Salesforce Marketing Cloud vs Mailchimp for Growing Businesses

Firstly, it’s important to remember that Salesforce Marketing Cloud isn’t a single product - it’s an umbrella term for a suite of powerful marketing tools. These include Marketing Cloud Engagement, Account Engagement (formerly Pardot), and both Growth and Advanced Editions, each tailored for different types of businesses and use cases. For example, Account Engagement is better suited for B2B lead generation and nurturing, while Engagement is the go-to for B2C and high-volume communications across multiple channels.

In this article, we’ll be focusing on Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement, which is designed for complex, data-driven marketing strategies. We’ll compare this platform with Mailchimp - a well-known tool for simpler email campaigns - to help you decide which solution is the best fit for your marketing needs, both now and as your business scales.

While Mailchimp is often the go-to for small teams starting out with email marketing, Marketing Cloud Engagement offers much more for organisations with complex needs. 

We often see growing businesses treating SFMC as a more powerful version of Mailchimp, but the reality is, they’re built for entirely different levels of marketing maturity.

Let’s dive into the key differences.

Mailchimp started as an email marketing platform and has expanded over the years to offer landing pages, social media tools, and basic marketing automation. It’s designed with simplicity in mind, making it ideal for smaller teams or businesses that need to get campaigns out the door quickly without needing deep technical expertise.

The platform's drag-and-drop editor and template library make it easy to create and send professional-looking emails. You can set up simple automations like welcome sequences, abandoned cart emails, and birthday messages. Mailchimp also offers integrations with popular platforms like Shopify, WooCommerce, and WordPress.

However, its core capabilities remain rooted in email marketing and limited marketing automation, which means it can be outgrown fairly quickly by businesses that are scaling or require more personalised, multi-channel communications.

For this comparison, we're focusing on Marketing Cloud Engagement, Salesforce's solution for multi-channel marketing automation. Designed for complex, data-driven strategies, SFMC Engagement provides advanced tools for building highly personalised customer journeys across email, SMS, push notifications, advertising, and more.

With features like Journey Builder, AMPscript for dynamic content, AI-powered recommendations, and deep Salesforce CRM integration, it’s built to help teams deliver 1-to-1 communications at scale. That said, it does come with a steeper learning curve, longer implementation timeline, and higher cost - but for the right business, the payoff is significant!

Here's how the two platforms stack up feature-wise:

At the heart of both platforms is email marketing, but the level of sophistication is vastly different. Mailchimp offers an intuitive drag-and-drop editor with a selection of templates. It’s quick and easy to build attractive emails, and for many marketers, this is more than enough to get started.

However, as you begin to segment your audiences more deeply or seek to personalise messaging at scale, you’ll hit limitations. Mailchimp has basic dynamic content functionality, but it doesn't compare to SFMC Engagement’s use of AMPscript and dynamic content blocks. These allow marketers to customise messages based on real-time data from multiple sources - a powerful capability for teams managing large, complex audiences.

Mailchimp allows users to set up simple automated workflows like onboarding sequences, anniversary emails, or re-engagement campaigns. These automations are helpful for common use cases but are fairly linear and limited in terms of conditions and triggers.

Marketing Cloud Engagement's Journey Builder takes automation to another level. You can map out highly customised customer journeys that adapt in real time to user behaviour, preferences, and engagement. Want to send an email, follow up with a text if there’s no response, and then trigger a Facebook ad based on the user’s actions? Journey Builder can do that and more.

Mailchimp integrates with many eCommerce and CMS platforms and offers a basic audience dashboard. However, data management within Mailchimp is relatively simple. Segmentation is possible but lacks the depth required for sophisticated targeting.

SFMC Engagement shines when it comes to data. It allows you to create and manage complex data models, build audiences across multiple sources, and use that data to drive personalised content in real time. Integration with Salesforce CRM and other Salesforce tools like Data Cloud means marketers can access a 360-degree view of the customer, making it possible to align sales and marketing strategies more closely.

Mailchimp’s reporting is clear and digestible, offering key stats like open rate, click-through rate, and subscriber growth. It’s great for getting a quick overview of email performance, but for marketers needing deeper insights, it falls short.

With SFMC Engagement, you can build custom dashboards to track performance across channels. AI tools like Einstein help predict outcomes and suggest next steps. This is particularly valuable for teams who want to test, learn, and optimise with precision.

This is where the gap between the two platforms really widens. Mailchimp is, at its core, an email marketing platform. It has expanded to include social media ads and basic landing page tools, but its focus remains narrow.

Marketing Cloud Engagement, on the other hand, is designed for multi-channel experiences. From email and SMS to push notifications, in-app messages, and advertising, it enables businesses to meet customers wherever they are, on their preferred channel, at the right time.

There’s no denying that Mailchimp is the more affordable option. It has a free tier and tiered plans that scale with usage. It’s also very accessible for marketers who don’t have technical backgrounds.

SFMC Engagement is a premium platform, and with that comes a higher price point and a steeper learning curve. Implementation takes time, and training is essential. However, for organisations ready to scale and personalise their marketing in a meaningful way, this investment pays off over time. We know, because we make it happen for our clients using the MarCloud ROI Framework.

At MarCloud, we work with many clients who start on Mailchimp and eventually reach a point where the platform no longer meets their needs. This often happens when they need:

• More sophisticated customer journeys

• Deeper segmentation and personalisation

• Integration with Salesforce CRM

• Better control over data and analytics

Migrating to Marketing Cloud Engagement isn’t as simple as flipping a switch. It requires careful planning, including auditing existing assets, mapping out data structures, recreating journeys, and ensuring the team is equipped to use the platform effectively. But with the right strategy and support, the transition can be smooth and well worth the effort.

Final thoughts

Mailchimp and Salesforce Marketing Cloud offer valuable tools, but they serve different stages of a business’s growth. If you need to send attractive emails and manage simple campaigns, Mailchimp is a solid choice. But if you’re looking to build intelligent, data-driven, multi-channel marketing that scales with your business, SFMC Engagement is built for exactly that.

For growing businesses with big marketing ambitions, Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement provides the power, flexibility, and integration needed to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

Need help implementing Marketing Cloud?

If you're exploring Marketing Cloud Engagement and want to understand how it could work for your business, we’d be happy to help. Our certified Salesforce experts support teams through implementation, migration, and ongoing management to ensure they get the greatest ROI. 

Contact us today to start a conversation.