can recommend products specific to your tastes because you looked at like products on their site, these are all capabilities of Marketing Cloud. Although email is generally the focus for most digital marketing campaigns, SFMC also has the ability to automate and analyze app push notifications and SMS text messages.

What can it do for me?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be a one-stop-shop to all your marketing needs. Depending on the version you decide to choose, it gives you the ability to execute your marketing efforts across multiple channels, create and customize customer journeys, easily implement A/B testing, quickly see analytics on performance and audience segmentation, and receive AI-powered insights through Marketing Cloud Einstein.

How much does it cost?

The most current pricing can be found directly on the Salesforce website linked here, but before you go, here is a bit on navigating the page: Salesforce has broken out their bundles based on functionality e.g. if you see the section for “Email, Mobile, and Journeys – Personalize and automate journeys at scale” and click on the “SEE EDITIONS” link, it will take you to several tiers of their email and journey building features. There is also a section to view all add-ons available.

This is always a difficult question because there are so many variables. Many businesses actually assume they are too small for/can’t afford Marketing Cloud as it is known to be an enterprise solution. However, the beauty of SFMC is that it can almost be as much or as little as you need it to be. As of this article, the cheapest solution can run as little as $400/mo. Much like purchasing a base model vehicle vs one fully-loaded with every option, SFMC pricing is highly customizable.

How does it differ from SFDC and how do they work together? What does SFDC stand for anyway?

First of all, SFDC stands for Salesforce dot com. It is the acronym commonly used in the industry to refer the main Salesforce CRM product. Salesforce Marketing Cloud (commonly abbreviated as SFMC) is one of the tools that integrate with their CRM solution. There are also other “Clouds” such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Experience Cloud, and Analytics Cloud.