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The Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement platform, formerly known as Salesforce Pardot, has four plans: Growth, for $1,250 per month; Plus, for $2,500 per month; Advanced for $4,000 per month, and Premium, for a massive $15,000 per month. Plus, businesses can pay an additional monthly charge for add-ons, including the $50/user/month sales communication add-on Salesforce Engage, the $300/year/user engagement history dashboards, and the $3,000 per month B2B Marketing Analytics Plus.
The Plus plan offers the best value to a smaller company, while the Advanced plan’s expanded features and abilities make it attractive to a larger company. We would caution against the much more limited Growth plan and the far-too-costly Premium plans (for most businesses).
This page will walk you through the features and costs to expect. And, once you’ve educated yourself on the options, take the next step: Take a minute to check out custom quotes for marketing automation services through our free price comparison tool.
Growth
Plus
Advanced
Premium
$1,250/month
$2,750/month
$4,400/month
$15,000/month
Email automation
In-depth analytics
AI-powered features
Predictive analytics
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
100 MB
500 MB
10 GB
10 GB
10,000
10,000
10,000
75,000
In this guide:
The Marketing Cloud Account Engagement software is available from Salesforce through four plans: Growth, Plus, Advanced, and Premium. Each plan supports up to 10,000 contacts with a monthly charge (with the exception of Premium, which supports up to 75,000), and they are differentiated by which features are included.
With some exceptions, businesses must have a Salesforce login in order to get Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, although this can be a free account rather than a paid subscription to the core Salesforce CRM. That said, paying extra for the Salesforce CRM does open up additional benefits, and the two integrate well. You can visit our Salesforce pricing page to get a handle on the complex pricing scheme for the main Salesforce plans and tiers.
Here’s a table that covers the main pricing and feature differences between the four Marketing Cloud Account Engagement plans.
Growth
Plus
Advanced
Premium
$1,250/month
$2,750/month
$4,400/month
$15,000/month
Email automation
In-depth analytics
AI-powered features
Predictive analytics
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
100 MB
500 MB
10 GB
10 GB
10,000
10,000
10,000
75,000
Growth costs $1,250 per month, Plus costs $2,500 per month, Advanced costs $4,000 per month, and Premium costs $15,000 per month. Each plan is billed annually.
B2B Marketing Analytics Plus is the priciest add-on, costing $3,000 per month to deliver addition AI-driven insights into marketing data and impact analysis. Salesforce also sells another add-on, Salesforce Engage, which can be added to the base Marketing Cloud Account Engagement price for $50/user/month. This feature helps sales teams better communicate with clients through alerts and trend reports.
Engagement history dashboards help sales and service when conversing with each buyer, by supplying the right insights at the right time. They cost $300/year/user, but each plan bundles a set amount of dashboards in for free: Growth has 5, Plus has 10, and Advanced and Premium both offer 20.
Plus, after the initial cap on contacts for each plan is met, additional contacts can be bought for $100 per 10,000 contacts per month.
Depending on the plan, certain features may cost extra, though you’ll need to get in touch with the Salesforce team directly to confirm details. All four plans include a user forum, live weekly training, on-demand training videos, and a success specialist team.
Here’s a quick overview of the difference between each of the four Marketing Cloud Account Engagement price plans.
Growth offers a full range of basic features, including email marketing tools, tracked social posts, engagement programs, in-depth prospect tracking, ROI reporting, custom fields, user management, and customizable URLs. Users can also benefit from lead nurturing, deduplication, and scoring. Available integrations include Eventbrite, Webinar, Olark Chat, Native CRM, and Google AdWords, although the Google AdWords integration comes at an additional cost.
Some features on the Growth plan come with more limitations than the other plans. Growth is capped at 50 landing pages, 50 forms, 50 automation rules, 5 engagement history dashboards, 10 competitors monitored, 100 SEO keywords monitored, and just 3 SSL vanity domains.
Other features are only available at an extra cost, including multivariate landing page testing, email preview analysis, advanced dynamic content, social profiling, and advanced email analytics.
Comparably priced plans in the world of marketing CRM include the Professional plan from HubSpot Marketing Hub ($800 per month) and Sugar Market ($1,000 per month).
Plus includes all the Growth features and more, as well as higher caps. Forms and landing pages are unlimited under Plus, for example, while feature caps extend to 100 automation rules, 10 engagement history dashboards, 25 competitors monitored, 250 SEO keywords monitored, and 10 SSL vanity domains.
New features include an integrated marketing calendar, A/B testing for emails, multiple lead scoring categories, multi-touch attribution models, and API access to 25,000 calls per day.
Plus includes many of the extras that Growth users would need to pay for. It also allows users to pay extra for a few features that are entirely locked away from those on the Growth plan, including custom object integration ($400/month), custom user roles ($500/month), and a dedicated IP Address ($500/month).
Other marketing CRMs that are priced similarly to this one includes the Enterprise plan from HubSpot Marketing Hub ($3,200 per month) and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing ($1,500 per month).
The Advanced plan includes all the features from Plus, as well as extended caps including 150 automation rules, 20 engagement history dashboards, 100 competitors monitored, 1000 SEO keywords monitored, 20 SSL vanity domains, and API access to 100,000 calls per day.
All the extras that Plus users need to pay for (custom object integration, custom user roles, the dedicated IP Address) are included at no extra charge under the Advanced plan.
Advanced also includes one feature entirely unavailable under the Growth and Plus plans: Salesforce’s Einstein AI, which powers lead scoring, behavior scoring, and campaign insights.
Salesforce, as you can tell, is quite expensive, and there really isn’t a comparably priced option when it comes to its more expensive options.
Finally, the Premium plan offers all the features from Advanced, and adds additional enterprise-friendly features including personalized product support. It also includes bundles in a few additional modules that cost extra under other plans: B2B Marketing Analytics Plus and Premier Plus.
The biggest benefit to this tier, however, is the greatly expanded cap on contacts, which is 75,000 up from the first three plans’ cap of 10,000. However, a business on any other plan could easily reach this number at a lower overall cost, just by paying an additional $100 per month per 10,000 contacts. This plan’s much larger price tag doesn’t appear to be justified by the extra features it offers, and we’d recommend the Advanced plan instead.
Salesforce takes the cake for most expensive marketing CRM in the industry, with no other options coming even close to this highly priced option.
A business’s Marketing Cloud Account Engagement users are directly tied to how many users they have licensed for the main Salesforce CRM plan.
In other words, the base monthly price for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement automation software will stay the same, no matter how many users are added. Instead, the total cost for the Salesforce CRM will go up as users are added, since it’s charged on a per user, per month basis. You’ll likely need to gather a custom quote to know exactly how much the marketing automation tool will cost your business per year.
Find out and compare custom price quotes, using our free tool. Start benefiting from the latest technology today.
Salesforce offers two marketing services that may seem the same on first glance: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud Engagement.
Marketing Cloud Engagement is less expensive than Marketing Cloud Account Engagement but offers fewer features as well: Marketing Cloud Engagement’s three plans are Pro, for $1,250 per month; Corporate, for $3,750 per month; and Enterprise, for which you’ll need to contact Salesforce for a quote, as the price varies based on contact and message volume.
Marketing Cloud Engagement is aimed at marketing to customers in three core ways: email, mobile, and web. If your business needs a B2C solution for cross-channel marketing campaigns and little else, Marketing Cloud Engagement will be a great fit.
They’re both aimed at marketing teams, but with one main difference: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is primarily for B2B marketing with a focus on email, while Marketing Cloud is targeted at B2C marketing and includes more granular advertising tools. Your business will not have to subscribe to Marketing Cloud Engagement in order to get Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is for B2B marketing, and Marketing cloud is for B2C marketing. That said, there’s plenty of overlapping features and abilities between the two, and both services can be used to stand in for the other in a pinch, even though their workflows are different.
The nitty gritty here is that Salesforce acquired Pardot in 2012, long after they had already built up a customer base of Marketing Cloud users. They didn’t want to lose their customers for either service, so they now run the two services simultaneously in the slightly confusing way that any modern conglomerate operates. Even worse, they’ve now changed the names to be oddly similar, mucking up the waters even more between the two platforms. Go figure.
Getting new clients takes a lot more time and resources than just working hard to retain the clients you already have. But a growing business can easily lose track of leads or clients. It all adds up, and the business may ultimately die a death from a thousand cuts.
The solution? Marketing automation software. The best options will offer all the reminders and alerts that agents need to respond appropriately to the needs of their clients and leads.
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement reports customers experience an average of 34% more sales revenue and 37% more marketing effectiveness after adopting their software.
Pros
Cons
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement offers a huge range of features, but they’re all aimed at streamlining four main challenges for marketers: lead generation, lead management, sales alignment, and ROI reporting.
Lead generation comes from tools including social media tracking, landing pages and forms, lead deduplication, lead scoring, email campaigns, and A/B tests to better target landing pages or emails. Once acquired, leads can be managed through engagement and nurturing programs, which can be custom designed with variable tags and automation rules.
The Marketing Cloud Account Engagement platform’s sales tools include engagement campaigns, customer activity tracking, and CRM integration, bolstered by custom alerts. Finally, ROI can be tracked with tools that unpack trends in email metrics or lifecycle reporting, which can identify problem areas across your entire sales funnel.
By automating the menial tasks, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement helps employees focus on the important elements of their workload. This ultimately lets agents generate more leads and boost customer satisfaction, leading to a resilient customer base and a healthier bottom line.
In fact, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement reports that its customers have experienced an average of 34% more sales revenue and 37% more marketing effectiveness after adopting their software.
Is that worth the cost? You may need to gather a few quotes from other marketing automation services before you can know if it’s a fit for you. However, we approve the service on the whole.
On one hand, the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement platform is on the expensive side. But its range of features is comprehensive. The cap of 10,000 contacts on most Marketing Cloud Account Engagement plans may be a deciding factor, as it is a very limiting restriction for many.
However, if your business doesn’t anticipate reaching 10,000, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is likely to be the more cost-effective option compared to other software services, which essentially charge a premium for a higher cap that your business ultimately won’t come close to hitting.
Which plan is best? We’d recommend starting with the Plus plan, which includes all the primary features you’ll need. However, if you’re a large enough company to fully benefit from the more granular, complex features and AI-powered insights found in the Advanced plan, then you’ll find it to be worth the cost.
We’d also recommend trying out a demo or a guided tour – after filling out our custom quotes comparison tool to get bespoke quotes from the best of the best marketing automation vendors on the market, of course.
Initially acquired by the company in 2012, Pardot ended up being a separate offering from the Salesforce for many years. It acted as an entirely different marketing platform that emphasized automation to aid businesses in their efforts to attract and retain customers.
However, in the last year, Salesforce has folded Pardot into its branded offering, now calling it Marketing Cloud Account Engagement. The platform is aimed at creating efficient marketing pipelines through lead qualification and advanced automation like personalized messaging.
Simply put, Pardot used to be a Salesforce marketing offering, but has since been rebranded to exclusively sport the Salesforce name, as one of several branches of its Marketing Cloud.
While marketing CRM software is often quite expensive, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is way up there, which means you might be in the market for an alternative. Fortunately, we’ve done the research and found that there are plenty of other options out there if Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement isn’t for you.
Take a look at our thoroughly researched list below and read on for more in-depth look at some of our best CRM for marketing.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Freshmarketer
HubSpot Marketing Hub
Act! CRM
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing
Keap
$1,250/month
$19/month
$15/user/month
$30/user/month
$1,500/month
$159/month
21 days
14 days
30 days
14 days
A very expensive option that provides robust email and omnichannel features
A good option for email, but not great for scalability
The best option for businesses looking to scale
A low-cost CRM with great email campaigns and mediocre automations
A bit too expensive for most, but great for managing teams closely
A suitable all-in-one platform for sales and marketing but a bit expensive
Tech.co doesn’t mess around when it comes to research. We have teams of people working tirelessly to provide us with the most up-to-date, valuable information about tools like CRM for marketing, and we want to be sure you understand exactly how we evaluate these providers.
Subsequently, here is a list of all the metrics we considered when ranking Salesforce against other alternatives:
If you’re still curious about how Tech.co researches its software providers, take a look at our research guide and check back for more reviews of CRM software.
We recommend Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement for your business, on the strength of its broad array of features, its flexible reporting ability and its customizable functionality. That said, one element of the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement service might ward off some potential clients: The limited number of contacts allowed under most plans.
If the upcharge of $100/10,000 contacts/month after the initial cap isn’t a concern, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is the way to go. It offers stellar functionality and integrates smoothly with any operations already benefiting from the Salesforce suite of products. The next step is our free comparison tool, which lets you compare Marketing Cloud Account Engagement’s prices against other top marketing automation solutions.
It’s distinct from customer relationship management software, which is more sales-oriented, although the features can overlap, and the two services work best when integrated.
Customers’ needs must be addressed in order to maintain satisfaction, and as a company adds more and more customers, the challenge to quickly generate and manage leads can spin out of control. With marketing automation software, businesses can trim the fat from chores that would otherwise begin to drain energy from a marketing team as the operation scales.
Granted, the two software have some overlap, given that marketing and sales teams must work together. Pardot does include plenty of features that can help sales teams, from analytics and SEO to its Google AdWords integration.
They each offer different benefits and come with different pricing plans, but our research shows that HubSpot is the best CRM for marketing in most cases. You can compare custom prices yourself with our comparison tool.
For a more in-depth look at what each service offers, check out our Salesforce vs. HubSpot comparison guide.
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Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Pricing – Tech.co
