Oct 5, 2023
Salesforce has been a massively popular tech company since the early 2000s.
While this was initially due to their successful customer relationship management (CRM) software, the company expanded into marketing territory with a series of acquisitions, including Radian6 in 2006, BuddyMedia in 2012, Exact Target in 2013, and Evergage in 2020.
These acquisitions formed the backbone of today’s Salesforce Marketing Cloud — a collection of products for use cases like:
Despite Salesforce being a staple in the industry, marketing teams often decide to move away from their Marketing Cloud. Most of them are looking for a more modern platform with tools built in-house (instead of via acquisitions), fast support provided by internal teams (instead of system integrations), or more cost-effective and flexible pricing plans.
In this guide, we’ve gathered the five best alternatives to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, including:
Insider
Emarsys
HubSpot Marketing Hub
Oracle Marketing Cloud
Adobe Experience Cloud
Get started faster, speed up ROI, and scale personalization across channels with Insider
We’ll look at each of their main tools, features, and use cases to give you a good idea if they’re right for you.
Before we dive in, note that:
Insider is a platform for unifying customer data, segmenting and predicting future behaviors with AI, personalizing all customer touchpoints, and automating cross-channel campaigns.
Our platform brings together the most extensive set of personalization capabilities for websites and mobile apps, as well as for channels like email, SMS, WhatsApp, push notifications, and more.
Thanks to this versatility, Insider has been ranked as a top solution by G2, Gartner, and Forrester across categories like:
You can click here to see how customers rate Insider compared to Salesforce Marketing Cloud in terms of main features, ease of use and setup, quality of support, and other key areas.
Insider also comes with a global, experienced, in-house support team that drastically reduces our customers’ time to value, speeds up their ROI, and helps them maximize their marketing budget.
Over 1200 leading brands across the globe use Insider, like:
In the next sections, we’ll discuss how and why Insider can be a perfect alternative to Salesforce Marketing Cloud for marketing teams in midsized and enterprise companies.
Most businesses using Salesforce Marketing Cloud have to rely on third-party system integrators to help them set up the platform and utilize it properly. This adds another layer of complexity to the already difficult task of running a lifecycle marketing program.
That’s why we’ve ensured all Insider customers have access to our experienced in-house support team. There’s no need to involve system integrators, agencies, or any other third parties when setting up and managing our platform.
This commitment to customer support has led to Insider being ranked as a top solution in categories like ease of use, ease of setup, and support quality.
Our support team:
Lastly, Insider also reduces your time to value with a huge library of proven templates. We offer templates for individual channels (e.g., email, push notifications, and SMS), use cases (e.g., cart recovery, gamification, and churn reduction), industries (e.g., eCommerce, finance, and banking), and much more.
These templates are easily customizable, allowing customers to send high-converting, personalized messages or launch entire campaigns incredibly quickly and conveniently.
Insider offers flexible setup options that help customers deploy our platform as hassle-free as possible. For example, eCommerce businesses can:
Insider was also built to make marketers’ lives easier in the personalization era. That’s why all our personalization and automation tools are created in-house, so they’re modern and intuitive and can share data seamlessly. This includes our:
Insider enables you to personalize every website or mobile app element — including content, messaging, and product recommendations — to each customer’s interests and preferences.
This is a crucial capability if you’re looking to maximize your digital marketing spend because it helps you increase conversion rates and revenue.
Here are some examples of key website elements you can personalize with Insider:
Besides your website and mobile app, Insider lets you easily personalize communications across all external channels, like:
As you can see, Insider lets you personalize each touchpoint in your customers’ journeys. But that’s not where our platform’s capabilities end.
You can also use Architect — our cross-channel journey builder — to tie these touchpoints into a consistent customer experience. Like all other Insider tools, Architect is built in-house. It comes with a simple, user-friendly interface and a drag-and-drop editor which lets you set the rules for each customer journey or automated flow — including how it starts, which channels it takes place on, and when each message gets triggered.
As you can see above, you can even A/B test different messages and journey flows against each other right inside Architect.
Overall, Architect is an incredibly versatile cross-channel orchestration and marketing automation platform that lets you build all kinds of flows and campaigns, including:
Additionally, Architect comes with powerful AI capabilities that can help you improve your campaign results and save you tons of time and effort. For example, our send-time optimization (STO) and next-best channel predictions ensure your messages are always sent at the right times and on the right channels.
Then, there’s our A/B test Winner Autoselection. With this feature, you don’t need to worry about interpreting the results of your tests and manually changing each journey based on them. Insider will do that for you automatically after the test depending on a winning metric you’ve selected — whether that’s deliverability, opens, clicks, conversions, or revenue.
You can view the results of each flow or campaign right inside Architect or in dedicated, fully customizable dashboards, like the one shown below.
For more automation examples and ideas, check out:
Today’s marketing stacks are incredibly diverse and complex. That’s why marketing teams that want to streamline workflows and achieve the best results need to ensure each technology they use plays well with the others.
To make that process easier, we’ve made sure that Insider can integrate and share data with different kinds of solutions, including:
This versatility lets you seamlessly plug Insider into your existing infrastructure and workflows based on your needs.
For example, if you’re already using other products in the Salesforce ecosystem — like their CRM, Commerce Cloud, or Service Cloud — you can rely on Insider for all your marketing needs while keeping the other Salesforce services connected with our platform.
Additionally, Insider can also become your single source of truth for all customer data thanks to our Actinable CDP.
This CDP (which is free when you’re using the Insider platform) is built to:
Our CDP even creates profiles for anonymous website visitors. These profiles contain information about where they clicked, which product categories they browsed, what they added to their carts, and so on. You can use these insights to personalize their experience in real time, which drastically lowers the time and resources needed to turn visitors into paying customers. For more details on how Insider can help you maximize your marketing spend, personalize all customer touchpoints, and unify your user data, book a live demo with our team.
Emarsys is a cloud-based omnichannel customer engagement platform that was acquired by SAP in 2020. The platform still continues to exist as a standalone product under the SAP umbrella. While it doesn’t support use cases like site search personalization or WhatsApp marketing, Emarsys still helps marketers set up SMS and email marketing automations, personalize web and mobile app content, unify their data, and orchestrate customer journeys.
Learn more: 9 Best Emarsys competitors and alternatives (detailed review)
Marketing Hub brings together lots of HubSpot marketing tools for individual creators, small businesses, and midsize companies. The Hub is known for its advanced automation capabilities, email and SMS features, and landing page builder. While it doesn’t support as many channels or have the advanced personalization capabilities of other platforms on this list, Marketing Hub still offers compelling packages for businesses looking for a cheaper solution that’s natively connected to other HubSpot solutions (like their CRM platform, CMS, or Operations Hub).
Oracle Marketing Cloud is a collection of marketing solutions for use cases like data unification cross-channel marketing, automation, lead generation, and customer support. Similar to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, this platform is also primarily made up of products that weren’t built in-house by Oracle but acquired over the years, like:
Adobe Experience Cloud is another classic marketing cloud that comprises over 20 products for data unification, marketing automation, personalization, journey orchestration, content management, analytics, and more. Among the most widely used of these products are:
Insider is a perfect Salesforce Marketing Cloud alternative for midsize and enterprise businesses that want:
Click here to book a demo with our team and learn how Insider can help you reach your business goals.
Written by
Katie Morley
Katie is an award-winning content marketer with over eight years of experience in content strategy, development, and copywriting. As Global Content Director at Insider, she currently oversees content strategy across 26 regions. Fun fact: Katie read 64 books last year (for which she owes a long commute and two week-long holidays where she spent approximately six hours a day with her nose in a book).