Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) is a marketing automation platform. Its key features include lead management, lead generation, social selling, and email marketing.
$1,250
per month
Twilio Segment
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Segment is a customer data platform that helps engineering teams at companies like Tradesy, TIME, Inc., Gap, Lending Tree, PayPal, and Fender, etc., achieve time and cost savings on their data infrastructure, which was acquired by Twilio November 2020. The vendor says they also enable Product, BI, and Marketing teams to access 200+ tools (Mixpanel, Salesforce, Marketo, Redshift, etc.) to better understand and optimize customer preferences for growth— all integrations are pre-built and…
$120
per month
Pricing
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Twilio Segment
Editions & Modules
Growth
$1,250
/month/up to 10,000 contacts billed annually
Plus
$2,500
/month/up to 10,000 contacts billed annually
Advanced
$4,000
/month/up to 10,000 contacts billed annually
Premium
$15,000
/month/up to 10,000 contacts billed annually
Free
$0.00
Includes 1,000 visitors/mo
Team
$120.00
Includes 10,000 visitors/mo
Business
Contact Sales
Custom Volume
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Twilio Segment
Free Trial
No
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
Yes
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
Salesforce Engage, an additional offering for sales and marketing alignment, is priced at $50 per month per user.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio is a very good option for publishing administration, following digital marketing campaings performance and results, social listening an monitoring your brand image in social media and other digital media. It has good features for engagement, but falls a little short for customer service. I'm surre it would work much better integrated with Salesforce as a CRM, but we use another CRM platform and it was not possible to integrate.
Best suited: - Merging emails coming from: Facebook leads forms, Unbounce or landing pages forms, Google forms, any other kind of lead generation tool and bundling all that information together for a single user "profile". - Passing events generated in multiple applications by the same user (product selected in web, product discarded in cart, etc) and delivering those events into other applications (like a CRM) Less appropriate: - Reading/updating data directly from segment from a frontend application
Pardot enables you to set up different environments via the Pardot Business Unit feature, this is helpful for when decentralization is still needed, but you want all business units working with the same tool.
Pardot enables you to quickly and easily create automation rules that can clean the database retro-actively.
Pardot has the ability to have multiple lead scoring models run at the same time.
Multi-platform. Segment has easy integrations in many different web, backend, and app platforms/frameworks. We use the Segment SDK in Android and iOS as well as our node.js backend.
Segment is fairly affordable for early-stage companies that are trying out different analytics software. The "developer" plan is free and is suitable for most companies with products that have a small user base.
The UI is great! It is extremely intuitive and easy-to-learn, and this made it take very little time to integrate this software into our analytics and marketing workflows.
Email templates and drafts are really confusing. I trained various people to create their own templates, but they consistently got confused between publishing a template or just saving a draft, and where they needed to go back to find it.
Their help process is broken, at least for our particular use case. Because we have an enterprise license for Salesforce (even though we had a separate license for Pardot) whenever I needed help with something, I'd get stuck down a rabbit hole and couldn't submit a ticket.
More and richer sources. For example, MailChimp is a source but the data you get from MailChimp is quite limited. I ended up writing my own scripts to take better advantage of MailChimp's API because Segment's integration was lacking.
Better examples on how to set up event tracking. Pageview tracking is easy enough, but it would be nice if they had a sample app and corresponding code for it and showed you, via Git commits, how to add various kinds of events.
As of right now we have not seen any other program that integrates as seamlessly into our Salesforce platform. We have barely scratched the surface of all the features and use cases. It would be irresponsible to make a move to another platform in the near future. We have not come up against any limitations that would prompt a need to switch
You won't find another solution that has as many features as Salesforce Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio. We all know Salesforce, we all know how big they are and it's not for nothing... Their tools do most of the things you want, need and even imagine. Using it is complicated, but the usability is infinite.
Upgrades and timing of the upgrades were communicated well and planned during off hours for our work. If we did have a campaign scheduled during that time, it would kick-off after the system was back active. There were a few unplanned system down times, but it was a rare occurrence and those times were also short in duration.
Though the make up of MA apps is not built this way today, it would be nice to see them become more real-time. The integration between Salesforce and Pardot is not a true real-time integration. If I modify something in Salesforce, those changes are not automatically reflected in Pardot immediately. There is a delay of about 15 minutes before the systems sync. This delay, although not long, is less than ideal We would love the systems to be integrated real time such that changes are propagated from one system to the other immediately.
They're fast and knowledgeable. You will always know what's the status of your request and they usually follow up with phone calls to ask you questions or provide updates. Sometimes it takes them a couple of days to investigate, especially if you have custom "situations" like my company usually does but at least they are very good at managing time expectations.
Over the period it took us to set up, we kept going back to their enablement team to help us with the setup, and they were always ready and were very helpful in the entire process. Even with their documentation, they took the time out to help us work through the process. We've never had a message/email unanswered for more than an hour on working days.
The trainers at the Pardot user conference (Elevate and Connections) were very knowledgeable and presented the material well. Again, the content was targeted to more of a new user audience, and was not really relevant for folks who had been using the product for 2+ years.
Pardot's online training touches on all topics briefly and vaguely without much indepth exploration into how a final outcome could look, such as Nurturing Campaigns, Email templates, landing page templates, etc... The only true way to uncover Pardot's full capabilities is to have Front End design and coding experience. Without this key skill set, I would not recommend Pardot to another business.
From an IT perspective, once you set up the Javascript beacon and start collecting data there is a waiting game. During this time you can start labeling your site actions which can be labor intensive for a single person, but you don't really have the final end-users on the platform yet. We did a lot of training so users were experienced, but it wasn't until they had their first tasks to accomplish that they started using the system and had questions. I'd recommend setting up some immediate goals for an end-user to start segmenting for the purpose of displaying message campaigns so you can jump start end-user action.
We had some scenarios and limitations on Oracle Data Cloud. With help of Salesforce, we were able to overcome most of those limitations. This made the work more efficient and productive as integration and providing Ad data to other parties became much more sophisticated and easy. This is helping the business in saving a lot of time and effort.
I'm not sure these are "official competitors" (or alternatives) to Segment, but we use them in parallel for different goals. We use Datadog for logging and monitoring and we use Mixpanel to perform data analysis based on the data we gather using Segment (and other sources). I don't think we ever evaluated any other service vs. Segment. I think we got a recommendation on Segment, liked it and decided to use it (and we're happy with it since).
We had approximately 20,000 recipients of most email campaigns, with some higher amounts and some smaller campaigns. The tools is easy to use and the recipient list size is really not a factor in the complexity or work to create and email campaign. Our campaigns could just have easily been sent to many more people, with virtually no additional work.
The ability to create sophisticated rules to personalize messages has helped us to create sophisticated rules to personalize messages.
The ability to track customer journey performance at every stage helped us to track the performance of customer journeys and make improvements.
The ability to quickly build and deploy complex customer journeys without the need for coding allowed us to deploy customer journeys faster and with fewer resources.
Segment has enabled us to get a full view of our front end activity, join it to our back-end activity, and get full visibility into our funnels and user activity.
Segment lets us send events to ad tools with a full audit trail so all the numbers line up.
Segment also brings data from other sources into our data warehouse, saving our data engineering time from building commodity connectors.
