The News: On February 20, Salesforce announced Marketing Cloud Growth, a new edition of Marketing Cloud, which is designed to help small businesses drive growth using CRM, AI, and data, while leveraging automation across sales, service, and commerce functions. Using the company’s Einstein 1 customer platform, small businesses will be able to use Data Cloud and generative AI directly within their flow of work, connecting multi-channel marketing with sales, service, and commerce on a single platform.
According to Salesforce, the key capabilities include:
- Segment audiences faster by using natural language prompts to generate new audience segments in minutes, not hours, with no code.
- Deliver campaigns and content quickly by automatically generating campaign briefs, segments, landing pages, and other content using natural language prompts and pre-built templates.
- Personalize customer relationships with unified profiles that power every marketing, sales, service, and commerce experience across email, mobile, and in-person engagements.
- Optimize campaign performance with real-time reporting and user-friendly dashboards.
- Marketing Cloud Growth will initially be available in the United States and Canada, with plans to expand to EMEA at the end of the year and more regions to follow.
You can read the Marketing Cloud Growth press release here.
Salesforce concurrently announced that Data Cloud would be available to get started at no cost for Salesforce customers with Sales or Service Enterprise Edition (EE). Data Cloud enables companies to bring all of their trapped data into Salesforce to build a 360-degree view of customers across all products, services, and interactions, and enables Einstein 1 to be natively connected to the organization’s data, which can improve productivity, efficiency, and create better customer experiences.
Salesforce Targets SMBs with Marketing Cloud Growth Edition
Analyst Take: The introduction of generative AI to the market was initially very consumer focused; roughly one year ago, individuals were flocking to OpenAI’s site to try out Chat GPT for themselves. Large SaaS companies, including Salesforce, Microsoft, Google, ServiceNow, Zendesk, Zoho, and others quickly ramped up and rolled out generative-AI functionality into their offerings, but generally implemented guardrails to prevent users from abusing the system, or for the system to spit out hallucinations at will (through techniques such as retrieval augmented generation, fine-tuning, and grounding large language models (LLMs) to specific knowledge sources.
However, most of these large SaaS platforms’ generative AI tools are targeted and priced for mid-market and enterprise customers, tacking on an extra $25 to $50 or more, per user, per month, in additional fees to access generative AI functions safely and across the entire spectrum of company data. As a result, SMBs and smaller mid-market firms that may have been considering these platforms may feel as they have been priced out of the market now, and, as the market evolves to a consumption-based pricing model, would be unlikely to swallow a potentially even larger bill in the future.
No-Cost Data Cloud Availability Is the Catalyst for Advanced Functionality
The most interesting aspect of the Marketing Cloud Edition is that Data Cloud is built into the product, which enables the automation of full-funnel campaigns and journeys, and allows the granular personalization of each step in the journey, via a Unified Customer Profile. Marketing automation tools have long been capable of automating specific tasks along a customer journey, but the incorporation of data held in other parts of the organization (namely in the sales and service departments) can add that extra layer of context, relevancy, and personalization that customers – particularly small business customers – expect and demand.
Another interesting part of the announcement is the initial availability of Data Cloud at no cost to enterprise marketers who have a Salesforce Sales or Service Cloud Enterprise Edition license. According to Salesforce, Data Cloud Starter for Marketing comes with ~$250k credits, which roughly equates to about 10,000 profiles. If customers would like to add additional profiles, they can add additional Data Cloud consumption credits.
This is an interesting way to entice marketers to connect all of their pertinent customer and interaction data together, to create a more informed and unified approach to marketing. The ability to truly incorporate all interaction data together, and infuse it with both predictive and generative AI capabilities is the Holy Grail of data integration, and Salesforce appears to be making a strong push into marketing departments to cross-sell its other offerings, with the promise of enabling greater cross-functional data utilization.
Targeting the Next Segment for Growth
Salesforce’s announcement of its new Marketing Cloud Edition indicates to me that the company realizes it needs to expand its customer base, particularly as generative AI use is only going to increase over time. Many SMBs and smaller mid-market firms often consider Salesforce to be too expensive, even if they acknowledge the platform’s high level of functionality and power.
Marketing Cloud Edition appears to help address this concern by providing marketers at these organizations. With SMB-focused pricing, the edition will come with full capabilities to run their marketing organization, including integration with Sales, Service, and Commerce, while allowing them to incorporate the elements that truly move the needle for smaller organizations, such as data-driven personalization and the ability to drive more efficiency through the use of generative AI and automation to create emails, campaigns, and follow-on work that traditionally would swamp a small marketing department.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
