Since then, a lot of investment has gone into Marketing Cloud Engagement and Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) to allow Salesforce to overtake this category and maintain growth.
Line graph showing marketing number phone in cambodia campaign management rankings
Taken from Salesforce
Source: IDC, Worldwide Semiannual Software Tracker, April 2022.
Marketing Campaign Management Applications refer to an IDC-defined functional market within the broader CRM Applications market.
User Experience
Salesforce has a ‘look and feel’ and if you speak to any hardcore user or consultant in the space, they’ll know what I mean.
Kind of like the iPhone experience, Salesforce has accomplished this when you use their software. Moving from Sales Cloud to Service Cloud to Marketing Cloud and back to Tableau Analytics doesn’t ‘feel’ too different. Users get a sense of familiarity when engaging with any of the Salesforce clouds.
This UX is so important when new features and products are released because there’s always that feeling of being there before so it’s not another tool to learn.
Remember, these tools exist to enable you in your role so UX can never be downplayed.
Take a look at the Oracle Eloqua marketing canvas below. Clearly, there’s a lot of power in this tool given the Campaign Step options you can choose from, however, it all feels a bit like MailChimp. You just know that some companies will have canvases that look immensely chaotic.
Screenshot of the Eloqua canvas
Source: Oracle
Compare this to the Marketing Cloud Journey Builder below, which brings a lot of clarity to building journeys. It’s very nice to use.
Marketing Cloud Journey Builder canvas
Source: Salesforce.com
I’ve personally always liked tools that follow a timeline approach (left to right) as it subtly reminds the user that a real human being will go through this automated program and come out the other side.
Let’s play devil’s advocate though and say that as an Eloqua user you love the campaign canvas. Looking at functionality first and foremost, Journey Builder is more powerful for a few reasons, such as:
Ability to do branching logic rather (in Eloqua the binary tree can make canvases much bigger than they need to be).
Fast reactions to events in Sales Cloud, whereas Eloqua requires a long wait.
Ultimately, the Eloqua campaign canvas may be nice enough to use but it struggles once a campaign reaches a certain size and complexity.
Email Builder
There’s not too much difference between the email builders from a cosmetic point of view.
However, when you start to look at the options in Marketing Cloud you’ll see that Artificial Intelligence (Einstein) is built in. You can simply drag and drop content blocks onto an email canvas and lean on AI to work out the best content for your audience. There’s also the option to test your content with AI too which is something not all platforms can offer.
Veteran users of Eloqua often bemoan the lack of sophisticated dynamic content tools, with Marketing Cloud you can leverage the relational data model and AmpScript to create truly dynamic and hyper-personalized experiences.