Salesforce vs Campaign Monitor

Salesforce, Inc. is a cloud-based software company that was founded in 1999 and is currently headquartered in San Francisco, California. It provides customer relationship management software and applications focused on sales, customer service, marketing automation, e-commerce, analytics, and application development.

Founded in 2004 by Ben Richardson, based in Nashville. Belongs to CM Group, along with other marketing software companies like Sailthru and LiveClicker.

Most users claim that it takes at least a month to learn working in Salesforce, so it’s not beginner-friendly.

The email editor is WYSIWYG and the platform provides users with a great choice of templates and an automated email builder for your brand — no coding or design skills are required. Campaign analytics come in the form of digestible graphs that are easy to interpret for junior marketers.

Large or scaling businesses and sales teams

Marketing agencies, small organizations, publishers

No free plan, 30-day free trial that includes:

• Preloaded data for learning
• Pre-configured processes, reports, and dashboards
• Online training and live onboarding webinars

No free plan, free trial only.

The free trial only allows sending test campaigns to 5 people or less, importing contact lists, and creating customer journeys without sending them

Salesforce has a very complex pricing system that includes several products. Since we’re only talking about email marketing, here are the pricing plans for the email, mobile, and web marketing package.

Basic: $410/month with unlimited users, billed annually, includes:

• Subscriber profiles
• Drag-and-drop segmentation
• Email and mobile-optimized templates
• Content management and workflows
• A/B testing
• Personalisation tools
• Preference center
• Integration with Salesforce Sales Cloud and Service Cloud
• Reports and dashboards

Pro: $1282/month with unlimited users, billed annually, includes:

• Personalisation Builder
• Automation Studio
• Triggered Communications
• Automated workflow and campaigns
• Web and mobile analytics

Corporate: $3844/month with unlimited users, billed annually, includes:

• Journey Builder
• Mobile SMS and MobilePush
• Multi-channel predictive content
• Advanced reporting

Entreprise: pricing depends on contact and message volume, unlimited users, includes:

• Real-time big data segmentation
• Distributed sending
• Shared content, subscribers, and data
• Locked templates
• Custom roles and permissions
• Business Units

Dynamic, depends on the contact list size and the tariff type:

• Basic: $9–$299/month
• Unlimited: $30–$699/month
• Premier: $158–$989/month

All tariffs are limited to 50000 contacts.

All customers regardless of a pricing plan can create a case in Salesforce Help using their Salesforce or Trailblazer accounts. Phone support in English is available 24/7 but support in other languages has limited availability for some regions:

• French Support (Canada) — Monday–Friday, 3:00 AM–11:30 AM EST
• Spanish and Portuguese Support for Latin American countries — Monday–Friday, 8AM–8PM EST
• French, German, Italian, Dutch, Spanish and Portuguese Support for European countries — Monday–Friday, 8AM–4:30PM GMT
• Mandarin and Korean Support for Asian countries — Monday–Friday, 10AM 7PM AEST

In addition to that, Salesforce also provides an extensive knowledge base, a YouTube channel with longform video tutorials, and communities for admins and developers.

An in-app Digital Assistant tool. Support agents around the world are available in the following hours:

• America: Mon to Fri 6 am to 5 pm PST/PDT
• Australia and Asia: Mon to Fri 9 am to 5 pm AEST/AEDT
• Europe: Mon to Fri 9 am to 5 pm BST/GMT

Limited support (unspecified working hours) is available on weekends and during holidays. Support phone numbers are only available for Premier users.

Aside from online support, Campaign Monitor offers:

• Video tutorials for newbies and experienced users
• A 30-minute Getting Started course
• Email Academy — an email marketing course
• Resources for developers
• The in-app Help Center with documentation

• CRM
• Email marketing automation
• AI-powered list segmentation
• A/B testing
• No-code email template builder
• Analytics in customizable dashboards
• Google Analytics integration
• Integration with third-party data sources for relevant embedded ads

• Supports SMS notifications
• Advanced segmentation — available for Premier users
• Link Review — checks for broken links
• Free email template builder
• Campaign analytics
• CAN-SPAM compliance checker
• Integrations with CRM systems and more

• Pre-made templates are empty but offer different layout options.
• Salesforce includes three types of templates: Classic (basically plain text with little customization options), Lightning Experience (allow for images, links, rich text, etc.), and built-in Email Template Builder (your regular marketing email editor).

108 free mobile-friendly templates available without signing up, templates sorted by email types from announcements to transactional.

If you don’t like templates, you can build emails from scratch using blocks in the email builder.

Recently launched their own stock with free images.

Campaign Monitor also has an automated custom template builder where you fill in the questionnaire and get a bunch of email templates with the logo of your business and custom design.

4000+ integrations and apps like other CRM systems, other ESPs (for example, Mailchimp), Slack, Tableau, Zoom, and more. Some of these integrations are free, others are paid for separately or only available for certain pricing plans.

• Data for marketing: Salesforce, WordPress, Shopify +
• List growth: Intercom, OptinMonster, Unbounce +
• CRM: Raiser’s Edge NXT, Lexer, Qgiv +
• Advertising: AdRoll, Facebook Lead Ads, Rungopher+

More than 100 integrations are available for CRM, list management, surveys, and more

• Web app
• Desktop app
• Mobile apps for iOS and Android

• A web app accessible from phones

• No mobile app

Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Danish Dutch Finnish English German Italian Portuguese (Brazil) Russian Spanish Spanish (Mexico) Swedish Thai

English

Salesforce offers Automation Studio for automating email journeys which allows users to create complex email sequences with many conditions.

The drag-and-drop interface for creating automated email sequences that includes:

• Triggers — subscribers’ actions that start or continue the sequenc
• Yes/No rules for personalization
• Timers — for example, you can send emails 3 or more days after a certain subscriber’s action or the previous email in the sequence

The sequence is visualized like an activity diagram where every element is customizable.

• Great support on onboarding from the vendor
• Sophisticated customer journeys
• Dynamic content in emails
• Integrations with CRMs

• Good WYSIWYG email editor interface
• Easy and simple email automation
• Easy-to-understand campaign reports with good infographics

• Steep learning curve
• Very convoluted pricing system that caused most of the negative reviews on TrustPilot
• Hard to implement and maintain, requires a Salesforce administrator to help
• Very expensive and includes arising additional costs

• No live chat support + no 24/7 support
• All of the tariffs are limited to 50000 contacts
• No functional free trial you can actually use for work
• Contact importing is difficult when matching custom fields
• Split testing only allows 2 email versions
• No landing page builder