ActiveCampaign vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud

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Our analysts compared ActiveCampaign vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud based on data from our 400+ point analysis of Marketing Automation Software, user reviews and our own crowdsourced data from our free software selection platform.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Software Tool

Product Basics

ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing services, with robust capabilities ranging from automation and reporting to lead scoring and contact segmentation. It’s ideal for businesses of any size, as it offers a flexible, device-agnostic deployment model. It also functions as a marketing-oriented CRM with different integrations and exporting options to assist sales.

It provides machine learning that can be used on data including phone calls, emails and sales. Machine learning enables predicting win probability and using predictive sending. Customers can also take advantage of a consultant directory with certified consultants from different countries.
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Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive software platform designed to empower businesses in managing their marketing campaigns across various channels. It caters to businesses seeking to enhance their marketing efficiency and effectiveness, enabling them to expand their reach, monitor campaign performance, and evaluate return on investment. The platform offers a range of benefits, including streamlined email campaign creation and tracking, effective social media marketing management, and insightful website analytics. Key features encompass tools for multi-channel marketing management, customer communication, and data collection and analysis.

User experiences suggest that Salesforce Marketing Cloud excels in providing robust marketing automation capabilities, facilitating personalized customer journeys and targeted messaging. Pricing for Salesforce Marketing Cloud is based on a per-user model, with a starting price of $125 per user per month. While it may be perceived as a premium option compared to some alternatives, its extensive features and scalability make it a compelling choice for businesses with substantial marketing needs.

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Product Assistance

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Product Insights

  • Take Back Your Time: Save time from otherwise arduous tasks with a robust suite of features including email automation, contact exportation and automatic campaign driving. 
  • Save Money: Reduce costs with an application that has a full suite of tools and features, helping cover all technological bases for less. 
  • Qualify Leads: Automated email delivery, blog scheduling and social media monitoring features help turn reluctant or uninformed leads into brand advocates. 
  • Assist Sales: Built to nurture leads to close, the system makes the sales team’s job much easier. 
  • Message Targets at Pivotal Stages: Schedule messages to target leads at crucial stages in the buyer’s journey. Offers numerous ways to contact and engage users. 
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  • Fit to Needs: Create and customize views, page layouts, fields and filters. Personalize mobile apps with custom menus, navigation bars, color schemes, branding and more. 
  • Easily Share Data: Find new audiences and create partnerships using Data Studio. Manage data rights and monetize by exposing audiences to marketers. 
  • Access Anywhere: Get data on the go with native mobile apps for Android and iOS. Visualize, track, and manage customer experiences in real time. 
  • Optimize Mobile Marketing: Create geofenced messages to automatically send coupons or promotions to customers in a targeted area. Deliver closer proximity messages using Bluetooth low-energy beacon devices. 
  • Do More With Apps: Access both free and paid apps with AppExchange to extend and enhance all the features offered. 
  • Streamline Tasks: Execute complex marketing and data management activities with simple or multi-step automation. Automation Studio includes an overview page for automation status and error information to enable quick recovery. 
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  • Dynamic Content: Keep content fresh and personalized by automatically changing email content depending on where a lead is in the buyer’s journey. 
  • Email Marketing: A robust and fully-featured suite offers broadcasting, triggered and targeted emails, funnels, and robust integrations with popular social media and e-commerce platforms. Also offers: 
    • Drag-and-Drop Builder: Create and automate campaigns with ease. 
    • Scheduled Emails: Enables scheduling emails for specific dates and times. 
    • Email Autoresponders: Enables sending welcome emails, starting a welcome series or delivering lead magnets automatically. 
  • Segmentation: Target specific groups within the contacts list to be more personal in emails and engage people with the right information. 
  • CRM: Notify the sales team, update deals, create tasks and nurture leads automatically. Scores leads, passes off highly-qualified targets to sales and integrates with popular email providers. 
  • Advanced Reporting: Offers custom reporting features, including custom KPIs, sales reporting, tag counting and robust segmentation. Gives insights into email performance. Split testing can also be used to get email opens, clicks and buys. 
  • Fast Training: Schedule one-on-one appointments with the company’s customer service team to help teams get up to speed with training. A series of robust webinars and user docs are available. 
  • Migration Services: Receive assistance migrating from another marketing automation product. Services include contact list and tag import, form recreation, workflow recreation, and email template recreation. 
  • Powerful Integrations: Integrates with PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Facebook, Google Analytics and more than 250 other apps including payment processors, membership websites and e-commerce stores. 
  • Audience Segmentation: Allows personalized messages by adding tags to segments. Tags can be based on purchase history, geographic location, time since last purchased, personal interests and more. 
  • Geo-Tracking: Automatically capture a contact’s location for geo-targeted email marketing campaigns. 
  • Site Tracking: Pulls data in from other websites to assist in tracking the customer’s activity. 
  • Social Sharing: Gives insights into performance on social platforms and enables greater audience engagement. 
  • Split Testing: Try different email subject lines, body copy and more to increase and optimize campaign conversion rates. Add up to five variations for a single campaign. 
  • SMS Marketing: Automate SMS marketing to send notifications and campaigns such as appointment reminders, flash sale notifications and more. 
  • Conversation Features: Provides: 
    •  Live chat to facilitate capturing leads and creating contacts from the website. Includes customizable auto reply, custom branding, contact creation and triggered automations. 
    •  A unified inbox to connect conversations with customers. 
  • Predictive Sending: Automate emails using machine learning algorithms. It ranks the hours in a day based on a contact’s open time and uses these recommendations to schedule an optimal send time. 
  • Contact and Lead Scoring: Sends notifications when leads are getting hot, with automatically triggered email notifications and task assignments based on lead score changes. Helps follow up with deals that are most likely to close. 
  • Win Probabilities: Calculates the conversion chance for a specific lead, giving foresight into lead behavior. 
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  • Audience Management: Utilizes data, machine learning and AI to provide deep insights into customer behavior and deliver personalized, relevant messages. 
  • Customer Engagement: Capture, unify, segment and act on customer data across multiple teams, devices and systems. Also, manage dashboards and safe provisioning measures, as well as optimize live campaigns based on data. 
  • Email Marketing: Engage audiences with marketing campaigns using tools such as: 
    •  Drag-and drop segmentation and built-in intelligence. 
    •  Test messages and automated emails with delivery schedules. 
    •  Campaign targeting to reach any number of customers. 
  • Mobile Marketing: Automate and customize mobile campaigns seamlessly. Includes: 
    •  Personalized messaging based on preferences and time-sensitivity. 
    •  Geofenced messages for promotions. 
    •  Mobile reports on the app. 
    •  Alignment of mobile campaigns with other marketing channels. 
  • Social Media Marketing: Manage and monitor content and conversations across social media platforms for insights. Machine learning and photo recognition drive marketing strategies and customizable dashboards help keep up with trends. 
  • Datorama: Use one marketing dashboard of cross-channel analytics and built-in reporting for ROI, speed and growth. Gain insights from advertising efforts, events, email, social media channels, a website and a CRM database. 
  • Pardot: Automates B2B marketing for connections and targeted sales pitches. Segmentation aids marketing tasks and email paths personalize the customer experience. 
  • Google Marketing Platform: Access advanced marketing solutions with powerful tools for identifying insights. Conduct deep analysis of user engagement with content and boost marketing performance. 
  • Advertising Studio: Gain new prospects like current high-value customers and reconnect with old customers. Coordinate advertising with email for more purchase intent and optimize spending by controlling advertising to current customers. 
  • Data Studio: Find new audiences with advanced discovery tools, integrate into over 200 channels and create new partnerships with premium data providers. 
  • Interaction Studio: Drive customer engagement by visualizing, tracking and managing customer experiences in real time. Control message frequency and connect online and offline interactions. 
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Product Ranking

#2

among all
Marketing Automation Software

#14

among all
Marketing Automation Software

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Analyst Rating Summary

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Analyst Ratings for Functional Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

ActiveCampaign
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
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AI-Based Capabilities Campaign Management Compliance And Data Security Dashboard And Reporting Email Campaign Management Lead Generation Lead Management Lead Nurturing Mobile Capabilities Platform Capabilities Social Media Campaign Management Text Campaign Management 57 93 83 81 95 75 100 100 62 95 88 76 0 25 50 75 100
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Analyst Ratings for Technical Requirements Customize This Data Customize This Data

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User Sentiment Summary

Excellent User Sentiment 6420 reviews
Good User Sentiment 1950 reviews
92%
of users recommend this product

ActiveCampaign has a 'excellent' User Satisfaction Rating of 92% when considering 6420 user reviews from 3 recognized software review sites.

79%
of users recommend this product

Salesforce Marketing Cloud has a 'good' User Satisfaction Rating of 79% when considering 1950 user reviews from 5 recognized software review sites.

n/a
5.0 (33)
4.6 (5328)
3.9 (1166)
4.6 (800)
4.1 (258)
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4.4 (102)
4.5 (292)
3.8 (391)

Awards

SelectHub research analysts have evaluated ActiveCampaign and concluded it earns best-in-class honors for Lead Management. ActiveCampaign stands above the rest by achieving an ‘Excellent’ rating as a User Favorite.

User Favorite Award
Lead Management Award

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Synopsis of User Ratings and Reviews

User-Friendly: Everyone referencing this aspect states the software is easy to use.
Automation: It helps run customer and lead campaigns, triggered automatically based on set specifications, note 98% of reviewers referring to this feature.
Customer Support: The support team is easy to reach and very responsive, according to 93% of reviewers talking about this aspect.
Functionalities: Every user mentioning features states the system offers robust capabilities including client onboarding, lead funnels, newsletters, contact tracking and more.
Email Campaigns: In the view of 85% of reviews about this feature, it’s easy to send weekly emails, replicate earlier emails and develop templates for other uses.
Integration: Connecting with Zapier and other platforms makes it easy to transfer leads, according to 88% of reviewers referencing integration.
Help Resource: Everyone mentioning training reports there are helpful tutorials and webinars.
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Reporting: All users who mention reports and analytics indicated that the reporting capabilities are a key benefit.
Features: A robust set of features enable cross-channel marketing, according to 75% of users referencing capabilities.
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Learning Curve: According to 77% of reviewers talking about training, it’s tough and time consuming to learn the platform.
Glitches: Every user mentioning this aspect notes it can be glitchy at times and quite slow to load during peak business hours.
Interface: The interface is slow and not very intuitive, according to 62% of reviewers referencing this aspect.
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Cost: All reviews on this topic noted additional costs as a concern associated with using this product.
Complexity: About 95% of user feedback on this issue suggested that assistance is necessary for understanding of all features and functions.
Customer Support: The customer support is unhelpful and concerns might go unsolved for days, according to 88% of users who mention service.
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ActiveCampaign provides cloud-based marketing services to businesses of any size. It’s easy to use and offers a wide range of features, along with robust automation and campaigning capabilities. The system integrates with all major platforms. Most users also find the customer support team as well as the training materials to be helpful. However, it takes time to learn the intricate features thoroughly. Reviews also state the system suffers from glitches and the interface could be more user-friendly. Businesses that need a system that caters to CRM as well as marketing needs, and that have the ability to leverage its complex functionality effectively, should consider this as a solid choice.

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Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be leveraged for its powerful set of features for effective cross-channel marketing, according to user feedback. Another common strength is its reporting features to analyze and plan marketing strategies. However, users raise concerns about the system’s complexity, which may require outside assistance at additional costs, especially due to unresponsive customer support. Another major drawback reviews agree on is the lack of cost-effectiveness due to additional costs and charges. Overall, the product can be a good pick for large companies looking to strategize and execute marketing effectively.

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