Zoho Campaigns vs Salesforce
Trying to choose between Zoho Campaigns vs Salesforce as your email marketing software? Here's when to choose each tool – and the pros and cons to know about.
- 4.3 GetApp
- 4.2 Capterra
- 4.3 G2
Average 4.3 / 5
Zoho Campaigns
A complex marketing solution with email campaigns. Features include automations, integrations, and SMS marketing.
Pricing
Starts at $3 a month for 500 contacts (billed yearly)
Key features
- Email automation
- E-commerce workflows
- Mobile app for email sending, reporting, and contacts import
- Integrations with various services
- Drag-and-drop email builder
- Signup forms
Support
Weekdays support during working hours via email, live chat, and phone by default. Limited support during weekends. On the free plan, the support is only available for the first 14 days.
- 1.4 TrustPilot
- 4.4 Capterra
- 4.3 G2
Average 3.4 / 5
Salesforce
Salesforce is a powerful marketing ecosystem that includes CRM, a system for marketing personalization, sales automation, analytics, and more — and all that is AI-powered.
Pricing
Dynamic, depending on the number of users, add-on products, and more
Key features
- CRM
- Email marketing automation
- Personalization
- Segmentation
- Analytics
- A/B testing
Support
Salesforce Help, phone, online chat, separate support systems for additional products
General info about company
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns is the product of Zoho Corporation — an Indian-American company. The company was founded in 1996 by Sridhar Vembu and Tony Thomas. Global headquarters in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India, and corporate headquarters outside of Austin in Del Valle, Texas.
Salesforce
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.
Difficulty
Zoho Campaigns
Possible to create emails and automations without coding or design skills. At the same time, many people find the interface to be not very user-friendly.
Salesforce
Most users claim that it takes at least a month to learn working in Salesforce, so it’s not beginner-friendly.
Best for
Zoho Campaigns
E-commerce businesses that require simple, essential workflows like post-purchase emails or digital marketing agencies working with different clients.
Salesforce
Large or scaling businesses and sales teams
Free plan
Zoho Campaigns
Has a free plan for up to 2,000 subscribers and 6,000 emails a month. The support is only available for the first 14 days. The features are limited. Segmentation, scheduling, and automation are excluded.
Salesforce
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
Pricing
Zoho Campaigns
For up to 500 contacts, billed yearly/monthly:
- Standard $3 / $4
- Professional $4.50 / $6
Other pricing features:
- 14 days free trial with all the features
- A Pay As You Go plan
- Discounts for non-profit organizations
Salesforce
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
Support
Zoho Campaigns
Weekdays support during working hours via email, live chat, and phone by default. Limited support during weekends. The response time is 8 hours depending on the pricing plan.
On the free plan, the support is only available for the first 14 days.
Offers paid additional support packages.
The Premium plan (an additional 20% of the Zoho subscription) includes 24/5 support and a three-hour response time.
The Enterprise plan (an additional 25% of the annual Zoho subscription with additional requirements) includes 24/7 support, one-hour response time, a dedicated technical account manager, a quarterly report, and early access to new features.
Knowledge Base, community forums, text and video guides, virtual classrooms, and self-service support portal.
Salesforce
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.
Features
Zoho Campaigns
- Email automation in a drag-and-drop builder
- Integrations with various services
- SMS campaigns
- E-commerce workflows with content sync between the store and email campaigns and AI product recommendations
- Signup forms
- Drag-and-drop email builder and templates
- A mobile app for Android and iOS to send emails, see reporting, and import contacts
Salesforce
- 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
Templates
Zoho Campaigns
240+ email templates including responsive email templates
The free plan doesn’t have advanced responsive templates
Templates for:
- Welcome messages
- Deals and offers
- Newsletter
- Webinars
- E-commerce
- Emergencies and crises
Salesforce
- 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).
Video/screenshots
Zoho Campaigns
Salesforce
Integrations
Zoho Campaigns
60 integrations including Zapier, Shopify, Salesforce, Twilio, Flickr, WordPress, Zendesk, and more.
Salesforce
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.
Devices
Zoho Campaigns
- Website
- A mobile app for Android and iOS to send emails, see reporting, and import contacts, etc.
- No installable solution.
Salesforce
- Web app
- Desktop app
- Mobile apps for iOS and Android
Languages
Zoho Campaigns
Dutch
French
German
Hungarian
Italian
English
Portuguese
Spanish
Chinese
Danish
Polish
Russian
Turkish
Vietnamese
Hindi
Thai
Indonesian
Swedish
Ukrainian
Bulgarian
Croatian
Czech
Salesforce
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Danish
Dutch
Finnish
English
German
Italian
Portuguese (Brazil)
Russian
Spanish
Spanish (Mexico)
Swedish
Thai
Automation
Zoho Campaigns
Many pre-built automation workflows:
- Different welcome series
- Reengagement
- Nurture series
- Customer retention
- E-commerce
- Conditional
Salesforce
Salesforce offers Automation Studio for automating email journeys which allows users to create complex email sequences with many conditions.
Pros
Zoho Campaigns
- E-commerce-focused features
- Integrations with other services including Zoho CRM
- A lot of templates and pre-built automations
- Various support options
- A mobile app
- Relatively cheap prices
Salesforce
- Great support on onboarding from the vendor
- Sophisticated customer journeys
- Dynamic content in emails
- Integrations with CRMs
Cons
Zoho Campaigns
- Slow loading times
- Low deliverability
- Design options and the email builder are limited
Salesforce
- 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
Reviews from experts
Zoho Campaigns
There are occasional glitches in the execution of campaigns but overall it's a fantastic marketing tool that is more user-friendly than it's competitors.
Pros: Zoho Campaigns has readymade templates that can be reused to save time.It is an affordable product in it's category making it a first choice for most businesses. Zoho Campaigns integrates well with other products such as Zoho Analytics, to generate some valuable end user data visualization that can help organizations take better & informed decisions.
Cons: Zoho's problems remain the same irrespective of the product, their customer support is sluggish and query resolution takes much time. Zoho Campaigns uses automation for scheduling campaigns but the user needs to take care of validation errors in advance else the scheduled job will fail.
Best Campaign Tool for Zoho One Users
This tool is connected in the backend to all Zoho Apps which really helps the Marketing team to track a lead in its entirety. We can have the whole life history of the lead and do lead scoring which can help the Sales team to prioritize.
Still, the deliverability is an issue and there are lot more fine-tuning needed in the features. The intelligence metrics that can come as part of a campaigning tool are not fully achieved in Zoho Campaigns
Salesforce
Salesforce scores a perfect 5/5 in our data reporting research category. It offers a lot of data visualization tools on all of its plans, which are important tools for any kind of business, and whether you’re looking for a sales or customer service CRM. These tools include custom reports, a chart builder, and revenue data views, and allow you to better understand data, explain trends, and generate valuable insights. When you can analyze data faster, you can create feasible business goals and targets.
When it comes to email marketing, you build your stack according to your size and maturity. You will consider Salesforce Marketing Cloud (either Engagement or Account Engagement) once you have data in your CRM and want to use it. In this case, Salesforce Marketing Cloud competitors would be Adobe, Oracle or Braze.
But Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a great solution if you consider the platform. You can easily use your CRM data, you have powerful Artificial Intelligence features with Einstein and one of the most powerful Customer journey orchestrators with Journey Builder.
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As for me, Salesforce meets the needs of both SMB and enterprise companies, but be careful with budgets: of course when customization needs are rising, you have to pay for that. But exactly the CRM gives you that opportunity.
*This information is current as of 02/14/2024. While we regularly update our articles, it`s possible that this article may not contain some of the latest information.
