Salesforce, the leader in CRM, announced that Salesforce has been positioned by Gartner as a Leader in its 2021 Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs. Salesforce was evaluated for its Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
“Today’s digital-first customer expects companies to understand their needs and engage them with relevancy,” said Michael Kostow, EVP & GM, Marketing Cloud, Salesforce.
“Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows marketers to combine customer data for a single source of truth, use that data and AI to personalize interactions, and unify analytics to measure performance and optimize their impact.”
Global marketers use Salesforce Marketing Cloud, a digital marketing solution, and Customer 360, in order to know more about their customers with data management and analytics, personalize every customer engagement with Einstein and create real-time marketing campaigns across email, mobile, social, digital advertising and more.
Strengths
Salesforce demonstrated consistent product execution in 2020, including integrating the Evergage acquisition as Interaction Studio, supported by Einstein-based “recipes” that present marketers with suggested next best actions.
Salesforce also released its Customer 360 Audiences CDP — one of the first applications to be built on the new Hyperforce platform — and launched Digital 360, which packages Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud and Experience Cloud for digital-first organizations.
The Salesforce brand and its MMH solutions are well-known within both marketing and IT organizations. Salesforce targets both business and technical decision makers, leveraging existing use of the company’s Sales and Service Cloud applications to achieve high consideration levels for and build organizational confidence in Marketing Cloud.
Customer 360 Audiences brings a more coherent approach to customer data and profile management to Marketing Cloud, with better integrated identity and consent management. Customer profiles combine affinity scores and browsing and purchase history for richer insights, and connections to a new privacy center enabling granular global policy settings.
Cautions
Salesforce’s expansive product vision comes with greater potential for complexity. The broad selection of add-on modules that Salesforce offers within Marketing Cloud presents marketers with packaging flexibility but can make determining the right solution set challenging.
Gartner clients and Peer Insights users perceive Salesforce Marketing Cloud as a high-cost solution within this market. The modularity of the solution and the multiple pricing levers for different modules complicate contract negotiation.
Marketers experience difficulties in managing the sprawling nature of Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s myriad tools, citing a steep learning curve to maximize value from the system. Peer Insights users note implementation challenges, an aging UI in parts of the platform and reporting challenges, despite Salesforce’s many improvements to its analytics capabilities.