Marketing Cloud Engagement: The Tool For Scaling Mid-Market & Enterprise Brands
- Daniel Barnett
- Apr 14
- 5 min read
Table of Content
Summary
Marketing Cloud Engagement is the leading enterprise email marketing platform. So, if you are looking for an email tool that can do some heavy lifting and your team has the resources to manage it, MCE is your solution, no doubt.
To say Salesforce does not know marketing would be an understatement. Salesforce CRM, from inception until very recently, defaulted to an archaic, disjointed, nonsensical data model that limited and confused the hell out of marketers, sales, and the entire industry for decades. Highlighted by a holy independent Leads table and a Contact/Account relationship that limited marketers in every way, marketers have always looked to third-party tools for workflows that fit their job descriptions and did not stagnate productivity. The default setup creates duplicates, bad data, disconnected customer experiences, more maintenance, more complexity, and a lack of clarity in best practices that left most of us guessing. For decades.
In 2013, Salesforce acquired ExactTarget for $2.5 billion. At the time, ExactTarget was the indisputable leader in the B2C, extreme high-volume email and deliverability space. B2C brands that needed to send hundreds of thousands or even millions of emails at the same time had one option and that was ExactTarget. The obvious gap was that Salesforce had no experience in the B2C space and had little to no experience integrating with B2C tools. Perhaps the acquisition was driven in part by ExactTarget's recent acquisition of Pardot, which gave Salesforce an easy win for their existing B2B customers.
Since its acquisition, little has been done to innovate on the platform and make it easier to use. Salesforce has changed its name so many times that it has left the ecosystem jaded and constantly clarifying what tool they are talking about. The name progression: ExactTarget, Salesforce ExactTarget Marketing Cloud (2013), Salesforce Marketing Cloud (2014), Marketing Cloud Engagement (2022). The ecosystem never fully adopted the new names and most practitioners still say Marketing Cloud or ExactTarget in the same breath.
Ideal customer profile
Large enterprise marketing teams with dedicated technical resources, specifically a certified MCE developer. High-volume senders, B2C and B2B alike, who need extreme data flexibility, deliverability at scale, and complex multi-channel journey orchestration. Not a fit for teams without technical depth, limited budgets, or organizations expecting quick time to value.
Pricing
Variable by email send volume and database size, making it difficult to quote simply. Entry-level Corporate Edition starts around $4,200 per month, which is where core Einstein AI features become available. Enterprise Edition typically starts at $15,000 per month depending on contact volume and configuration. Licensing is only part of the cost story. Implementation, developer headcount, third-party tooling, and ongoing administration drive total cost of ownership significantly higher. Do not underestimate this when budgeting.
Ease of use and interface
One of the worst interfaces in enterprise software. The platform is organized into separate Studios, each of which effectively SSO's into its own environment with long load times, frequent crashes, and browser instability. Navigation requires many clicks to move between functions. Foldering, the most basic method of content organization, works differently in every area of the tool. The experience is a direct artifact of a platform built in the 1990s that has been extended rather than rebuilt.
Email and content editor
The native email editor is functional but dated. Templates produce emails that look basic. The strongest approach is using a third-party editor. Stripo.email is the standout, a phenomenal drag-and-drop tool that seamlessly integrates with MCE and replaces a huge chunk of the content build work with a modern experience.
Landing page management
Called CloudPages. Technically strong and highly customizable with the right development resources. Not a visual drag-and-drop experience. CloudPages reward technical investment.
Data management
The area where MCE genuinely earns its enterprise reputation. Contact Builder and Data Extensions give marketers near-unlimited flexibility to work with relational data: purchase history, audit trails, past sends, form submissions, record updates, and virtually any structured dataset. The freedom is real and significant. The tradeoff is that Data Extension proliferation degrades platform performance. Data governance becomes a critical operational discipline, not an afterthought.
Technical requirements
Non-negotiable: you need a skilled, certified MCE developer on the team. This is not a nice-to-have. SQL is required for segmentation, AMPScript for personalization, JSON for custom integration calls. The developer must work in close collaboration with marketing and CRM administration. Teams that understaff this function will move slowly and take on unnecessary risk on basic marketing operations.
Salesforce CRM integration
Easier than most expect. The Marketing Cloud Connector handles the connection and Synchronized Data Extensions expose Salesforce data within MCE. The data is read-only in its native state, so SQL queries and AMPScript are still required to activate it in campaigns. Functional once configured correctly.
Deliverability
Exceptional at scale. This was ExactTarget's founding strength and it remains MCE's clearest differentiator for high-volume senders. For organizations sending hundreds of thousands or millions of emails, deliverability infrastructure is best-in-class.
Scalability
The platform's ceiling is essentially unlimited for email volume and data complexity. The constraint is organizational. Teams that scale the platform properly with the right resources will find it performs well. Teams that do not will find performance degrades with data extension bloat and poor governance.
Reporting and analytics
Out-of-the-box reporting is a significant limitation. Native reports are sparse and dated. Advanced SQL queries can populate exportable Data Extensions and automate engagement capture, but doing this well requires the same developer depth the rest of the platform demands. The practical solution is a tight integration with a third-party reporting tool, pushing data out via connectors and APIs to get the visibility you need. It works, but like everything in MCE, doing it well means doing it with complexity.
AI
Einstein for MCE has expanded significantly in 2025, including Data Cloud connectivity across all MC products for enriched segmentation, Einstein Segment Creation using natural language prompts, and bot activity filtering to clean engagement metrics. Core Einstein features within MCE include Einstein Engagement Scoring, Send Time Optimization, and AI-assisted content creation for email subject lines and body copy. Einstein features are meaningfully useful at the Corporate tier and above but require clean, sufficient historical data to produce reliable predictions.
Innovation and roadmap
Honest assessment: innovation on the core MCE platform has been slow since acquisition. The platform that ships today is recognizably the same platform ExactTarget shipped decades ago, extended rather than rebuilt. Salesforce's current innovation energy is concentrated on Data Cloud and Marketing Cloud Next, which is a separate product entirely. MCE customers should watch the MCN roadmap carefully to understand where Salesforce's long-term investment is going.
