Salesforce core platform provides great features and automation tools to support Sales or Service business processes.  Some of the tools Salesforce offers:

• Workflow Rules – Workflow lets you automate standard internal procedures and processes to save time across your org.  
• Approval Process – Approvals take automation one step further, letting you specify a sequence of steps that are required to approve a record.
• Process Builder – Instead of doing repetitive tasks manually, you can configure processes to do it automatically. Process Builder helps you automate your business processes and gives you a graphical representation as you build it.
• Flows (visual workflow) – A flow is the part of Lightning Flow that collects data and performs actions in your Salesforce org or an external system. Lightning Flow provides two types of flows: screen flows and auto launched flows.
• Notification Builder – Notification Builder enables admins to create customized in-app notifications for the targeted audience. You can define when you want the notification to trigger, what message to display and which users to notify. 

These tools are robust and very useful in performing data related automation. But none of these really support ‘marketing automation’. Salesforce does have its Marketing Cloud product separate from the core Salesforce platform which helps enterprise-level businesses but it becomes quite expensive for small businesses with the high maintenance costs of the Salesforce marketing platform. So, small businesses definitely need an alternative solution within the Salesforce platform itself to do marketing automation to go along with their Sales or Service-related process.

The current core features within Salesforce with all the email send limitations, and not so user-friendly email templates – do not support full-blown marketing automation.  That’s where the Salesforce AppExchange products come to our rescue – and one such app that is definitely ranking high and worth giving a try is “inwise“.

inwise

inwise is available as an AppExchange app to install on Salesforce instance.  inwise provides a marketing cloud that will empower small businesses. A smart 360-degree multi-channel software for all the direct marketing needs. inwise provides a great set of marketing solutions:

• Email: Design email campaigns with a drag & drop interface that are mobile responsive as well. 
• SMS: Send personalized individual text messages to your customers. Like confirming, reminding, or updating an appointment to your customers.
• Two-way Communication: Communicate directly with the customers by sending personalized and two-way messages: emails, text messages, transactional messages, and Whatsapp.
• Landing Pages &Pop-up: Use the free template to create landing pages or even sign up forms to capture new leads and contacts.
• Analytics: Track campaigns, landing pages performance with real-time reports.
• Marketing Automation: Build customer journeys by automating marketing tasks. 

Some of the use cases to use inwise – capturing new leads & engaging them with relevant messages at the right time or taking your new customers on a personalized journey with the right content to complete their onboarding process or re-engaging/retaining your existing customers with new promotional messages, product releases and supporting them across multiple channels 

The benefits of connecting inwise plugin to Salesforce are:

• Creating an Email marketing campaign and sending it to the Salesforce audience (contacts, leads) is a bliss.   
• Send personalized SMS directly from Salesforce to an individual, group of leads, contacts, or campaign members. Then, apply a personal touch in your messages and add a CTA with a direct link to landing pages.
• With the Salesforce process builder and inwise automation tool, you can create a personalized customer journey for each lead and contact.
• Design landing pages as well as popups, for collecting leads and contacts and synchronize them from Salesforce to inwise
• Tracking who opened the email, clicking links, etc, and getting back the insight to Salesforce is what marketers would love to have to improve their campaigns.

If you are looking for a marketing automation tool within Salesforce, I’d recommend you to give the inwise app a try with the free plan. It is quite easy to use and has all the features that you’d need for your marketing. Direct link for inwise app in AppExchange – https://sforce.co/2rL4EcG.

Let me know in the comments below how it goes or if you have tried other apps before from the Appexchange.