Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Pricing

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement platform, formerly known as Salesforce Pardot, has four plans: Growth, for $1,250 per month; Plus, for $2,500 per month; Advanced for $4,000 per month, and Premium, for a massive $15,000 per month. Plus, businesses can pay an additional monthly charge for add-ons, including the $50/user/month sales communication add-on Salesforce Engage, the $300/year/user engagement history dashboards, and the $3,000 per month B2B Marketing Analytics Plus.

The Plus plan offers the best value to a smaller company, while the Advanced plan's expanded features and abilities make it attractive to a larger company. We would caution against the much more limited Growth plan and the far-too-costly Premium plans (for most businesses).

This page will walk you through the features and costs to expect. And, once you've educated yourself on the options, take the next step: Take a minute to check out custom quotes for marketing automation services through our free price comparison tool.

In this guide:

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Pricing
• Account Engagement vs Marketing Cloud Pricing
• Why Use Account Engagement?
• Is Account Engagement right for you?
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Alternatives
• About Our Research
• Verdict: Is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Worth It?
• Frequently Asked Questions

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Pricing

The Marketing Cloud Account Engagement software is available from Salesforce through four plans: Growth, Plus, Advanced, and Premium. Each plan supports up to 10,000 contacts with a monthly charge (with the exception of Premium, which supports up to 75,000), and they are differentiated by which features are included.

With some exceptions, businesses must have a Salesforce login in order to get Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, although this can be a free account rather than a paid subscription to the core Salesforce CRM. That said, paying extra for the Salesforce CRM does open up additional benefits, and the two integrate well. You can visit our Salesforce pricing page to get a handle on the complex pricing scheme for the main Salesforce plans and tiers.

Here's a table that covers the main pricing and feature differences between the four Marketing Cloud Account Engagement plans.

How Much Does Marketing Cloud Account Engagement cost?

Growth costs $1,250 per month, Plus costs $2,500 per month, Advanced costs $4,000 per month, and Premium costs $15,000 per month. Each plan is billed annually.

B2B Marketing Analytics Plus is the priciest add-on, costing $3,000 per month to deliver addition AI-driven insights into marketing data and impact analysis. Salesforce also sells another add-on, Salesforce Engage, which can be added to the base Marketing Cloud Account Engagement price for $50/user/month. This feature helps sales teams better communicate with clients through alerts and trend reports.

Engagement history dashboards help sales and service when conversing with each buyer, by supplying the right insights at the right time. They cost $300/year/user, but each plan bundles a set amount of dashboards in for free: Growth has 5, Plus has 10, and Advanced and Premium both offer 20.

Plus, after the initial cap on contacts for each plan is met, additional contacts can be bought for $100 per 10,000 contacts per month.

Depending on the plan, certain features may cost extra, though you'll need to get in touch with the Salesforce team directly to confirm details. All four plans include a user forum, live weekly training, on-demand training videos, and a success specialist team.

Here's a quick overview of the difference between each of the four Marketing Cloud Account Engagement price plans.

Growth – $1,250 per month

Growth offers a full range of basic features, including email marketing tools, tracked social posts, engagement programs, in-depth prospect tracking, ROI reporting, custom fields, user management, and customizable URLs. Users can also benefit from lead nurturing, deduplication, and scoring. Available integrations include Eventbrite, Webinar, Olark Chat, Native CRM, and Google AdWords, although the Google AdWords integration comes at an additional cost.

Some features on the Growth plan come with more limitations than the other plans. Growth is capped at 50 landing pages, 50 forms, 50 automation rules, 5 engagement history dashboards, 10 competitors monitored, 100 SEO keywords monitored, and just 3 SSL vanity domains.

Other features are only available at an extra cost, including multivariate landing page testing, email preview analysis, advanced dynamic content, social profiling, and advanced email analytics.

Comparably priced plans in the world of marketing CRM include the Professional plan from HubSpot Marketing Hub ($800 per month) and Sugar Market ($1,000 per month).

Plus – $2,500 per month

Plus includes all the Growth features and more, as well as higher caps. Forms and landing pages are unlimited under Plus, for example, while feature caps extend to 100 automation rules, 10 engagement history dashboards, 25 competitors monitored, 250 SEO keywords monitored, and 10 SSL vanity domains.

New features include an integrated marketing calendar, A/B testing for emails, multiple lead scoring categories, multi-touch attribution models, and API access to 25,000 calls per day.

Plus includes many of the extras that Growth users would need to pay for. It also allows users to pay extra for a few features that are entirely locked away from those on the Growth plan, including custom object integration ($400/month), custom user roles ($500/month), and a dedicated IP Address ($500/month).

Other marketing CRMs that are priced similarly to this one includes the Enterprise plan from HubSpot Marketing Hub ($3,200 per month) and Microsoft Dynamics 365 Marketing ($1,500 per month).

Advanced – $4,000 per month

The Advanced plan includes all the features from Plus, as well as extended caps including 150 automation rules, 20 engagement history dashboards, 100 competitors monitored, 1000 SEO keywords monitored, 20 SSL vanity domains, and API access to 100,000 calls per day.

All the extras that Plus users need to pay for (custom object integration, custom user roles, the dedicated IP Address) are included at no extra charge under the Advanced plan.

Advanced also includes one feature entirely unavailable under the Growth and Plus plans: Salesforce's Einstein AI, which powers lead scoring, behavior scoring, and campaign insights.

Salesforce, as you can tell, is quite expensive, and there really isn't a comparably priced option when it comes to its more expensive options.

Premium – $15,000 per month

Finally, the Premium plan offers all the features from Advanced, and adds additional enterprise-friendly features including personalized product support. It also includes bundles in a few additional modules that cost extra under other plans: B2B Marketing Analytics Plus and Premier Plus.

The biggest benefit to this tier, however, is the greatly expanded cap on contacts, which is 75,000 up from the first three plans' cap of 10,000. However, a business on any other plan could easily reach this number at a lower overall cost, just by paying an additional $100 per month per 10,000 contacts. This plan's much larger price tag doesn't appear to be justified by the extra features it offers, and we'd recommend the Advanced plan instead.

Salesforce takes the cake for most expensive marketing CRM in the industry, with no other options coming even close to this highly priced option.

How Many Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Users Can I Have?

A business's Marketing Cloud Account Engagement users are directly tied to how many users they have licensed for the main Salesforce CRM plan.

In other words, the base monthly price for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement automation software will stay the same, no matter how many users are added. Instead, the total cost for the Salesforce CRM will go up as users are added, since it's charged on a per user, per month basis. You'll likely need to gather a custom quote to know exactly how much the marketing automation tool will cost your business per year.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement Pricing

Salesforce offers two marketing services that may seem the same on first glance: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement and Marketing Cloud Engagement.

Marketing Cloud Engagement is less expensive than Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, but offers fewer features as well: Marketing Cloud Engagement's four plans are Basic, for $400 per month; Pro, for $1,250 per month; Corporate, for $3,750 per month; and Enterprise, for which you'll need to contact Salesforce for a quote, as the price varies based on contact and message volume.

Marketing Cloud Engagement is aimed at marketing to customers in three core ways: email, mobile, and web. If your business needs a B2C solution for cross-channel marketing campaigns and little else, Marketing Cloud Engagement will be a great fit.

They're both aimed at marketing teams, but with one main difference: Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is primarily for B2B marketing with a focus on email, while Marketing Cloud is targeted at B2C marketing and includes more granular advertising tools. Your business will not have to subscribe to Marketing Cloud Engagement in order to get Marketing Cloud Account Engagement.

Which Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement plan is for you?

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is for B2B marketing, and Marketing cloud is for B2C marketing. That said, there's plenty of overlapping features and abilities between the two, and both services can be used to stand in for the other in a pinch, even though their workflows are different.

The nitty gritty here is that Salesforce acquired Pardot in 2012, long after they had already built up a customer base of Marketing Cloud users. They didn't want to lose their customers for either service, so they now run the two services simultaneously in the slightly confusing way that any modern conglomerate operates. Even worse, they've now changed the names to be oddly similar, mucking up the waters even more between the two platforms. Go figure.

Why Use Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement?

Getting new clients takes a lot more time and resources than just working hard to retain the clients you already have. But a growing business can easily lose track of leads or clients. It all adds up, and the business may ultimately die a death from a thousand cuts.

The solution? Marketing automation software. The best options will offer all the reminders and alerts that agents need to respond appropriately to the needs of their clients and leads.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement reports customers experience an average of 34% more sales revenue and 37% more marketing effectiveness after adopting their software.

What Does Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Do?

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement offers a huge range of features, but they're all aimed at streamlining four main challenges for marketers: lead generation, lead management, sales alignment, and ROI reporting.

Lead generation comes from tools including social media tracking, landing pages and forms, lead deduplication, lead scoring, email campaigns, and A/B tests to better target landing pages or emails. Once acquired, leads can be managed through engagement and nurturing programs, which can be custom designed with variable tags and automation rules.

The Marketing Cloud Account Engagement platform's sales tools include engagement campaigns, customer activity tracking, and CRM integration, bolstered by custom alerts. Finally, ROI can be tracked with tools that unpack trends in email metrics or lifecycle reporting, which can identify problem areas across your entire sales funnel.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Benefits

By automating the menial tasks, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement helps employees focus on the important elements of their workload. This ultimately lets agents generate more leads and boost customer satisfaction, leading to a resilient customer base and a healthier bottom line.

In fact, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement reports that its customers have experienced an average of 34% more sales revenue and 37% more marketing effectiveness after adopting their software.

Is that worth the cost? You may need to gather a few quotes from other marketing automation services before you can know if it's a fit for you. However, we approve the service on the whole.

Is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Right for You?

On one hand, the Marketing Cloud Account Engagement platform is on the expensive side. But its range of features is comprehensive. The cap of 10,000 contacts on most Marketing Cloud Account Engagement plans may be a deciding factor, as it is a very limiting restriction for many.

However, if your business doesn't anticipate reaching 10,000, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is likely to be the more cost-effective option compared to other software services, which essentially charge a premium for a higher cap that your business ultimately won't come close to hitting.

Which plan is best? We'd recommend starting with the Plus plan, which includes all the primary features you'll need. However, if you're a large enough company to fully benefit from the more granular, complex features and AI-powered insights found in the Advanced plan, then you'll find it to be worth the cost.

We'd also recommend trying out a demo or a guided tour – after filling out our custom quotes comparison tool to get bespoke quotes from the best of the best marketing automation vendors on the market, of course.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Alternatives

While marketing CRM software is often quite expensive, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement is way up there, which means you might be in the market for an alternative. Fortunately, we've done the research and found that there are plenty of other options out there if Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement isn't for you.

Take a look at our thoroughly researched list below and read on for more in-depth look at some of our best CRM for marketing.

HubSpot Marketing Hub – starts at $45 per month

Yes, Salesforce is a recognizable name when it comes to CRM, but our research shows that you can't beat HubSpot Marketing Hub when it comes to CRM for marketing. It provides a wide range of features across its many plans and allows for scalability that is unparalleled in the industry, thanks to its functionality across all four major marketing channels (email, social, content, and paid).

The low price is understandably attractive, as is the free plan option, which is shockingly robust and perfect for smaller businesses looking to get their foot in the door with marketing automation. Take note, however, that prices go up substantially if you want the best features, with Professional and Enterprise plans costing $800 and $3,200 per month, respectively.

Act! CRM – starts at $12 per user per month

As you can likely guess from the price, Act! CRM is not like the other options on this list. This sales-marketing combo CRM is geared towards smaller businesses, offering a low price and comparably few features. In fact, if you're looking for the marketing automation found in Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Act! CRM is not going to be the best bet, as it offers virtually none compared to other providers.

Still, Act! CRM is certainly worth considering if you're a smaller team without the need for multichannel functionality. It has a great email campaign creator, which is one of the most effective means of marketing today, as well as social media integrations to tap a new customer base. Overall, for the price, we'd say Act! CRM is a viable alternative to Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement if you only need email marketing functionality and need to save a bit of money.

Freshmarketer – starts at $19 per month

It can be pretty intimidating to see prices in the thousands when it comes to CRM. Fortunately, Freshmarketer provides a more budget-friendly option that can get you started. Sure, it'll only allow you to manage your email marketing, but at least it isn't costing you an arm and a leg to get started.

Even the most expensive plan only costs $300 per month, which is comparatively low to the four digit starting plans from other options. Still, you are definitely sacrificing a lot of functionality, so make sure that those additional marketing channels are a necessity for your business. You also won't get any team organization tools, making Freshmarketer a great option for small businesses, but not ideal for anything else.

About Our Research

Tech.co doesn't mess around when it comes to research. We have teams of people working tirelessly to provide us with the most up-to-date, valuable information about tools like CRM for marketing, and we want to be sure you understand exactly how we evaluate these providers.

Subsequently, here is a list of all the metrics we considered when ranking Salesforce against other alternatives:

• Price – Obviously you need to know how much a software costs, but we go deeper and provide an insight into how good of a value each product is.
• Features – Sometimes, it's all about size, and understanding exactly how big a feature catalog can make all the difference in your decision.
• Help & support – You're going to need help adapting to a new software, which is why we investigate how solid each products customer support system is.
• Customer score – This is an aggregate score of reviews from app stores and review sites, so you know how actually customers feel about the software.

If you're still curious about how Tech.co researches its software providers, take a look at our research guide and check back for more reviews of CRM software.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Account Engagement FAQs