Salesforce is the world’s most popular enterprise CRM solution. This has been true for more than a decade, but Salesforce continues to widen the gap compared to the competition with each passing year. As a result, there’s been a recent explosion of free Salesforce marketing tools that extend the value of this huge investment in the leading CRM.
Salesforce Marketing Tools Have Filled Gaps In The Native Functionality
Over the years, the Salesforce platform has continued to expand. In its earliest iterations, as the name would imply, it was primarily a CRM platform for sales teams. As the platform has grown in popularity, they have expanded the feature set to include features for marketing, support, finance, and other departments. Today, Salesforce powers some of the largest companies in the world.
With how large and fully-featured Salesforce has become over time, there are many different situations in which companies may be better served to use integrations to even further flesh out the platform and sync disconnected platforms together.
There are now thousands of native platform integrations and apps across many different categories, including:
- Marketing
- Human Resources
- Enterprise Resource Planning
- Sales
- Customer Service
- IT & Admin
- Finance
- Integration
- Salesforce Labs
- Analytics
When it comes to marketing, the Salesforce ecosystem has a wide range of low cost solutions that take advantage of the data and automation capabilities of the Salesforce platform.
In this article, we will cover some of the best and most popular integrated marketing solutions that plug directly into Salesforce.
These apps should provide you with a well-rounded look at what is available to connect directly to Salesforce while extending the base marketing features that are available through the platform.
Let’s get started.
1. Postalytics – Direct Mail Automation
Postalytics is a complete direct mail marketing and automation platform that makes sending high-quality campaigns easier than ever before. Its ability to extend the value of your Contacts, Leads and Workflows makes this one of the top low cost Salesforce marketing tools.
Often, and especially among more modern companies, direct mail marketing is an overlooked channel. Many traditional marketing channels are. Old school direct mail marketing was run on spreadsheets, emails and phone calls. There was little to no integration with core platforms like Salesforce. But that is not true with modern platforms and integrations.
Postalytics plugs directly into Salesforce, allowing you to send triggered postcards and letters generated from Salesforce Contacts, Leads, and Workflows. Then using personalized URLs, the actions that your recipients take after receiving your direct mail campaign can be tracked and utilized in your other marketing automation campaigns.
For instance, a prospect that responds to your postcard and visits your website could trigger an email marketing campaign to push them farther down the funnel.
Building direct mail steps into your existing marketing workflows can be a great way to increase response rates, capture the attention of unengaged customers, and provide a better omnichannel experience to prospects. This ability makes Postalytics a top Salesforce marketing tool for many businesses.
Postalytics is a full-service direct mail automation solution. With Postalytics you can:
- Build your mailing lists
- Design your postcards and mailers (Using professional templates)
- Create multi-touch campaigns
- Package and deliver your campaigns
- Improve deliverability by filtering out bad addresses
- Track deliverability and recipient actions
- Integrate with Salesforce (and other CRMs)
Postalytics delivers a comprehensive solution that makes it easy for businesses to integrate direct mail marketing into their existing marketing ecosystem. With Postalytics, you can create multi-touch campaigns at different points in the funnel, and ensure that you can track recipient actions to influence future marketing automation through Salesforce and other platforms.
2. ActiveCampaign – Digital Marketing Automation
Source: CrossBeam
ActiveCampaign is one of the most popular Salesforce marketing tools, as it’s automations are powerful but easy to use.
Utilizing ActiveCampaign gives companies access to a whole host of features and use cases that are not possible through the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
When you use the integrated ActiveCampaign app, you can call valuable Sallesforce CRM data and utilize ActiveCampaign’s deep customer experience automation features to create highly personalized email marketing campaigns.
Leads, contacts, and accounts sync automatically once the integration is in place. That way, your marketing team will always have a single customer view that they can utilize to create highly segmented marketing campaigns, and not have to worry about moving the data back and forth.
With ActiveCampaign, you’ll have access to hundreds of pre-built automations within the platform. ActiveCampaign also offers its own marketplace with pre-built templates and processes that can be automatically loaded and launched for your own purposes.
ActiveCampaign allows you to engage with customers through a wide range of channels including:
- Social
- SMS Messaging
- Chat
The ActiveCampaign integration brings high-quality marketing automation features to the Salesforce platform, unifying your data between both.
3. Qualified.com
Source: Qualified
Qualified immediately connects your sales for sales reps with qualified buyers and target accounts. Using Qualified, your reps will receive alerts when qualified visitors arrive on your website, allowing them to engage in conversation with them immediately.
This allows your sales reps to provide a personal touch at the most critical touchpoints in the customer journey.
With Qualified, your sales reps can engage in real-time meetings right on your site through a variety of different channels including live chat, voice calls, and screen sharing. These impromptu meetings allow your sales reps to save time on the tedious back and forth that meeting scheduling usually requires, and maximize their selling productivity.
They’ll also be able to take meetings with prospects that otherwise would have flown under the radar. Being able to engage in both voice and video calls in a simple way ensures that your sales team will take more meetings with qualified prospects over time.
Qualified also delivers high-quality chatbots and other automation to engage with your website visitors in an effective way. These chatbots can be used to help visitors to find critical content, ask qualification questions, and help your marketing and sales teams to capture leads and book meetings. With a quality chatbot, your team can engage with prospects and sell around the clock with less effort.
Qualified takes the amazing sales infrastructure that Salesforce offers, and adds a layer on top of it.
4. Bizible – B2B Marketing Attribution
Source: G2
One of the biggest struggles that many B2B companies have is finding a way to effectively attribute their marketing activities to the sales and leads that they generate.
How did that blog post impact their ultimate decision to purchase? How many ads did they see? Which ad pushed them toward purchase the most? This is exactly what Bizible attempts to solve.
Bizible’s marketing automation and analytics suite provides granular performance data and machine learning forecasts for all of your critical channels, connecting directly to your Salesforce data.
The powerful insights generated by the platform will help every marketer and channel manager to maximize their ability to create growth, optimize their campaigns, and reliably hit their targets.
The Bizible system can track and attribute sales and lead generation software activities through a wide variety of different channels:
- Paid & Organic Search
- Social Media
- Display & Retargeting
- Partner Marketing & Web Referral
- Offline Marketing (events, mailers, etc.)
- Sales Activity (outbound calling)
Their system also offers multiple different methods of multi-step attribution for complex customer journeys.
- First-touch attribution
- Last-touch attribution
- U-shaped attribution
- W-shaped attribution
- Full-Path attribution
- Custom attribution models
Bizible Works out of the box with pre-built reports and dashboards. You can create sophisticated custom processes to make data collection and normalization more automatic.
Their complete closed-loop performance reporting solution provides account-based marketing support, with lead to account mapping, and predictive account engagement scores so that your marketing and sales teams can more accurately identify who to engage with.
Their system is fully customizable, putting you in complete control of how your leads, contacts, cases, and contact accounts are attributed and managed internally.
5. MailChimp – Email Marketing
Source: Google
MailChimp is the largest email marketing platform in the world, enjoying nearly 70% of the total email marketing industry market share. Naturally, many companies use MailChimp and Salesforce simultaneously and are looking for a reliable way to connect the two platforms and share data between them.
The MailChimp integrated app is the ideal solution to this problem, providing companies with the features that MailChimp brings to the table while keeping all of their customer data accessible through Salesforce.
MailChimp seamlessly connects the two platforms allowing you to manage MailChimp subscribers from Salesforce leads, contacts, and audience views, making it one of the top Salesforce marketing tools.
You can automatically import MailChimp subscribers as Salesforce leads or contacts, then sync the two platforms using MailChimp audiences to map Salesforce fields to merge variables.
With MailChimp, you can create custom segmented, personalized email marketing campaigns directly from your Salesforce data and deliver them with ease.
The MailChimp dashboard in the app provides detailed subscriber information and MailChimp activity directly inside the Salesforce platform. Additionally, custom MailChimp fields and pages can be added to contacts and lead pages within Salesforce.
Because MailChimp is such a popular email marketing platform, it makes sense that many companies would be looking for a way to have MailChimp interact more reliably with their Salesforce database.
6. Twilio
Source: Twilio
Both your sales and marketing teams must be able to connect reliably with leads and customers through many different channels.
98% of Americans switch between devices daily. Businesses that adopt omnichannel strategies see 91% higher year-over-year customer retention rates compared to companies that do not adopt omnichannel strategies.
Twilio is the perfect solution for Salesforce companies that would like to add SMS text messaging to their marketing and sales arsenal.
Twilio’s Salesforce integration allows you to easily add text messaging to Salesforce. Their system works directly out of the box with the Salesforce data in tools that your company is already using daily, making it one of the most popular Salesforce marketing tools.
Their easy-to-use dashboard system is extremely flexible, allowing you to customize the text messages that you send using the Twilio Process Builder and merge fields for customization and personalization.
Using Twilio, Your marketing team can engage in two-way conversations with contacts and leads in real-time. They can also build bulk messages, which can go out to a segmented contact list from your Salesforce platform data. Outbound text messages can be scheduled, with opt-in and opt-out handling for every campaign.
If you are looking to provide a more omnichannel approach this year, text messaging should play a critical role in your business. Using Twilio, you can seamlessly add text messaging components to your existing marketing and sales processes without a complicated onboarding process.
7. EventBrite
Source: Eventbrite
Events are a big part of many businesses marketing efforts. This Salesforce marketing tool makes the planning and management of events faster and easier.
Eventbrite is a solution that allows your company to better manage events from within the Salesforce platform. Integrating directly with Salesforce, the EventBrite integrated app allows you to connect your event marketing processes to your Salesforce data.
You can connect multiple different organizations directly to Eventbrite in Salesforce. Their intelligent mappings will automatically link and sync data for leads, contacts, accounts, campaigns, and opportunities. You can also optionally link Eventbrite with CampaignMonitor or Emma email marketing solutions.
Eventbrite adds several new event data fields to your Salesforce system including:
- Orders
- Attendees
- Venues
- Tickets
- Question and Answers
Then, you can use the advanced Salesforce reporting features to pull that data and build advanced reports about the events that your company has run or participated in.
8. TypeForm
Source: CompareCamp
Typeform makes it easy for marketing teams to create beautiful forms for feedback, customer support, and lead capture.
Typeform’s forms plug directly into Salesforce, providing numerous themes, layouts fonts, and colors for your website forms. Not only will this help you to increase the conversion rates of your forms, but will give you more control. Typeform also offers conditional forms, where the selections that your customer makes can impact other available fields on the form. This often means more, and more impactful data for your Salesforce contacts.
Typeform also allows you to embed the form into your website in multiple ways, including standard embedding, pop-up, and embedding, or even full page embeds.
For companies that want to get away from the traditional Salesforce forms and capture more leads on their website — while connecting that data directly into WordPress — Typeform is a simple but powerful solution.
Salesforce Marketing Tools Leverage Your Salesforce Investment
These low cost Salesforce marketing tools represent some of the best of the thousands of integrations available through the Salesforce ecosystem.
Through these Integrations, companies can reliably connect platforms and sync the data between them. All of the apps mentioned in this article can connect and sync with all standard Salesforce record types.
If you’d like to learn more about how Postalytics can help you extend the value of your Salesforce investment with highly personalized automated direct mail:
About the Author
Dennis Kelly
Dennis Kelly is CEO and co-founder of Postalytics, the leading direct mail automation platform for marketers to build, deploy and manage direct mail marketing campaigns. Postalytics is Dennis’ 6th startup. He has been involved in starting and growing early-stage technology ventures for over 30 years and has held senior management roles at a diverse set of large technology firms including Computer Associates, Palm Inc. and Achieve Healthcare Information Systems.