MoEngage vs. Salesforce:
From Legacy to
Next-Gen Engagement

If you’ve been using Salesforce Marketing Cloud for years, you already know what it’s like to feel trapped inside a system that seems part of your brand. You’ve felt the pain when you need a segment that isn’t there, or wonder when the best time is to send an SMS message. Everyone assumes it’s just how things are because everyone is used to it.

But at the question of trying to switch platforms, the dread kicks in. You anticipate pushback from your leadership team, which has become comfortable with Salesforce itself. Thoughts of the customer engagement platform migration effort make you shiver.

So you keep going, running campaigns on a good-enough setup. But how long can you bear to let your customer engagement rates trickle away?

You feel like your hands are tied. But they’re not.

At first glance, both Agentforce Marketing (Salesforce Marketing Cloud) and MoEngage appear to cover similar ground. Both can send omnichannel campaigns, for one thing. For another, both offer PII Tokenized Sending, a feature that transforms your customer’s Personally Identifiable Information (PII) into anonymous tokens, so the data is never stored within your platform, maximizing security.

Each of the two platforms has strong AI capabilities to boost campaigns, too, including send time optimization and content generation.

As you look a little deeper, though, the differences between MoEngage vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud start to emerge.

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud divides its core capabilities between Marketing Cloud Next and Marketing Cloud Engagement, each handling distinct functions in separate environments. For example, the former handles audience segmentation, while the latter is responsible for send-time optimization and campaign content creation. Understanding which version does what can be confusing for new and existing customers.
• On top of that, many common use cases need you to buy and integrate several separate modules. The payoff? Longer go-live timelines and slower time-to-value.
• Integrations are also limited to Salesforce’s own ecosystem, forcing you to toggle between multiple platforms to run basic campaigns and adding to the overall Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). Combined with a fragmented user interface (UI) and developer-heavy workflows, you’ll be left spending more time navigating systems than sending campaigns.

The good news is, MoEngage’s unified customer engagement platform (CEP) brings together channels, data, and advanced segmentation. You can launch campaigns faster and deliver timely, hyper-relevant ones that drive growth.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t any other alternatives to Salesforce Marketing Cloud or Agentforce Marketing that can fit your team like a glove. But since you’re already here, let’s look at the major contrasts between MoEngage vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

When choosing a customer engagement platform, channel flexibility matters. It’s a key factor you should take into account if you want to deliver timely and personalized campaigns.

Although both MoEngage and Salesforce Marketing Cloud support multiple channels, the latter is heavily skewed toward email. You can build, send, and optimize email campaigns. But few other channels are supported — SMS, LINE, in-app messages, web personalization, mobile push notifications, WhatsApp, social media, and ads. And they’re not supported as aggressively as email is.

This imbalance means you either rely on separate tools or spend extra time setting up workarounds to run powerful omnichannel marketing campaigns. The only other option is to settle for a weaker relationship with your customers outside of email.

With MoEngage, you not only get seamless support for the channels that Salesforce already provides, but you can unlock even more channels natively:

• On-site messaging (OSM): Trigger on-site messages like pop-ups, banners, or nudges by page visits, browsing behavior, or custom events to engage your website visitors in real-time. This channel is ideal for cross-selling, exit-intent promotions, and product recommendations.
• Web push notifications: Deliver timely web push notifications directly to your customers’ browsers, even when they’re off your website. It doesn’t matter whether your customers are using Chrome, Opera, Safari (macOS 13 or higher and iOS 16.4 or higher), Edge, or Firefox.
• Rich Communication Services (RCS): Send interactive, media-rich RCS messages with suggested reply buttons and a verified sender status to build trust. From high-resolution images and GIFs to carousels, video and audio clips, you can add any media to guide your customers toward the next step in their journey. In case of network or device limitations, you can even fall back on SMS to reach a wider audience, so you never miss a delivery.

MoEngage’s native support for 10+ channels gives you the freedom to include more touchpoints in your lifecycle campaigns. That’s a major advantage if you need to increase engagement and conversions during key decision-making moments.

Customer segmentation and personalization go hand in hand. The more granular your targeting is, the more relevant your campaigns become, and the higher your conversion potential will be.

If you’ve been using Salesforce Marketing Cloud Next for decades, you know how segmentation works there. Include and exclude customer attributes, apply aggregation, and manage refresh schedules for both static and dynamic segments. You can also build audiences using Einstein Generative AI by applying filters on the Unified Individual object in the segment canvas.

Sure, it’s a powerful way to create rule-based audiences. But every month, you run automated marketing campaigns without realizing which customers might be about to churn, or which ones are most loyal to your brand. Without realizing it, you slide further behind competitors who are leveling up their personalization game.

MoEngage puts you miles ahead of your competitors with Merlin AI Segment Assist. Build precise segments in seconds using natural language prompts.

With MoEngage, you can also choose from a wide range of segment types built for different targeting scenarios:

• Rule-based segments: Combine user attributes, events, behavior, and event properties into complex logical groupings with nested AND/OR conditions.
• File segments: Upload fixed lists of customers from external analysis to the MoEngage platform for running campaigns.
• Affinity segments: Target customers based on ‘minimum of’, ‘top/bottom percentage of’, or ‘predominance’ behaviors. For example, a customer watches rom-coms for a minimum of 30% of their viewing time, or predominantly books cabs between 10 and 11 AM.
• RFM segments: Group customers in real-time into behavioral categories, like ‘Champions’, ‘Loyal’, ‘Potentially loyal’, and ‘At risk’, based on their Recency, Frequency and Monetary Value (RFM) scores. Recalculate them when sending campaigns to ensure the audience reflects the latest behavior.
• Warehouse segments: Pull audiences from live warehouse data (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or Databricks), without delays or data duplication.
• Custom segments: Save and reuse audience queries. You can also combine multiple segments into one by nesting up to three levels deep.

So, if you need to target customers who make a purchase on a weekday, reward your loyal customers with referral incentives, or engage recent website visitors with special discounts, MoEngage has built-in advanced segmentation capabilities to make it happen.

Both platforms can help you generate content using AI. The difference between MoEngage vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud lies in the number of channels for which you can create AI content.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement offers Einstein Generative AI to create subject lines, preheaders, and body copy for emails, as well as SMS messages. You can configure your brand identity and personality, iterate content variations, and even generate images via Salesforce’s integration with Typeface.

But for other channels, like push notifications and in-app messages, you need to create messages manually. No AI to help you out with writer’s block or provide you with data-driven insights for content optimization.

Those gaps translate into more time spent switching between tools for keyword research and briefing copywriters. Ensuring consistency across formats for different channels takes longer than expected. Campaign launches slow down, and you miss the opportunity to respond quickly to customer behavior.

On the other hand, MoEngage’s Merlin AI Copywriter is built into campaign creation workflows for email, push notifications, and on-site and in-app messages.

Specifically, you can:

• Define your campaign’s target audience, use case (promotion, upsell, retention, etc.), content tone, and creative style (inspired by trends, personas, and even pop culture references like Harry Potter)
• Add impactful, high-performing keywords in your copy, based on your past campaign performance
• Exclude low-performing keywords that could hurt your engagement
• Personalize messages with dynamic user attributes to make the copy feel relevant to your audience

What’s more, you can generate images and banners inside campaigns using Merlin AI Designer. Just add detailed text prompts and throw in some optional reference images, and you’re good to go.

As a result, you don’t need to jump between external integrations or channel-specific editors in MoEngage.

How can you launch on-brand campaigns without starting from scratch every time? The answer: templates. Not only do they save you time, but they also help you stay consistent with your brand style and collaborate with different teams.

In Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement, Content Builder lets you build and manage email templates by using a layout tool or pasting HTML. You can even store branded layouts as Single Source templates and reuse them for new email variations.

There’s also an option to connect to whitelisted or approved WhatsApp templates via your BSP and build SMS messages. You’ll find pre-built layouts for in-app messages, too, with options like full-page, modal, or banner styles. Certain push formats, like basic or carousel notifications, are also available.

But every time you need visual variety or ready-to-use templates for other channels, the creative options thin out. So, you build the creatives from scratch. You’re compelled to coordinate with multiple teams to ensure the look and feel of the creatives are consistent across all channels.

Sounds like you’re spending hours (if not days) trying to fit your content into the available formats. Here’s where the wedge between the two platforms is driven in.

You see, MoEngage gives you pre-built, richer template formats for even more channels than Salesforce does in Marketing Cloud Engagement:

• Email: Use our drag-and-drop or custom HTML editor to build email marketing templates, save them, and share them across your teams.
• Push notifications: From image carousels and countdown timers to stylized notifications and progress bars, choose from 6 different mobile push notification templates.
• In-app messages: Send popups, rating prompts, video popups, full-screen layouts, and native and HTML formats, along with getting built-in guidance for offer alerts, feature announcements, and other common use cases with in-app templates.
• On-site messages: Utilize pre-designed banners, nudges, and pop-ups for website engagement, offers, surveys, and lead capture.
• SMS sign-ups: Get pop-up or full-screen layouts in SMS sign-up templates to capture opt-in consent, with pre-configured compliance text for North America.
• WhatsApp: Add approved carousels, limited-time offers, and other marketing and authentication message layouts directly from your BSP.

You can use this variety to create more visually engaging and tailored experiences for each channel, wherever your customers engage.

Add to that the fact that every template type in MoEngage supports advanced personalization, and you’ve struck gold.

Sometimes, whether a customer opens or ignores your message depends on when you sent it. Send too early, and they might miss it. Send too late, and your competitors’ messages might have already grabbed their attention.

To address this issue, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement provides Einstein Send Time Optimization (STO). This feature analyzes up to 90 days of historical customer engagement data, using machine learning to predict when each customer is most likely to open or click an email.

You can also apply STO to mobile push notifications to determine the ideal campaign sending slots. These predictions are updated weekly, providing you with current insights for email and push campaigns.

But it leaves a valuable channel out of the equation, one that delivers a 98% open rate — SMS. You’re left trying to manually figure out when to send SMS messages or guessing based on limited customer data.

This gap in intelligence results in missed windows when customers are most likely to respond to your text messages. Soon enough, you’ll notice a drop in SMS engagement rates and ROI.

MoEngage closes that gap, though. That’s another difference between MoEngage vs. Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

In particular, MoEngage’s Best Time to Send (BTS) feature determines the optimal hour for each customer to receive emails, push notifications, and SMS messages. Based on as little as 60 days’ interaction data, you can apply BTS in periodic and one-time campaigns.

Like Salesforce’s Einstein STO, MoEngage’s BTS updates weekly, so your campaigns can automatically adapt to changing customer behavior. Just like Telekom Macedonia’s campaigns, which led to 132% higher CTRs using MoEngage’s BTS and other AI capabilities.

As you know, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help you send campaigns across multiple channels. But it doesn’t show you which channel each customer engages with the most.

So you end up guessing. Consequently, you send messages on all channels, which might annoy your customers. Not to mention the wasted budget. Another possibility is that the messages hit channels that your customers barely touch. Over time, response rates start to decline.

MoEngage’s Most Preferred Channel (MPC) feature removes all the guesswork by leveraging Merlin AI. MPC is a user-level attribute that pinpoints the channel a customer is most likely to respond to, based on their interactions over the past two months. It considers both depth (the number of clicks) and frequency (the number of opens) to draw a conclusion. To keep its recommendations up to date, it prioritizes recent customer activity.

How does it work? If a customer has engaged more with push notifications than with email over the past two months, MoEngage suggests sending them a push notification. But if their interactions shift to SMS the next month, MPC automatically updates the data to suggest sending them automated SMS campaigns.

A data-driven approach like this helps increase conversions. So long, wasted spend on irrelevant channels!