Mailchimp vs. Salesforce.com

Mailchimp is well suited to companies / individuals who want to capture emails via form on their website or a link in an email. Mailchimp is relatively easy to set up and manage. They also have decent reporting tools and segregation tools. The email visual builder is fairly decent as well. Overall, it's a great 'first' lead capture tool while you're still figuring out what you really need.

Incentivized

Ability to create dashboards. The project progress can be easily tracked. Tickets can be fed with all the right data and the same can be exported. You can customize the fields as per your usage. Can be used for multiple projects. The reports generated are accurate in nature and can be used for making important decisions and improvements.

• Super easy integration to Pipedrive via Zapier, and I'm guessing it integrates seamlessly with hundreds of other CRMs.
• Intuitive UI when designing the email templates, you don't have to be a designer to use the templates that Mailchimp provides (although using a graphic designer to create newsletters etc. is always a good idea IMO...)
• Simple functionality when it comes to creating an email marketing funnel - no redundant complications that make your life harder when building the funnel

Incentivized

• Salesforce.com is extremely customizable. I would not consider it an out-of-the-box solution, although its standard fields allow for fundamental CRM activities and reporting.
• Salesforce.com is able to integrate with 100s of third-party softwares—often times creating efficiencies in processes.
• Reports within Salesforce.com have the ability to be simple as a standard Account report, or you can get very granular with your report filtering to segment a very specific result, eg. Accounts in California who are active clients and fall within the pharmaceutical industry and have a specified market capitalization.

Incentivized

• Not a fan of some of the font choices, it would be nice to have more.
• How campaigns are organized I would like to see this organized differently so older campaigns are easier to find if you need to refer back to an old one.
• It would be nice if the reporting gave a little more info on if your email performance with not just open rates but clicks, etc.

Incentivized

• Would like easier integration of Einstein data in Salesforce Dashboards so we do not have to navigate to the Analytics Studio.
• Quicker adoption of custom objects into new offerings like the Pipeline Navigator.
• Continued expansion of Salesforce Surveys for more features and flexibility.

Incentivized

We've had Mailchimp for about ten years, I want to say. I started with the company about four years ago, and I don't see us ever diverting to another source. It's easy for us to use, and we have all our clients already built into the database. I imagine we'll use them for as long as we have the company.

Incentivized

There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.

Incentivized

The user experience, the design, and the simple-to-follow instructions make MailChimp one of the easiest email solutions. The drag-and-drop builder makes it quick to set up, and if you do know some code, there are options to do a bit more customizations.

Incentivized

Compared to the Salesforce Classic layout, the Lightning Experience is very user-friendly. Customize your top navigation bar to include quick links to your most frequently used records, objects, or reports. There are free online courses from Salesforce called "Trail Heads" to help new users get acquainted with the CRM. As a whole, it's a well-designed and user-friendly website. All is well, and there have been no problems so far.

I have, in the 4+ years that I've used Mailchimp, never seen an issue that restricted the use of their software/tools. I don't know of a single time when they're system crashed or went down. I could be wrong, but I honestly haven't experienced any issues with outages, errors or unplanned downtime

Incentivized

Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.

Incentivized

I haven't noticed any slow speeds from Mailchimp or their tools. I think the landing pages load quickly and look nice. The email reports and editing operates smoothly and doesn't take time to load. Additionally, when I use Mailchimp in conjunction with Zapier + Hubspot I don't notice any drag between any of these tools

Incentivized

Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day."
Points per Salesforce -
1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs.
2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers.
3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years.
4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale.
6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com.
7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.
8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training.
9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure

Website tools were easy to use and understand so a novice can easily meet or exceed their client's expectations! Loved that we were able to totally customize so that the e-mail we created conveyed our client's overall messaging consistent with their branding! Client love that we can provide turnkey services to support their sales and marketing teams!

Incentivized

Account managers are awesome for the most part but change every year. So just as they are getting to know your business they usually switch accounts. We have premier success now which gives us 24/7 access to support, which has been helpful as we deal with integration issues with APIs and across Salesforce products.

Incentivized

I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business

I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this

It's pretty easy to get up and running! There's a slight learning curve on a few things, but once you find where everything is located, you can import your list and send your first email. It really makes our clients feel great to see how quickly they can get that first email out.

Incentivized

Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.

Mailchimp is pretty comparable to other email marketing software I have used, but I had a better experience designing templates and emails using Campaign Monitor compared to Mailchimp. Mailchimp always seemed to have small little glitches with the design, and my emails never looked exactly like they did when I designed them.

Incentivized

I actually did not select Salesforce, I use [Salesforce.com] as a data source when integrating systems together for my clients. My clients have selected either Salesforce or Microsoft CRM for the most common CRM tools from my experience. Both tools are very flexible and can be made into a streamlined process or confusing grouping of ideas.

Incentivized

Salesforce has never been able to answer a question I've had, but I've heard from colleagues that they respond quickly. Market leaders tend to be more professional when things go awry. For CRM systems, Salesforce is by far the most popular. I've used CRM systems before Salesforce, and they weren't even close. Salesforce has such a monopoly on the market that they consider us as users. Inextricably linked, the two are one.

Mailchimp over the years I've used it has grown in leaps and bounds. They have added so many additional features than were previously available. They are truly an all-in-one marketing platform now. If you're a small operation and just want to add email to your marketing efforts, they're there for you. If you're a larger operation and want to start sending postcard advertisements, they can do that. If you'd good with that and want to kick up your marketing by going social, you can do that on their platform. They are truly able to be as small as you need, but also get quite large in whatever it is you'd like to do through their system.

Incentivized

I've worked with Salesforce since 2001 in companies ranging from 4 to hundreds of sales people and the system has been able to scale and perhaps more importantly expand (functionally) to the needs of larger organizations. In fact in my previous company, as a provider of a solution that integrated with Salesforce, we had customers that had thousands of sales people using Salesforce.

Incentivized

I believe it is the best customer relationship management system available. We use it for everything and have integrated other platforms to give customers/accounts a 360-degree view. According to Salesforce customer service, it is beneficial for tracking all information, and the reporting/dashboards are unique. It's where we keep track of every sale.

• Mailchimp has helped us promote events and fundraisers, providing signups and donations from more than 60% of attendees at an event or online fundraiser.
• Mailchimp has given us the ability to more easily stay in contact with our volunteers and specific groups of people by messaging using segmentation.
• Mailchimp is a great tool for testing the effectiveness of emails using A/B testing.

Incentivized

• Salesforce has had a huge impact on our company. Making us 50% more profitable since we can easily manage leads better and see where profitable opportunities lie.
• Employee management and engagement are also easily trackable and have since made us more accountable to each other since everyone can see progress within their units in salesforce and it drives healthy competition.

Incentivized