Salesforce.com: Email Marketing Solutions and Provider Comparison

Salesforce.com offers some mass email capabilities -250 contacts/mass email (PE), 500 (EE), 1000 (UE) up to a maximum of 1000/day (all editions), however it was never designed to send email blasts. For a company looking to email a large(er) customer base or with certain email marketing needs, Salesforce's Mass Email functionality can be limiting.

Acutedge was recently approached by a PR and communications firm using Salesforce. They are a small company with a need to send 2500-3000 emails/month. They had strict requirements around personalization - example the email should not carry a footer such as "powered by Salesforce.com", and the From address should not be an imaginary address such as sandeep@mail.emailprovider.com or for that matter anything other than the address of the person sending the email. So while their email volume was well within Salesforce's allowed limits, the need to personalize made them look for a third-party email marketing solution.

We created a list of mass-email providers from Salesforce.com's AppExchange - of course we would want someone with an existing integration with Salesforce and AppExchange is a great place to start. There were four main criteria for selection: Price; No provider logo or ads in the footer; Emails should come From or atleast appear to come from the person's email address; and the provider should offer an out-of-the-box integration with Salesforce.

Following providers were researched for this project.

Vertical Response: VR is one of the leading email marketing providers, and one of the most cost-effective. The integration seems fairly straightforward, and they offer a 30-day trial.

Pricing: Clear published pricing, monthly or pay as you go model. $32 for 2500 emails.

Possible to suppress logo and ads: All accounts are defaulted with the VR footer and logo. It can be removed on a case by case basis and they would require you to answer some questions.

Email carries senders address in the From field: No. Email would come from mail.vresp.com. Even though their website states that they can do this for an additional fee, when I contacted them, I was told that it is not possible.

SF Integration: Yes. Seems pretty straightforward.

ExactTarget: Another leading provider of email marketing services to Salesforce's customers, ExactTarget offers 3 main packages Core, Advanced and Enterprise. When I called them, I was helped by a customer support rep who was very knowledgeable, however would not provide any information on pricing. They made me speak with a Sales Rep to get an idea of costs involved. No trials are offered.

Pricing: Not published. Custom pricing - somewhat negotiable. Includes an annual subscription plus per email cost. For 25000 emails/year the Core package costs $1000/year for annual subscription plus 4-5 cents/email. Total costs between $1,500 -$2,000 per year.

Possible to suppress logo and ads: Yes.

Email carries sender's address in the From field: Yes. Email would come from sender's address.

SF Integration: Yes. I was told that installation can be done in less than an hour.

Genius: Genius offers more than just email marketing, and for that reason this may not be an apples-to-apples comparison. They offer 2 packages Genius Pro and Enterprise. They have an instant messaging component that resides on the desktop and tells you when your email subscribers' are on your website in real-time. You can also replay page by page visit from a subscriber to see where they go on your site.

Pricing: Based on number of contacts in database. Their basic package (for less than 25k contacts) would cost approximately $10,000/year. No trial offered.

Possible to suppress logo and ads: Yes. Email carries sender's address in the From field: Yes. It can be any address.

SF Integration: Yes. They can set up a 20-30 minute phone call to help you install and configure the app.

Boomerang: One of the lesser known players, Boomerang offers affordable email marketing services for Salesforce's customer base. The application is pretty basic, and the interface could be better however they offer most of the capabilities we were looking for, and at a very attractive price. Their customer support is very willing and able to help, I called them twice and they responded promptly. They offer a 30-day trial as well.

Pricing: Offers no-contract, month-to-month pricing plans starting at $10/500 emails. No charge for application usage.

Possible to suppress logo and ads: Yes. They can suppress logo on a case by case basis. You can choose to use your own address in the email, and customize the "unsubscribe link" and altogether do away with the default footer which is what we wanted.

Email carries sender's address in the From field: Yes. You can use your Salesforce User email address and also send emails on behalf of another person.

SF Integration: Yes. It took us about an hour to set up the application; another hour to configure it to our needs, create our template (editor could be better) and send test emails.

We ended up going with Boomerang.