This article comes in for the Marketing Cloud Consultants and pre-sales consultants trying to sell a Marketing Cloud implementation to a new Business who are in the process of evaluating Salesforce Marketing cloud as a marketing automation platform.
So Basically there are 3 types of licenses for Marketing Cloud that a Business can obtain from Salesforce:
3) Advertising
Almost all of these types of licenses come with a Basic, Pro, Corporate and Enterprise editions. Each edition comes with a specific set of features which can be found at the Salesforce site.
What it means for a consultant is that you first understand what all features is a business looking for from their Marketing Automation platform. If they are only interested in the traditional marketing capabilities like email, mobile and app marketing and do not wish to leverage the Platform's capability to run Marketing Campaigns on social media or if they do not wish to engage with their customers on social media by listening to social mentions, probably Email, Mobile and Web Marketing make the most sense for them.
With this type of license they will be able to carry out all sorts of outbound marketing activities over emails, SMS, app messages, Chat messengers etc. and will be able to use the features like Journey Builder, Automation studio, Web studio, Contact builder, Content Builder etc. for automating and carrying out their day to day Marketing activities.
However if they wish to leverage the social media by listening to their social mentions on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook, and take actions on those mentions, you should consider Social Media Marketing type of license along with the traditional Email, Mobile Web Marketing License.
If they wish to advertise on social media and integrate third party Advertising platforms like a Data Management Platform or Google Ads, you should consider the Advertising License too.
Each of these modules help a Business solve the complex Marketing challenges faced by the Brands and provide them with a solution for their Marketing needs.
Now, if you have boiled down to a conclusion, about the type of License the Business would need from Salesforce for Marketing Cloud, you should carefully study the features offered in each of the Editions offered in the type of license and draw a comparison between the type of edition the Business would need among Basic, Pro, Corporate and Enterprise editions and the requirement the Business has for their Marketing needs.
For example if the Business is just looking for Email marketing and 1-1 customer engagement journeys, the Pro edition may work well for them from the Email, Mobile and Web Marketing license with some extra editions. However if they are looking for a large number of contact base to market to, and wish to leverage SMS and a Mobile App for sending Marketing communications to their customers, a Corporate or Enterprise edition would make more sense for them.
The details and the features offered by each Edition can be found on the Salesforce site hyperlinked in the section above, and a detailed comparison can be found by clicking on the learn more link on the web page for each type of license.
Although Salesforce does not provide a price quote for all types of Licenses up front on their website (like in case of Salescloud) prices can be requested from Salesforce by getting in touch with them with the type of license and edition you are willing to purchase.
There are a few key parameters that go into the calculation of a license cost from Salesforce:
Edition You choose – From the Basic, Pro, Corporate or Enterprise editions depending on the features you wish to have from the platform.
Business Units – This determines the instances of Marketing Cloud you get in a package you get in a package.
Users – This is the number of Marketers accessing the system from the business teams.
Super Messages – Super Message is a unit of customer experience than can be used as an email message, SMS message, MMS message, mobile push message, social mention, web impression, or landing page impression. For example 1 SMS or MMS would comprise of 25 Super messages.
Number of Subscribers – Contacts you wish to send messages to.
API Calls (per year) – Typically calculated by the hits SFMC would get from other boxes for performing CRUD operations or sends.
Automations – The number of Automations you wish to create.
Data Extension Storage (GB) – Used to store data and assets in the Marketing Cloud like data tables containing records, images, content blocks etc.
All of these features are customizable and the features from a higher edition can be chosen on a lower edition package at extra cost.
That will be all for the day. Please leave a comment and let me know if this information was helpful. Would love to hear your feedback or thoughts about it.
Note:
All this information is sourced from the Salesforce website pricing section and my personal experience while working with Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Resources:
Pricing section on Salesforce Website: https://www.salesforce.com/editions-pricing/marketing-cloud/
Detailed Feature list --
Email, Web and Mobile Marketing: https://c1.sfdcstatic.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/pricing/mc_email_journey_pricing_sheet.pdf
Social Media Marketing: https://c1.sfdcstatic.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/pricing/mc_social-pricing-sheet.pdf
Advertising: https://www.salesforce.com/editions-pricing/marketing-cloud/ads/