From digital engagement strategy and AI best practices to Salesforce Digital Engagement, its real costs, and how to send SMS from Salesforce without it.
How can one enhance digital engagement? Recognize the demands of your target audience and refine your messaging accordingly. According to research, 3 out of 4 customers want businesses to be aware of their needs and preferences. Businesses will be able to foster enduring relationships if they understand customer behavior and use interaction data efficiently by leveraging emerging technologies such as AI to unlock the true power of that data.
Let's examine what digital engagement is, why it poses a challenge, how AI and a sound digital strategy can help you get past that challenge, and what Salesforce teams need to know about Salesforce Digital Engagement, its costs, and its alternatives.
What Is Digital Engagement and Why Does It Matter?
The way your business communicates with both existing as well as potential customers via digital platforms is known as digital engagement. Every time a customer or prospect interacts with your brand via your website, email, and social media, a unique digital engagement experience is created, and that experience is crucial for acquiring and retaining customers. You may create enduring relationships with your customers by implementing a strong digital engagement strategy.
Examples of digital engagement include:
- Using self-service tools like chatbots on a portal, website, social media page or app
- Accessing product videos and educational material on popular video platforms such as YouTube, Instagram, etc.
- Engaging with social media posts
- Visiting a web page via internet search while looking for a product or service
- Reading a blog article or email newsletter
- Visiting a website or landing page via a link from an email or SMS marketing campaign
- Engaging with targeted ads on a website
- Posting a review, answering a survey, or leaving feedback on a social media page
Digital Engagement Challenges for Marketers and How to Solve Them
Nowadays, companies in all sectors have prioritized their online presence. In addition to our increased use of digital shopping, a large portion of our daily lives, including working, booking appointments, planning travel, and much more have moved online. Consequently, the digital realm has become quite crowded, which makes digital engagement a big challenge for marketers. Companies need to:
- Face off against a plethora of online advertisements and digital content.
- Ensure a smooth experience across a range of new digital platforms.
- Connect with the appropriate target audience to increase ROI.
- Keep up with the constantly evolving laws pertaining to data privacy and security.
It's also critical to keep in mind that regulations governing how businesses get private customer information are evolving. In certain states, third-party data collection—which has historically been a crucial source of information for marketers—is being outlawed. You must make sure your data collection techniques are up to date if you want to maintain compliance while continuing to provide the tailored digital experiences that customers have come to expect.
You can use first-party data, or information acquired directly from the customer, to overcome these challenges. This covers previous purchases, phone conversations, website visits, social media interactions, email and SMS click-throughs, feedback and surveys, and more. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are often used to collect, organize, and analyze first-party data. Another useful tool is generative AI, which can help you interpret first-party data and produce tailored content at scale.
7 Best Practices for AI-Powered Digital Engagement
Nearly half of marketers surveyed by Salesforce indicated they need to learn how to make the most of generative AI, even though many have started experimenting with it and see its revolutionary potential. Let's examine AI's potential for successful digital engagement in more detail.
Use AI Chatbots to Learn Customer Preferences
AI-powered chatbots can help you customize future marketing campaigns in addition to being an affordable means of promptly resolving consumer concerns. Consider a clothes store, for instance. When a consumer completes a return through the chatbot on the retailer's website and informs the chatbot that the fit is too big and the color is darker than they would like, the retailer gains more insight into the customer's preferences. Personalized, automated, real-time product recommendations can now be sent by the marketing team through social media advertisements, SMS, or email.
Personalize Email and SMS Timing with AI
AI has the potential to revolutionize email. Users scan receipts and read recipes online or through an app at one well-known food supermarket, which uses a rich database from its education funding program and internet recipe sites. All of that information is analyzed and entered into the business's CRM. Customers are then given personalized product and recipe suggestions by AI. Based on past engagement history, AI also assists the business in segmenting its audience to determine the optimal moment to send an email or SMS. For the food industry, this strategy is helping to treble engagement.
Create Content That Drives Engagement
It can be difficult to get your audience's attention when there are so many online advertisements. Brands can use content marketing to keep customers interested in campaigns across multiple digital channels by providing instructive content in the form of blogs, podcasts, YouTube videos, reports, and downloadable PDFs.
One key question remains. What are the topics you ought to cover? What is going to drive engagement? Currently, over 70% of marketers use AI to help them write copy. You can make a significant impact by using an enterprise-grade CRM with AI capabilities (like Salesforce) and a native SMS for Salesforce app to analyze content performance and identify what appeals to your audience the most.
Target the Right Audience at the Right Moment
Naturally, all of that excellent material is useless unless it is seen by the appropriate people, and AI can assist with that as well. AI can find the preferences, behaviors, and interests of your target audience that would otherwise need hundreds of man-hours to interpret by analyzing all of your customer data. It can also ensure that the proper context is presented to the right audience. Figuring out their favorite channels and the times of day when they respond most to marketing campaigns can also help ensure that your message reaches them at the most opportune moment on the device of their preference.
Embrace an Omnichannel Digital Engagement Strategy
Every customer wants a smooth experience as they interact with a brand across multiple channels. This necessitates the need for a digital engagement strategy with omnichannel capabilities (email, website, app, social media channel, etc.).
If it saves your customers time and effort, the likelihood that they stick with you increases.
Connect Your Data with Your CRM
A seamless experience is also achieved by integrating your CRM with all of the key components of your customer engagement process. In addition to recording fresh data with every interaction, it facilitates anticipating and responding to their concerns more quickly and easily.
Analyze Customer Feedback
To make the best use of the content your customer shares with you, analyze it for the following:
- What causes them to bounce or make a purchase?
- Website and app impressions
- Customer satisfaction, recommendations, and feedback
How to Develop a Sound Digital Engagement Strategy
You have the customer data. You have integrated AI into your digital engagement platform. You have created tailored experiences. It's time to make sure your digital engagement plan works.
Visualize the Customer Journey
For every customer persona, marketers usually develop a customer journey map, which is a visual representation of a customer’s experience across your brand’s platforms. For instance, millennials typically use social media to identify things, do their research on rating and review websites, and then use their device to make a purchase. You can better anticipate and plan for prospects' future actions across various digital channels with this information, coordinating your marketing, sales, and customer service initiatives accordingly.
Adopt an Account-Based Marketing Strategy
Let's unlock the power of those customer journey maps. By focusing marketing, sales, and customer service on accounts, account-based marketing, especially for B2B businesses, enhances the customer journey. To provide tailored content at the appropriate moment, teams collaborate side by side to nurture leads.
Using this strategy, a significant ride-sharing company has sent retargeting ads to various audience segments, especially those who have ceased using their service. In order to offer the right content and keep leads moving down the sales funnel, the marketing team feeds CRM data into third-party online advertising networks.
Personalize the Experience Across Every Channel
According to Salesforce, a majority of customers (70%) have come to expect brands to be aware of their needs and preferences. Using first-party data is key to driving personalized engagement across all channels.
It's how a global automotive racing brand delivers a tailored customer experience for both digital and live events. By leveraging CRM first-party data, brand marketers are aware of the fan's name, preferred driver, and previous purchases when they attend an event on race day. Following the race, the marketing reps can propose event merchandise or send out follow-up messages on their favorite driver.
The sheer volume of first-party data needed to carry out these three processes might be difficult for marketers to analyze. In order for marketing teams to create campaigns based on facts rather than conjecture, a robust CRM can assist in centralizing all customer data and organizing it in an easily accessible manner.
From LiveMessage to Salesforce Digital Engagement
The Salesforce messaging app LiveMessage brought conversation-based service directly to your customers at the time when they need it, on the device of their choice and on the messaging app of their choice. With LiveMessage, you can use bots to power conversations and automate service. Customers can also directly connect with a service agent to get instant assistance. Agents can access additional information on customers ranging from CRM data to conversation history and reply directly from the Service Cloud Lightning Console. Now they can provide intelligent answers fast. LiveMessage also augments agent productivity by empowering them to handle multiple conversations concurrently. And customers can easily engage in service conversations, not transactions, since they use the messaging app of their choice. LiveMessage empowers you to deliver an instant personalised service experience to your customers.
The age of the connected customer is here. Your customers live in an instant, mobile world, where ultrafast service is the price of entry, and personalization rules. They’re connecting on more channels than most companies ever dreamed of, and they’re changing to new favorites every day. With customers using multiple channels to interact with brands they do business with, the key question is whether you can deliver service on the channel or device they’re on right now.
In fact, customers are so accustomed to seamlessly switching channels to suit their needs and preferences, they expect your service team to do the same. Whether it’s retail, financial services, healthcare, or anything in between, customers expect a consistent experience, anywhere and every time they connect with your company.
Here are the key capabilities of LiveMessage, the Salesforce messaging app:
Assist Customers Anytime Through Any Messaging App
Agents can easily connect with your customers at any time using chat. Use the preferred messaging app of your customers like Facebook, WhatsApp and SMS. Moreover, you can add chatbots to textual chats to automate regular asks.
Deliver Conversational Service from One Place
Be there for customers whenever they need you with mobile messaging. Agents can have instant access to the information they need to address customer support needs from within the Service Cloud Console and send messages.
Handle Multiple Chat Windows at Once
Agents can handle multiple conversations concurrently right from the Service Cloud Console, with all the information and intelligence they need, and deliver a splendid customer experience every time. This allows agents to resolve cases with faster response times and thereby be more productive. Salesforce LiveMessage boosts ROI and lowers service costs, compared to traditional customer service methods of phone and email.
Automate Routine Questions with Chatbots
LiveMessage comes integrated with chatbots allowing you to automate responses to customer queries. This allows you to deliver an enhanced customer engagement experience owing to faster and intelligent responses. Chatbots can provide automated replies to routine questions that customers often ask, thereby freeing up your agents to focus on more important customer issues. Now you can drastically trim time spent on repetitive questions.
Capture Leads with Click-to-Text
Now you can generate more leads from your website. When prospects are going through your website, they can reach you faster and more conveniently by utilising the two-way click-to-text feature. This helps you to deliver a greater customer experience and drive up lead generation.
Send Push Notifications
LiveMessage comes with push notifications. Now you can ensure that none of your customers are ignored.
Access Full Conversation History
Agents can easily access entire conversation history with returning customers faster than ever. Once your agents know what products or services your customers prefer, and what has been the context of their interaction with your business, they can initiate a more engaging and personalised service conversation with them. This makes customers feel that you understand them and will consequently be more inclined to return and make a purchase.
Why Companies Hesitate to Unlock All Digital Channels
New Channels Mean More Interactions
Most companies today only have traditional service channels such as phone and email — and with those they are still evolving their strategy to meet customer needs and deliver exceptional experiences. And once businesses go digital, they face a lot of unknowns, making them reluctant to add additional channels on top of what they already have. Many fear a sudden increase in case volume, additional training, or a slowdown in employee productivity and happiness due to an increase in channel management.
Companies Are Unable to Scale Service
Automation is changing your customers’ expectations of how you provide service. The benefits of AI are not only to provide more efficient service experiences, but to assist agents in delivering more personalized experiences at scale. Most companies know that AI, and chatbots specifically, are a required element to scale service and meet customer expectations. At the same time, most companies don’t know where to start.
Companies Fear an Inconsistent Customer Experience
Understandably, companies are concerned that switching over to a digital model might make for a less consistent customer experience. They fear that the addition of more channels will create more chair swivel for employees and agents, resulting in longer hold times, redundancies, and a siloed user experience from one channel to the next.
What Is Salesforce Digital Engagement?
Digital Engagement from Service Cloud allows businesses to deliver personalized 1-to-1 conversations with customers on the channel of their preference. From messaging apps such as SMS, Facebook and WhatsApp to web chat, companies are able to provide consistent service across channels, and do so more efficiently with automation such as chatbots. Digital Engagement is intrinsic to Salesforce, which means your agents can have a 360-degree view of every customer across channels, thus eliminating the need to switch screens. Now you can deliver the kind of seamless service that your customers have come to expect while allowing your agents to be more productive.
Salesforce now sells Digital Engagement as Agentforce Contact Center Digital, listed at $75 per user per month (prices as listed on Salesforce.com in October 2026).
Provide Personalized, Consistent Service Across All Digital Channels
Fifty-two percent of customers would switch away from brands that don’t personalize communications. With Digital Engagement, optimize your service channel engagement to meet your customers with the right channel at the right time, including messaging and chat. Then take the experience one step further by enhancing and automating every interaction with Einstein Bots to resolve issues more efficiently with intelligence.
Take your first steps with AI by using Einstein Bots to automate common questions or routine interactions across digital channels. Because Einstein Bots are native to the platform, you have the flexibility to build the experience and quickly deploy it across digital channels, including chat on your website or in-app, SMS, and WhatsApp. While Einstein Bots can resolve some tasks directly with your customers, in more complex cases, Einstein Bots can gather more information from your customer and hand over the case to a relevant agent. All this means reducing average case-handling time, improving case resolution on first contact, and engaging with customers effectively to find answers to their queries fast.
Say Goodbye to Screen Swapping and Welcome Productive, Happier Agents
With omni-channel routing, conversations from multiple channels are effortlessly routed to the relevant available agent. This allows agents to handle cases more efficiently, switching between multiple concurrent conversations as against one phone call, because of the asynchronous nature of digital interaction. All the data and information the agent needs can be accessed in one screen on the Lightning Service Console, allowing agents to spend less time searching for answers and more time engaging with customers, which translates to a better experience. And Trailhead will help maintain that efficiency by keeping your agents up to speed on the dynamic digital landscape.
How to Get Started with Salesforce Digital Engagement
Digital Engagement allows you to connect all channels and your existing CRM data seamlessly, eliminating redundant silos. With Digital Engagement, you can engage multiple channels concurrently so you can deliver a consistent, stunning customer experience no matter where they are. Best of all, once your agents are trained on one channel, they can manage all channels. With the Service Cloud Lightning Console, agents can handle multiple conversations seamlessly across channels. But even though Digital Engagement makes it easy to get started, it’s important to first understand your customers’ needs, and how customers are already interacting with your business.
Determine Where Your Customers Are
Establish where your customers are and how they interact with your brand. How are they coming to you for support? Are they using smartphones or laptops? And then rank them from highest to lowest depending on the devices they use.
Meet Your Customers There
The traffic you attract across each device will help you establish what to focus your efforts on. For instance, does your website attract high traffic from mobile devices? In that case, add a button to your mobile browser allowing customers to message with your company on channels such as SMS, Facebook Messenger, or WhatsApp. High web traffic via desktop? Look to add real-time chat.
Scale Support with Einstein Bots
Once you identify your channels, start by defining the top use cases across your channels (messaging, web chat, social, and so on) and identify your most frequently asked questions. Are customers showing preference for a particular channel when it comes to certain questions? Overall, consider how your chatbot can best assist you with cases, whether it’s handling the case in full or gathering information upfront for the customer service employee.
Why Businesses Are Reconsidering Salesforce Digital Engagement
Modern customer engagement relies on multiple digital platforms such as WhatsApp, in-app chat, and more. Yet, SMS stands out as a preferred and one of the most popular solutions among these. For organizations leveraging Salesforce, a Salesforce SMS app acts as a powerful tool that has helped businesses better connect with their customers and across different channels.
However, for several companies, the reality of using Digital Engagement hits hard due to its high cost and complexity. With budget tightening and scrutiny increasing, Salesforce teams across the globe are re-considering their communication stack. Now, the debate isn’t about the capability of Digital Engagement, it’s more about whether it is worth the investment, especially when better and cost-effective Salesforce digital engagement alternatives are available.
Salesforce users are always in a constant state of concern regarding its steep and often volatile pricing structure. Rather than a simple and transparent model, the total cost classically includes several aspects such as licensing fees per user, texting session charges, additional expenses for the usage of SMS and WhatsApp, besides implementation overhead. As businesses grow their outreach, the costs of high-volume use cases such as client support, lead nurturing, or transactional alerts can escalate rapidly.
Though the Salesforce digital engagement pricing structure is feature-rich, it can feel restraining for teams looking for increased flexibility and within a tighter budget. This tends to become more challenging, as what appears to be a practicable investment can turn into a significant operational expense, especially for organizations pursuing aggressive customer engagement strategies. For many organizations, additional licensing costs, complexity involved in implementation, a wide range of features, and longer deployment timelines go beyond their actual interaction requirements.
The Hidden SMS Costs of Digital Engagement
SMS remains one of the most effective channels of communication - offering dependably high open and response rates. However, when utilized within Salesforce Digital Engagement, it can soon become more costly than expected. The Salesforce digital engagement SMS cost structure is not always forthright, and includes several cost components such as charges per segment, region-specific fees, and additional platform costs layered on top. For companies that send hundreds and millions of texts every month, these expenditures can accumulate to impact overall margins. Consequently, several businesses have started to question whether depending on Digital Engagement for SMS makes sense or if more economical substitutes are available.
What Salesforce Teams Use Instead
To address these challenges, many companies are turning to solutions accessible on the Salesforce AppExchange. These apps fit in easily with Salesforce while presenting greater flexibility that too at a lower cost. A common assessment is between Digital Engagement and AppExchange solutions. While Digital Engagement offers a native experience, apps from AppExchange stand out for their direct cost, low cost per message, and quicker execution timelines. They also pave the way for industry-specific customization - making them appeal to businesses focused on efficiency and ROI.
4 Benefits of Switching to a Digital Engagement Alternative
Cut Costs
One of the most immediate and significant benefits of choosing an alternative option is cost savings. By doing away with needless licensing fees, businesses can minimize overall expenses. This makes messaging more affordable at scale – enabling organizations to allot budgets more efficiently while still ensuring effective customer communication and outreach across various channels without sacrificing performance or reliability.
Get to Value Faster
AppExchange solutions are usually easy to implement, helping teams launch quickly without substantial development. With simpler setup and minimal technical requirements, organizations minimize complexity, reduce costs, and start using the solution faster while ensuring flexibility and efficiency in their processes.
Gain Greater Control
With a clear pricing structure and flexible configurations, businesses can manage their communication approach more effectively. They gain clearer visibility into costs – allowing for better budgeting and intelligent decisions. This control helps improve spending, fine-tune plans as desired and ensure engagement efforts stay aligned with both operational goals and financial restraints.
Scale Without Penalties
Unlike outdated pricing models where costs rise as usage grows, many substitute solutions are designed for growth more smoothly. They offer transparent pricing and better financial control. This enables businesses to expand their messaging activities without facing a sudden rise in expenses or putting pressure on budget as demand increases.
Many businesses explore Salesforce digital engagement alternatives to better manage Salesforce SMS pricing and improve efficiency. You can compare the leading options in our guide to the best Salesforce SMS apps.
How to Send SMS from Salesforce Without Digital Engagement
Maintaining customer relationships isn’t all about answering customer queries, it is more about providing personalized responses without making them wait for long hours. Now, this demands humongous efforts and time! As a centralized platform for managing customer relationships, Salesforce has become the go-to platform for businesses across different industries – helping organizations manage opportunities, leads and support cases from a unified platform. On the other hand, in the era of digital communication channels, SMS still remains a preferred channel of communication - delivering one of the highest engagement rates.
Yes, you can send SMS from Salesforce without Digital Engagement. Companies that wish to know how to send SMS from Salesforce without digital engagement can heave a sigh of relief, as it's possible to send SMS directly from Salesforce using AppExchange solutions and third-party integrations without the need to invest in Digital Engagement or Marketing Cloud.
Text messaging is one of the most effective channels of communication for today’s businesses. SMS has become a preferred channel of interaction because it is quick and easily accessible - making it appropriate for time-sensitive conversations and tailored engagement. SMS enables businesses to connect with their customers in real time while driving better response rates than traditional channels. When SMS is integrated with Salesforce, businesses can:
- Send messages from Contact, Account, Lead and Opportunity records
- Maintain an overall communication history within Salesforce
- Automate reminders, alerts and follow-up messages
- Optimize customer interaction and response rates
- Do away with manual communication tasks
- Deliver tailored customer experiences at scale
While most organizations assume that Salesforce SMS capabilities require significant investments in Digital Engagement or Marketing Cloud, many businesses are unaware that they can bring powerful SMS solutions inside Salesforce using other methods. For businesses looking for SMS messaging within Salesforce, a cost-effective option would be a third-party app available on Salesforce AppExchange. Such an app allows users to send and receive text messages from Salesforce records, automate messaging workflows, and maintain interaction history without the need for Digital Engagement or Marketing Cloud. This approach allows organizations to attain their SMS interaction goals while reducing costs and implementation effort.
Salesforce SMS Setup Without Marketing Cloud: 10 Steps
A successful Salesforce SMS implementation includes various steps:
Define Your SMS Use Cases
Before opting for an SMS provider, organizations must define their communication needs and key business use cases. SMS can support sales activities, customer service updates, operational notifications and workflow messages. Identifying these needs determines the features, automation capabilities, and scalability needed from the SMS platform.
Choose an AppExchange SMS Solution
The next thing to do in a Salesforce AppExchange SMS setup is selecting the right application that fulfills your business needs. When assessing providers, organizations must consider several factors such as automation capabilities, native Salesforce integration, hassle-free deployment, and many more.
Install the SMS App
Once a solution is decided upon, it can be implemented via Salesforce AppExchange. The process involves assignment of user permissions, license allocation, and more. Most modern SMS applications include guided setup wizards that simplify deployment and ease implementation effort.
Connect SMS Infrastructure
The SMS application must be linked to a messaging infrastructure that sends messages to mobile carriers - involving phone number configuration, short codes and completion of business verification.
Map the App to Salesforce Objects
The SMS app should align with Salesforce objects. Proper record mapping enables users to deliver and receive text messages right from Salesforce records while creating a unified interaction history for augmented visibility and customer engagement.
Create SMS Templates
Creating SMS templates helps regulate customer communications, minimize manual effort, and optimize efficiency. Templates ensure consistent messaging for notifications and support interactions while allowing faster message delivery.
Enable Two-Way Messaging
This enables clients to respond directly to messages - creating productive discussions. This optimizes client interaction, speeds up issue resolution, supports sales communications, and gathers responses automatically within Salesforce records for better communication visibility.
Enable Automation
SMS automation is one of the outstanding benefits of Salesforce integration. Using Salesforce Flow or Apex triggers, organizations can send timely messages depending on specific business events. This reduces manual effort and optimizes client engagement.
Ensure Compliance
As SMS regulations evolve, organizations must lay emphasis on compliance requirements by implementing robust platforms that support regulatory guidelines.
Test and Deploy
Before initiating SMS capabilities across the company, thorough testing must be conducted. This helps in validating message delivery, process automation, user permissions, and more. Thorough testing helps issue identification and resolution. This ensures smooth customer-facing implementation.
The Path Ahead for Salesforce Communication
The Salesforce ecosystem is undergoing a gradual shift with client expectations rising at a rapid pace. Businesses should offer tailored, timely, and cost-efficient conversations. This shift is driving innovation on the AppExchange, with new tools designed to tackle the weaknesses of legacy tools. Consequently, Digital Engagement is facing stiff competition. It isn’t a question of competence, rather it doesn’t always match the growing needs of modern businesses.
Engagement platforms are shifting away from a one-size-fits-all model to more adaptable and budget-friendly options. For several businesses, this translates to going beyond Digital Engagement and choosing a solution that aligns with their goals.
Conclusion: Engagement That Fits Your Customers and Your Budget
Understanding your customers' needs, preferences, and behaviors is key to developing a successful digital engagement strategy. You may demonstrate your understanding of your customers as unique individuals by putting these best practices into effect. The kind of trust and loyalty that compels people to keep coming back is created by that high level of personalization.
While the features offered by Salesforce Digital Engagement are robust, its high cost and inadequate flexibility are pushing organizations to identify better options. From mounting messaging costs to complex execution needs, these challenges are becoming difficult to ignore. To address this, Salesforce teams are turning to leaner Salesforce digital engagement alternatives that deliver similar capabilities without unnecessary complexity or overhead.
For ensuring effective SMS communication within Salesforce, implementing Salesforce Digital Engagement or Marketing Cloud isn’t required. AppExchange-based SMS solutions help businesses deploy texting capabilities and streamline customer interactions while maintaining complete communication visibility from a single platform. Salesforce SMS setup without Marketing Cloud provides automation, scalability, flexibility and compliance features for supporting modern strategies. By following an orchestrated approach, businesses can optimize customer experience, augment functional efficiency, and maximize their Salesforce investment.
Text from Salesforce Without Digital Engagement
See how GirikSMS adds two-way SMS, WhatsApp and web chat to Salesforce.
