Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a much raved-about automation platform and decidedly, the most feature-rich product in its category. It offers incredible insights into customer journeys and helps businesses deliver connected, personalized, and 1:1 customer experiences. As such, it is a must-have tool for marketers who want to achieve bigger ROIs and impressive results by weaving their marketing strategies around customer needs and interests.
So, today we shine the spotlight on Salesforce Marketing Cloud with the aim of getting you to know the basics of this platform, what is it used for, and what benefits you can derive from it.
What Is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a leading email marketing software for creating and managing successful marketing campaigns and nurturing customer relationships. This SaaS platform allows marketers to use email personalization to plan, segment, and optimize various facets of marketing, including customer journeys, multi-channel campaign execution, pre, and post-campaign analytics, social media promotions and engagement, and data management platform.
There are four “base versions” in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) platform, each with different levels of functionality. Additional at-cost components can be used to increase functionality. The “Studio” components, including Email Studio, Social Studio, and Mobile Studio, are used to manage and engage with communication channels. “Builder” components help manage data, content, and customer journeys.
Who Uses Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Cloud computing is at the forefront of innovation, and Salesforce is a recognized leader in cloud computing. More than 100,000 businesses of all sizes across every industry use Salesforce Marketing. Major companies using SFMC for marketing automation include the likes of Amazon, Walmart Inc., CVS Pharmacy, Exxon Mobil Corporation, McKesson Corporation, and so on.
What Can You Do with Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
In today’s marketing world, customers have the last word. With Salesforce Marketing, marketers have endless possibilities to understand the customers and offer them what they want.
The platform allows:
- Customer engagement in real-time
- Email and Marketing Automation
- Social Media Engagement
- Mobile (SMS) Messaging
- Customer Marketing Analytics
SFMC helps create automated multi-channel customer journeys to provide customers with a one-to-one, tailor-made customer experience through:
Data-Driven Customer Messaging
This tool allows companies to send messages to each customer based on their current data, and then generate new messages depending on real-time customer data changes and interactions. Customer journeys can have many branches, and decisions can go on different journey-branch depending upon:
Contact Data – In the marketing cloud, the data associated with a contact that you send information to is called contact data. Changes to that data determine which journey branch to take. For instance, a contact that has been in the journey branch for prospects gets converted into a customer. The change in the SFMC contact data could automatically remove the contact from the prospect branch to the new-customer journey branch.
Journey Data – The data associated with a contact’s interaction with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud journey (e.g., email reads or clicks) is called journey data. After making a purchase, a customer may receive multiple emails (welcome mail, product registration mail, etc.). SFMC can detect if a customer is opening and interacting with each correspondence. After a certain configurable time, the system can resend the product registration mail if someone doesn’t open it or send them the next mail in line if someone has opened and interacted with the product registration mail.
Multi-Channel Messaging
With SFMC journey builder, you can build email and SMS messaging journeys. There are several use cases for multi-channel messaging like:
Service and support case communication – using emails to communicate service and support related content to a customer and sending SMS for more timely information.
Post-purchase communication. It involves using emails and SMS to send post-purchase communications like shipment status, product delivery info, registration, etc.
Financial Communication. It is used to send financial status information related to loans or credits. Emails serve well as a reminder for upcoming loan payments, while SMS communication can be apt on the actual due date, so the customer doesn’t miss their payment.
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Dynamic Components
The dynamic components of SFMC are aimed at further increasing customer engagement and include:
- Dynamic content – Creating customized email and subject lines according to a customer’s attributes and associated data. The content of such emails gets automatically populated based on individual recipient profiles without creating multiple versions. Such mails deliver personalized messages.
- Dynamic Sending Profiles – Creating custom sending addresses for a single email, with the sender varying based on the sales agent interacting with the message recipient.
Thus, SFMC helps forge strong customer relationships through judicious communication of relevant content, increasing customer engagement for your brand.
What Are Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Benefits?
Among its significant benefits, Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows you to:
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Understand Your Customer Better
With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, every interaction with your customer is personalized. SFMC allows you to connect data from various sources and devices to build profound, unified customer knowledge. The platform also enables you to capture and trigger first, second, and third-party data. Each customer journey becomes a lifelong experience with your brand.
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Customize With Artificial Intelligence
Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows users to combine data with the Einstein tool, such that interactions can be managed through AI. Thus, the platform enables you to customize customer communications based on their interaction with your brand.
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Create Interest Across Every Critical Customer Touchpoint
This Salesforce Marketing platform generates attention and awareness during the entire customer journey, providing better insights so you can serve the customers in the best possible way. Marketing Cloud helps you become a customer-driven company.
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Perform Impact Analysis
Marketing Cloud allows users to perform the metrics of customer journeys through various channels and devices with the help of AI and Google Analytics 360.
Both B2B and B2C businesses can benefit immensely through the use of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, as it helps businesses deliver the right messages at the right time to the right users.
What Are the Key Components of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud consists of sophisticated tools and features that help discover and understand customers on a personal level and market to them through email, social media, e-commerce, and mobile advertising. Marketing Cloud makes it possible to create tailor-made content for each customer and form and maintain a one-to-one relationship with them.
Let us break down each of the components within Marketing Cloud.
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Journey Builder
Journey Builder is the visual mapping solution of Marketing Cloud. Create personalized, multi-branched customer journeys through multiple channels at every stage of the life cycle.
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Email Studio
Email studios help marketers strengthen customer relationships by delivering the right message at the right time through email campaigns.
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Data Studio
This data-sharing tool lets you link up with other marketers and publishers to acquire unique customer insights and increase revenue with data. The more you learn about a customer, the easier it is to create marketing campaigns that strike a chord.
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Social Studio
This tool helps create customized social media campaigns, to transform social media followers into potential customers. Enrich social media marketing by listening, analyzing, and engaging with your social media audience.
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Advertising Studio
Take a step towards digital advertising with advertising studio, which helps manage the acquisition, retargeting, and alignment campaigns. Use your CRM and marketing data to create personalized advertising consistent with your marketing strategy.
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Mobile Studio
Engage customers on the go with marketing interactions through personalized SMS, push notifications, and group messaging. Mobile marketing is the best tool to deliver time-sensitive messages right to the device customers use the most.
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Interaction Studio
A real-time engagement tool to visualize, track, and manage customer experiences in real-time. It helps you deliver relevant content at each stage of the customer journey.
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Salesforce DMP
Formerly called Krux, Salesforce DMP is a data management platform that helps marketers gather contact information from Salesforce and external sources to create comprehensive customer profiles. This helps build better customer engagement and better business results.
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Salesforce Marketing leverages cloud computing to deliver advanced marketing automation and analytics. To master this dynamic tool, enroll in cloud computing courses, gaining insights into its capabilities and driving business growth.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a complete set of studios, which is impressive and compelling, to say the least. If you are a marketing professional looking to upskill in Marketing Cloud or Microsoft Cloud Services - Simplilearn is the ideal platform for you because we are the world’s #1 online Bootcamp. Our Salesforce Administrator certification training will help you become a professional expert.