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Which is right for your organisation?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Vs Salesforce MC Account Engagement (Pardot)
(As of April 2022, Pardot has been renamed to Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. )
Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly known as Pardot) are two marketing automation tools from Salesforce. They both enable you to design unique email journeys, nurture leads, generate informative reports and dashboards, as well as utilise landing pages and forms.
You might be wondering… If Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Marketing Cloud Account Management can both do all of these tasks, which one should I implement at my organisation? In this article, we will explore how Salesforce Account Engagement and Salesforce Marketing Cloud differ so that you can decide which is the best fit for your organisation.
Which tool is best for B2B or B2C organisations?
Traditionally Salesforce has positioned its two platforms like this:
- Marketing Cloud = B2C marketing automation tool
- Marketing Cloud Account Engagement = B2B marketing automation tool
However, this binary way of dividing the two products doesn’t do either of them justice. After all, both B2B and B2C clients have utilised Marketing Cloud and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. So why have they been categorised in such a manner?
Marketing Cloud has a wide variety of studios that offer a high level of tailored personalisation across a variety of channels, including email, SMS and push messages. Marketing Cloud Personalization (previously Interaction Studio) lets you engage with your prospects across multiple touchpoints. This way of marketing is traditionally used by B2C companies as it focuses on repeated communication with one individual.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, on the other hand, is predominantly an email marketing and lead generation and scoring tool that uses engagement journeys to nurture prospects to be sales-ready. It excels in a longer buying cycle that has higher value sales and that’s why it’s often associated with B2B organisations.
When deciding which platform is ideal for your company, consider how long your sales cycle is and choose a product based on the marketing plan’s capabilities and demands, rather than focusing on the B2B or B2C aspect. Marketing Cloud and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement are both easily tailored to your organisation’s needs.
Top Marketing Cloud Account Engagement features
Will Tennison is one of our Marketing Cloud Account Engagement experts. He is a certified Pardot Specialist and Consultant, writer for Salesforce Ben and has delivered presentations at the London Pardot User Group.
Here are his top features of Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.
- Lightning email builder gives you full customisation over your emails with drag and drop tools. This is super easy to use and limits the need for code in your regular marketing activity.
- Account Engagement works alongside Sales Cloud to create a single source of truth and bring your data into one place. It also gives you a thorough view of your lead’s activities to pinpoint how they engage with your website and marketing assets. Additionally, Account Engagement provides insightful reports measuring everything from your impact on revenue to prospect lifecycle. At Pracedo, it has helped us to automate countless numbers of tasks as well as nurture our leads, so we pass over only those that are ready for the next step on their Salesforce journey.
- Account Engagements emails go one step further by giving you powerful control over personalisation.
- Dynamic content allows you to show alternative email views based on preset criteria. A great use case for this is sending different email autoresponders based on the answers prospects have given you through forms with no manual work!
- Variable tags also allow you to pull through information like name, location and product of interest. These features give you the power to personalise your emails at scale.
- Automation Rules and Engagement Journeys let you automate your nurture programmes, taking the manual work out these processes. This intelligent lead nurturing will help you close more deals quicker and make the marketing case to your senior leadership team.
Top Marketing Cloud features
Zoe Nicholson's experience as a Salesforce end user gives her a unique understanding of our customer's needs and desires. Zoe predominately consultants on Salesforce's marketing tools including Marketing Cloud and Account Engagement. She is Marketing Cloud Email and Pardot specialist certified.
Here are her Marketing Cloud top features:
- Journey Builder allows you to create and send your customers down multichannel journeys to create more meaningful, engaging experiences.
- Marketing Cloud’s AI tool, Einstein, can be used to gather and analyse customer behaviours. This functionality can then be used in Journey Builder to help businesses to send campaigns at the most relevant time to their audiences through a simple Send Time Optimisation activity.
- Marketing Cloud Connect is an API that brings data directly into Marketing Cloud from Sales or Service Cloud. Customers who have other Salesforce CRM products love Marketing Cloud due to the ease of transferring data between clouds. This mitigates the issue of siloed disconnected information and allows their business to understand their data, target individuals based on their known characteristics and have a single source of truth across the two clouds.
- Content Builder allows any business to create engaging personalised content. By using drag and drop functionality or a more advanced AMPscript code, you can create dynamic emails, SMS and PUSH content, also making it possible to target cross-channel and reach your customers more efficiently.
- Datorama reports allow you to understand your deliverability, click through and open rates at a campaign level giving further insight into how your campaigns are performing and being engaged with. Marketing Cloud is customisable on so many levels and is easily adaptable to each business skillset and needs. This makes it possible to manage and overall understand your B2B or B2C relationships on a deeper level.
What further considerations are there?
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is the lower-cost setup option with its easy to understand out of the box prebuilt package. This makes it easy to get up and running as quickly as possible.
Marketing Cloud, however, offers a more complicated structure as packages are customised to each business’ needs. Custom packages include anything from email capabilities to 1-to-1 advertising, and utilising mobile to varying levels of reporting. These highly customised packages let you create something that works for your business. Figuring out what custom Marketing Cloud package you need can seem confusing, but luckily our experienced team can guide you from discovery to implementation and even into post-project support.
When considering what platform is the best for you, the cost is just one factor to consider. Although it can often seem like this is the most important aspect to think about, especially when making a business case to your stakeholders, the more important things to consider are:
- Can the system scale with your business?
- How will your marketing team grow over time?
- What are your goals with marketing automation?
It’s critical to figure out your marketing strategy and then pick the best system for achieving those objectives. There’s no sense in investing in a marketing automation solution if you’ll outgrow it in 2-3 years. Proper planning and investment will future proof your marketing automation tool for many years to come.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Vs Salesforce MC Account Engagement
Which tool is right for your organisation?
Marketing automation drives a 14.5% increase in sales productivity and a 12.2% reduction in marketing overheads, so the question is can you afford to not be using these tools? Marketing automation can drive your ROI while creating more time for your marketers to get on with what really matters. Whether it’s customer nurturing, engaging emails, detailed reports or lead generation there’s an automation solution to nearly every problem.
Marketing Cloud offers a larger suite of additional products such as Marketing Cloud Personalization, Marketing Cloud Customer Data Platform and Marketing Cloud Intelligence. All of these products will give you a deeper level of understanding of your customer and a higher level of personalised interactions than Account Engagement.
However, the higher price point, steeper learning curve and the continued resources required to manage it; might mean it’s not the best fit for your organisation.
Account Engagements complete package brings Engagement Studio, lead nurturing and generation, and detailed reports to you at a lower price point with a more intuitive interface. However, it can’t offer everything that Marketing Cloud does.
Follow these 3 simple steps before purchasing any Marketing Automation software:
- Always start with a strong marketing and sales plan with clear goals that are measurable.
- Decide which system can help you achieve those goals within the desired time frame at an affordable cost.
- Start automating your marketing!
Making this decision can be tricky. That’s why the Pracedo team can help, bringing a wealth of knowledge and experience across thousands of hours working on Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud projects. If you want more information about what marketing automation tool is right for you, then please get in touch.
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Pracedo is an award-winning Platinum Salesforce.com Consulting Partner that delivers innovative Salesforce implementations to forward-thinking customers.
With over a decade of experience focused on Salesforce, and with offices in London, Milan, Rome, Belgrade and Melbourne, we work with our customers to unlock the power of the platform through tailored implementations that facilitate achieving business goals and ambitions. Our talented team of over 80 Salesforce professionals globally means that Pracedo offers a boutique consultancy experience, delivered locally to you, with the breadth and depth of knowledge earned from delivering over 1000 projects across our locations.
Pracedo specialises in Digital Transformation and Change Management. Implementations and customisations include: Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Service Cloud, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Pardot, Salesforce CPQ and Billing, Salesforce Community Cloud and Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud.
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