Everything You Need to Know About the Ultimate Salesforce Email Integration

Integrations are a smart, accessible way to get more value from your technology investments, streamline your processes, and save time.

What is an email integration?

An email integration is a technology plugin that connects to your email marketing software platform to improve or streamline some aspect of your communications and promotional outreach. Typically this enables the free flow of data and notifications between the integrated technologies, allowing them to “talk” to each other and even make adjustments or use each others’ functions and features. 

Because email is such a ubiquitous channel, which has been in use for so long, there are many great email marketing integrations that help enhance strategy execution in areas such as:

• Data, analytics, and reporting
• Personalization
• Creative and design
• List building and management
• Cross-channel consistency
• Ecommerce and online conversion
• Real-time marketing

What is a Salesforce integration?

Similarly, a Salesforce integration is a technology designed to hook up a platform or tool to the vast suite of Salesforce products, especially its renowned and heavily-used CRM. Marketing technology is a natural fit for Salesforce integrations, but other business functions can benefit from Salesforce integrations as well. Many approved integrations, including Campaign Monitor for Salesforce, can be found on the Salesforce AppExchange. 

How do I integrate email with Salesforce?

Integrating Salesforce with your email service provider is usually fairly straightforward, though some ESPs are better than others when it comes to playing nice with other technologies.

The exact steps to setting up an email integration with Salesforce will vary on the complexity of the integration and how well-developed it is. Ideally, the integration shouldn’t require a lot of time or technical expertise to set up. For instance, the Campaign Monitor for Salesforce integration can be up and running within hours of initiation.

To get an email integration started with Salesforce, find the listing you want on the AppExchange and click ‘Get it Now’. The best email integrations will have plenty of support, guidance, and tutorials to make sure you have the proper permissions and settings to allow for a smooth installation.

Not all email integrations created equal. If you want the best Salesforce email integration, the choice is simple.

Campaign Monitor for Salesforce is the highest-rated ESP integration on the AppExchange. Here’s why:

Design and build out email campaigns directly from Salesforce

As your technology stack broadens, it becomes tedious and even confusing to constantly jump between a growing list of marketing, sales, and operations platforms. The Campaign Monitor for Salesforce email integration streamlines your process, allowing you to orchestrate and execute your email strategy without having to leave your Salesforce instance.

You can even directly access our library of scientifically designed, mobile-ready templates, and modify them with our intuitive drag-and-drop email builder. It’s all in one place, so you save time and keep your workflow simple.

Automated data syncing

Integrating your customer and marketing data systems means you can spend more time being creative and analytical, and less time wrestling with technology and performing manual transfer tasks. 

Connecting your accounts lets you automatically synchronize your contact and campaign data so you never miss a new contact (or lose changes to an old one). And since you can dynamically map data from any Salesforce object to Campaign Monitor’s custom fields, personalizing your email marketing becomes easier and more powerful than ever.

24-hour support

Users of Campaign Monitor for Salesforce can rely on responsive, hands-on support at any time. Reach out to Campaign Monitor customer service, or connect with Beaufort 12, creators of the Campaign Monitor for Salesforce app.

Campaign Monitor for Salesforce is easy, fast, and seamless to integrate. It has enabled us to really reach out and get to know our clients. The customer service is brilliant; it’s responsive, helpful and personal, by people who really know their product and care about their customers. — Paul Easto, CEO, Wilderness Scotland and Wilderness Ireland

Simplified marketing permissions

The world of permissioned email marketing continues to become more important—and more complex. The Salesforce email integration keeps your customer and subscriber preferences aligned across systems and keeps your audience in control of how and when they hear from you. That not only means happier customers, it also makes staying compliant with opt-in laws and regulations easier for your team.

More flexible dashboards

Synchronized data gives you deeper insights into subscriber behavior and helps you track customers from first touchpoint all the way through the purchase funnel. Custom reports and dashboards that update in real time with data from both platforms can help you measure the success of email campaigns in driving engagement and revenue.

You can view who is engaging with your emails and who is not, and track your subscriber lists—all in one place.

It is great to be able to schedule the data import to automatically run a couple of times a week to send contacts to CM based on SF report criteria. Also the mapping fields functionality can keep fields updated between the two. Using both of those functions we are able to confidently have up-to-date recipient segments whenever we are ready to send an email. — Rachael Arnott, System Analyst, on the AppExchange

Integrating Salesforce, a legendary customer relationship management technology, with email tools and platforms is one of the most fundamental and effective technology choices you can make for your organization.

For many businesses and nonprofits, Salesforce is the heart of their engagement, growth and outreach operations. It often acts as the primary ‘source of truth,’ where all the most important lead information and records are kept. Used right, it’s an invaluable hub of data, collaboration, and insight. It’s no surprise CRMs like Salesforce are the most commonly integrated platforms with marketing technology, according to the Customer Data Platform Institute.

A good email service provider is one of the best ways to tap into Salesforce’s data and potential. Email is endlessly personalizable and can be sent to recipients on an individual basis at any moment, responding in real time to behavior triggers. It’s low cost, high ROI, and is part of the foundation for almost any marketing or communications campaign. 

By bringing the power and insights of Salesforce together with the flexibility and effectiveness of your ESP, you combine both of their strengths in the ultimate engagement recipe.

Almost any organization can make use of email marketing software as a Salesforce integration. Whether you’re a business or nonprofit, a large enterprise or a growing firm, there’s almost always value to be found. All you need is a Salesforce subscription and an ESP.

In short: if you have Salesforce, and you do email marketing of any kind, there’s no reason not to use some kind of integration. If you do a lot of direct sales or donor engagement, an outbound integration in Salesforce with flexible email marketing software is a great way to enable and simplify that work.

Even small teams with limited resources can get great value from integrating their email marketing. If anything, they may get even more value from the saved time and increased ROI.

Real story, real results

Multiple Sclerosis Limited accelerated personalization and fundraising with Campaign Monitor’s Salesforce Integration. Completing the key integration with Salesforce has delivered a number of important benefits:

• A smoother, more intuitive user experience
• Faster access to critical subscriber data
• Endless personalization in one click

Ready to choose a Salesforce email platform integration? Find out how some of the biggest ESPs with AppExchange apps compare to each other in ratings and reviews. You can find the Campaign Monitor AppExchange listing here.

Salesforce AppExchange email apps ratings:

• Campaign Monitor – 5 stars
• MailChimp – 2.5 stars
• ActiveCampaign – 4.5 stars
• Pardot – 4.5 stars
• SendinBlue – no stars
• Emma – 5 stars
• iContact – 4.5 stars

Look for listings from Salesforce AppExchange partners in the marketing field here.