The Ultimate Guide to Salesforce Email Marketing Integration

Many nonprofits using Salesforce also use email marketing solutions like Mailchimp and Constant Contact to communicate with their supporters. These are incredible tools that give them the ability to engage and communicate at scale.

However, many organizations struggle to create an impactful communication strategy due to the lack of integration between these solutions. As many users know, most integrations between these tools and Salesforce are static one-way integrations. This means that supporter data is only pushed in a single direction from Salesforce into the email marketing solution where the communications are sent. Insightful engagement data such as opens, clicks, and communication preferences continue to sit within the email marketing solution once a campaign is sent, never making its way back into Salesforce where they can be further acted upon. This one-way integration may prevent an organization from making appropriate adjustments to their communication cadence which can lead to missed opportunities, or even worse – frustrated supporters.

Throughout this blog, we’ll explore some of the challenges nonprofits encounter with native one-way integration and reveal how two-way integration can empower them to make the most of their supporter data in Salesforce.

Why Integrate Email Marketing Software with Salesforce

Integrating your email marketing platform with Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack (or Salesforce Nonprofit Cloud) is an important step for transforming contact and gift data into timely, personalized communications while reducing manual work and improving insights.

With fresh, accurate data flowing between Salesforce and your email marketing platform on a regular basis, your organization can optimize communications with the following:

• Automated email triggers
• Personalized messaging
• Enhanced insights

In short, with more data you can do more—without added staff time. It’s a win-win! Next, let’s get into the integration options available.

For more insights on email marketing, check out our free eBook, The Data Disconnect: Why Nonprofit Email Campaigns Fail and How to Fix Them.

One-Way Integration: The Barrier to Creating Impactful Donor Communication

Without two-way integration between their email marketing solution and Salesforce, organizations often face a myriad of challenges:

• Limited visibility: Data silos and restrictions from one-way native integrations prevent organizations from seeing the full picture when it comes to their supporters’ overall level of engagement, preferences, and behaviors.
• Manual processes and time wasted: Organizations spend too much time and effort consolidating or reconciling data between systems and struggle to keep up with the demands of donor outreach.
• Outdated, stale information: Since email data cannot seamlessly synchronize between systems, organizations risk relying on inaccurate information that erodes supporter trust and delays timely communication.
• Lower ROI: Budgets are tighter than ever, and organizations need to make every donor dollar count. Instead, organizations have invested heavily in Salesforce and email marketing solutions but still miss out on data-driven opportunities to more effectively engage and nurture donors.

Salesforce and your email marketing solutions are interdependent. So, all the information that lives in Salesforce should be used to personalize email messaging to donors, and all the email activity–what readers open, click on, and subscribe to–should be used to further build each supporter’s unique profile in Salesforce.

If these two systems are siloed – your organization could miss key opportunities to nurture donors and grow your impact.

Two-Way Integration: The Key to Building Stronger Relationships with Supporters

In a data-driven world, it’s imperative to be able to get your supporter history, preferences and insights all in one place within Salesforce.

This is where the power of two-way integration comes into play. Omatic empowers nonprofits to send accurate and complete data both ways between Salesforce and email marketing solutions, facilitating timely, personalized, and engaged communication with supporters.

• Save valuable time while maintaining control. Omatic lets users take the wheel and determine how much automation they want, giving organizations full control over how and when data is sent between systems.
• Gain a complete and up-to-date supporter view. Omatic’s two-way integration ensures that supporter data remains consistent across Salesforce and your email marketing solution, eliminating guesswork, duplicates, or delayed data entries. This enables teams to operate more efficiently and deliver timely donor outreach.
• Eliminate blind spots. With a unified view of supporter data within Salesforce, organizations no longer need to bounce between systems to access specific information. Teams can fully leverage Salesforce and email marketing data holistically for personalized outreach.
• Send the right message at the right time. By gaining insight into subscription preferences and recent interactions, organizations can better tailor their outreach to resonate with supporters’ interests and preferences.

Email Marketing Software That Integrates with Salesforce

Check out some of the most common platforms nonprofits use to engage with supporters via email, social media, and SMS.

Mailchimp

Mailchimp, a solution from the tech giant Intuit, is a best-in-class email marketing platform for small to mid-sized nonprofits and businesses alike. This powerful yet user-friendly application makes it easy to craft campaigns, design emails with click-and-drag elements, and leverage AI insights for optimization.

Constant Contact

Constant Contact is a long-standing email marketing solution tailored to small businesses, nonprofits, and solopreneurs who need straightforward, affordable tools to reach their audiences. With a 4.4/5 rating on Trust Pilot, Constant Contact is both a popular and reliable tool in the marketplace of email marketing options. In addition to flexible and customizable email design templates, Constant Contact also has strong social media marketing features.

Emma

Emma is an excellent all-in-one platform for engaging with supporters via email and text. Used by both nonprofit and for-profit teams, Emma is a popular option for small teams looking to make a big splash in email marketing. Emma provides AI features, automation journeys, and dynamic content options to help you provide the right messaging for your audiences in each and every email you send.

HubSpot

HubSpot is a robust tool for all things inbound marketing, from email and social media to content management, and search engine optimization (SEO). This platform is excellent for an organization looking to scale its existing marketing programs and is well suited for medium and large sized organizations.

Engaging Networks

Engaging Networks is an advocacy-focused digital engagement platform aimed at nonprofits and political campaigns that need to mobilize supporters and drive online activism. It combines email marketing with petition management, donation processing, event sign-ups, and social-sharing tools into a unified system.

Encompass from iModules

Encompass by iModules is a robust, enterprise-grade email marketing and constituent engagement platform tailored primarily for higher-education institutions and other nonprofit organizations. It combines powerful segmentation and personalization tools with a focus on alumni engagement, fundraising appeals, and event management.

Omatic: The Best Email Marketing Integration with Salesforce

At Omatic, we believe that getting all your third-party tools to communicate with your email marketing system makes magic happen. When systems talk to each other, you can access more data for better outreach and improved engagement. Integrating Salesforce with your organization’s email marketing platform also means:

No more manual data imports: Ditch the downloads. Integration allows you to automatically move biographic, philanthropic, and other data between systems on a regular basis.

An end to time-consuming spreadsheet edits: A purpose-built integration tool will automatically edit, configure, and transform your data, so it matches your exact customization preferences—no manual edits required.

Automated emails can run more frequently: With fresher data, everyone wins. Run acknowledgment emails, campaign progress report communications, and other automated messages on a weekly or daily basis with confidence.

Accurate supporter data: Enjoy having all the relevant supporter data you need, including giving histories, engagement activity, email history, event attendance, and more in your CRM, automatically.

Better segmentation for communications: Having accurate development data within your email marketing platform makes segmentation based on biographical data, donation history, and volunteering a snap.

Access more data about your supporters than ever before. Learn about nonprofit data integration solutions today!

Conclusion

It’s hard enough to fundraise – the way your systems speak to one another shouldn’t make it harder.

For nonprofits, integrating email marketing solutions with Salesforce is essential for maximizing donor engagement. However, one-way integrations ultimately prevent organizations from truly understanding their supporter base, which can lead to a decrease in trust and many missed opportunities. By adopting two-way integration solutions like Omatic, organizations can ensure that they’re using the right information to focus on what matters most to their supporters—leading to stronger support and a meaningful step forward in advancing their mission.

Curious how Omatic can help you make the most of Salesforce and your email marketing solution? Reach out for a demo or learn more here.