Salesforce vs Constant Contact

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.

The company was founded in 1995 by Randy Parker and was later sold to Endurance International in 2015. In 2021, it was acquired by ClearLake Investments. Headquarters in Waltham, Massachusetts.

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

Beginner-friendly. Basic tutorials are built into the interface.

Large or scaling businesses and sales teams

Small businesses, nonprofits, and event organizers. Some features are aimed at sales and marketing directors.

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. Depending on the location, users can get a 14 or 60 day free trial with access to the core features and send up to 100 emails. No credit card required.

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

Based on number of contacts and email sends. Overage fees of $0.002 per email apply.

For up to 500 contacts, billed monthly:

Lite $12

• 1 user
• 1 GB storage
• Monthly email sends: 10x your number of contacts.

Standard $35

• 3 users
• 10 GB storage
• Monthly email sends: 12x your number of contacts.

Premium $80

• Unlimited users
• 25 GB storage
• Monthly email sends: 24x your number of contacts

Other pricing features:

• Everyone: 15% off for 12-month prepay
• Nonprofits: 20% off for 6-month prepay and 30% off for 12-month prepay
• Full refund for closing account within 30 days of signing up. Conditions apply.
• Free trial
• Customized solutions for agencies, organizations in need of 5+ accounts, franchises, and member-based associations.
• Lead Gen & CRM starting at $449/month
• SMS Marketing, starting at $10/mo USD for 0-500 messages with any paid plan. Available only for US customers.

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.

• Live chat and phone for all the plans during the office hours.
• Live chat: Mon-Fri 3 am-8pm ET
• Phone: Mon-Fri 8am-8pm ET, Sat 10 am-6pm ET
• Knowledge Base
• Product Help Center
• Community Forums

• 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

• Drag-and-drop email templates
• Dynamic content in email
• Reporting (engagement, campaign comparison, open rate by device, heatmap*, revenue*)
• Automations (pre-built and custom templates)
• AI Content Generator
• Marketing CRM
• Web sign-up forms
• Polls & surveys
• Landing page builder
• Social media posting
• Event management, including selling services and merch with the tickets and accepting payments
• Scheduled email sends
• Contact segmentation
• Social media ads manager
• Facebook retargeting ads*
• Google Ads Manager*
• SEO recommendations*
• 5,000+ integrations
• SMS marketing (US only)**
• Subject line A/B testing

_____________________
*Available only with Premium
**Charged separately

• 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).

• Over 200 mobile-responsive templates
• Drag-and-drop editing

Popular templates:

• Newsletter
• Holiday-themed
• Retail
• Industry-specific
• Customizable Standard template to any occasion

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.

Over 5,000 integrations, including Google and Facebook Ads, WordPress, Canva, Vimeo, SalesForce, Eventbrite, Shopify, Stripe, WooCommerce, social media

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

• iOS
• Android
• Web

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

Danish Dutch English French German Italian Portuguese Castilian Spanish Latin American Spanish Swedish

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

• Automated email and SMS messages.
• Automation Path Builder with a library of plug-and-play path templates and ability to create a custom path.

Some path templates are compatible with Shopify and WooCommerce, including:

• Welcome email series
• Abandoned cart messages
• Win-back series
• Thank you series
• Request a review

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

• Ease of use
• Diverse template library — more than 200 mobile-ready email templates categorized by tag
• Over 5,000 Integrations with filters by category
• Sharing newsletter content on social media in one-click
• Niche features for event organizers
• Automated contact list segmentation based on engagement

• 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

• Steep price tag for the users who have more than a couple hundred subscribers and going beyond basic functionality. Some features are not included in the plans and cost extra, like SMS
• Automation can’t include multiple channels, actions and conditions. Selection of triggers is also limited
• A/B testing is limited to subject lines
• No customization options for sign up forms
• Only five templates for landing pages
• No geographical breakdown of the regions that are engaging more, or the time that subscribers open emails
• No RTL language support
• Account can be canceled only by phone