Pricing & Editions
Now it comes where you get into the pricing and this really I think determines whether or not the product is truly available to small market businesses. In a sense it’s actually maybe more available than Pardot. If you look at that $400-a-month price point for personalized promotional email marketing. A lot of capabilities in there including A/B testing. That is a far better value actually surprisingly. We’ll get into how to choose between Pardot and Marketing Cloud. That actually might be a better value than the Pardot pricing which starts at $1,000 a month and then scales up to 2,000 if you want A/B testing.
Version Based Pricing
In addition to the Feature specific based editions of Marketing Cloud you can buy Marketing Cloud with cross channel features by looking at Pro, Corporate and Enterprise editions.
You can see where Marketing Cloud could be accessible by a small business as opposed to the Pardot platform, which might push it up into the upper tier small into mid-market. You can also buy the Pro version at $1250 a month or the corporate version at $3750 a month.
Beyond these prepackaged versions you can get the Enterprise can really scale up. You’ll see there’s other pricing. There’s so many pricing and capability packages that it gets confusing. You’re going to need a sales rep from Salesforce to determine what you need and what your actual price is, because at $1250 a month up to $3750, but then you look at the editions in pricing that are published in their guide, yes, it starts at $400 a month.
Then they talk about social media marketing as a standalone as opposed to email, mobile, and web marketing at $400 a month. Social media marketing alone can be $1,000 a month. Advertising platform $1250. You can actually buy the capabilities of the platform a la carte. Rather than just taking a version that has additional features, you can hive off, you say, “Hey, I only want the social media marketing capabilities.” They can build that out for $1,000 a month, or I only want display and pay-per-click advertising management platform across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn ads. That’s $1250 a month. Then B2B marketing automation, so lead generation, qualification, nurturing, tracking, again very almost like a customized version of the Marketing Cloud for $1,000 a month.
We can see where it gets a little confusing. What you need to really identify is your digital marketing strategy, the personas of your customer, and then across what channels you’re going to interact with them. Then you will have an idea of what parts of Marketing Cloud are you actually going to operationalize and use and to what scale. From there you can begin to figure out your pricing – with the help of a Salesforce Account Manager most likely.
What edition would make the most sense for your company? What features or versions are you most interested in? Let us know at ideas@cloudadvisory.io
What are the capabilities of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
How do you choose between Salesforce Pardot and Marketing Cloud?