CRM solutions all have various features related to sending and managing email. But there are significant differences in the specifics of how solutions accomplish these things.
The following is a comparison of limitations and capabilities related to email for Salesforce.com and SalesNexus. We’ll break it down based on outbound, template based, “email marketing” features and also email archival capabilities.
Salesforce.com
Email Marketing Limits
Strictly speaking, Salesforce.com CRM or Sales Cloud doesn’t purport to be an email marketing solution. They have an entirely different solution called their Marketing Cloud, the former Exact Target, that comes with it’s own costs, features, etc. Click here, for a more indepth analysis of Exact Target/Marketing Cloud email capabilities and limitations.
However, many sales teams attempt to use Salesforce.com CRM for automating email communications. It’s intended to be used by salespeople to let them send out the typical follow up emails they send all day, without re-writing the same email several times a day but, has the ability to support HTML emails, attachments and all the basics you need. It does come with some limitations.
Salesforce.com Email Sending Limitations
Also, the template and email size limitations should not be a problem in most cases but, companies that plan to send lots of graphics, images or attachments will need to be careful. It can be frustrating to spend a few days creating a great looking new marketing piece and then find out you can’t send it!For a salesperson that’s sending follow up emails, 1000 per day should be plenty. However, companies run into trouble when they start trying to use the Sales Cloud to “broadcast” emails due to the 1000 per day limit. If you have a total list of 10,000, you’d need to send 10 separate email blasts to stay under their 1000 per day limitation.
All the specific inclusions and limitations are listed on the Salesforce site here.
Email Capture/Archival
Salesforce.com Sales Cloud can also store your more general email communications with customers. In other words, the regular emails you send and receive via Outlook, or Gmail, can be attached to a Salesforce.com contact or account. So, if you create a proposal in Word and then attach it to an Outlook email and send it to the customer, that can be attached to the customer’s record in Salesforce and when the customer sends you a response, that can also be attached.
It’s a very cool feature and extremely useful! Imagine that you have a salesperson that’s been exchanging lots of emails with a potential customer, negotiating pricing and terms. Then the customer calls in to place the order but, the salesperson is out of the office. Now anyone on your team with access can pull up the customer’s record and access all of those emails.
However, the way the emails get attached to Salesforce presents some limitations that cause only some emails to get archived and that can really damage the value of the capability.
In the screenshot below, you’ll notice the “Add Emails to Salesforce” buttons. This is a plug-in for Outlook that’s provided by Salesforce.
This works fine except when you consider a couple of very real scenarios:
- Mobile Users: On tablets and smartphones, users typically use the built in email client on their phone and the Salesforce plug-in is not available there. So, those emails are not going to get captured.
- Human Error: Regardless of the platform, this solution requires the user to remember to do something for each email. If they just forget or are busy and don’t get around to it, those emails won’t get captured.
This results in an incomplete solution. If you only can find 1 out of 3 emails that you want to see, you end up not using it because you can’t count on it.
Also, there are some technical limitations:
So, some emails will be truncated if the body was too big or the attachments consumed too much size.
SalesNexus
Email Marketing Limits
SalesNexus is built to be both a Sales CRM and a Marketing Automation solution in one system so, email marketing capabilities are more comparable to ExactTarget/Marketing Cloud.
SalesNexus Email Sending Limitations
Email Capture/Archival
SalesNexus Email capture or archival solution is fundamentally different in that the system talks directly to your mail server and just grabs all the emails your team is sending and receiving and matches them up with customer records in the CRM. That means nothing is required of the user and it works no matter which email client or device you’re using, anywhere.
For a technical description of how SalesNexus Email Capture works, watch this short video.