Personalization in the age of marketing automation: An intro to Salesforce Marketing Cloud

New to Salesforce Marketing Cloud or curious about what it is and how it works? This article will walk you through its most frequently used components that are used to design and orchestrate omnichannel marketing campaigns. Before we get started, let's define what marketing cloud is. 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is built on the world’s leading CRM platform and used by some of the largest and most popular brands to send dynamic, personalized and relevant communication to their consumers. 

What exactly does this mean? Let’s meet Anne. Anne was browsing for vacation deals on her favourite travel site, selected a great deal for a one- week escape to Mexico and completed the purchase with her credit card. Soon after, Anne received an email from her bank that alerted her of her purchase. Twenty-four hours later, Anne received an SMS alert. The next day, Anne received yet another email from her bank with an offer to upgrade her ticket using her rewards points. With one easy click, Anne upgraded her travel package and a few days later, she was lounging poolside sipping a mojito.

The touchpoints Anne received, highlighted in red, during her customer journey would have been automatically built in a tool like Marketing Cloud. Marketing Cloud allows marketers to quickly and effortlessly develop digital campaigns to deliver relevant information to their customers. The process ultimately adds value and offers a more meaningful customer experience with brands.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Studios and Builders 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a suite of products made up of studios and builders that fall under four categories: 

  1. Messaging and Automation
  2. Data and Advertising
  3. Social Media
  4. Analytics 

Below is a screenshot of various options a digital marketer can select from to build their campaigns and an explanation of their functionality.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Source: Trailhead.salesforce.com

Email Studio allows you to build and deploy personalized and transactional (i.e. password reset) emails to customers. Email Studio, one of the oldest products in the suite also offers manual sends, scheduling and straightforward automation.

Mobile Studio is Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s mobile marketing solution to create SMS, MMS and push notifications. Marketers use Mobile Studio to create time-sensitive messages such as reminders and alerts for customer engagement, acquisition and retention purposes.

Social Studio is your one-stop social media dashboard to create, schedule, manage and measure social posts across all of your social media accounts – complete with real-time engagement and publishing.  

Advertising Studio manages social ads on Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest. By creating an audience, or a target list, you’ll be able to push that list to your social ad account (e.g. Facebook ads). This cross-platform tool allows you to harness the data segmentation and filtering powers of the Marketing Cloud and use the final list in your social media ad platform. 

Web Studio creates personalized landing pages and microsites. Marketers commonly use Web Studio to create subscription centers, preference centers and campaign-specific landing pages and forms. Data from landing pages can also be injected into other campaigns, such as email campaigns or journeys. 

Analytics Builder is a reporting and analytics toolset. Marketers gauge the performance of their marketing campaigns and can generate any of the more than 45 reports that measure email performance, Mobile Push analytics, Journey Builder analytics and Cloud Page analytics. 

Content Builder is where you would create, edit and manage cross-channel content. Marketers import assets (images, documents, etc.), build templates, emails and content blocks. Elements built-in Content Builder can be later used in other studios and builders, such as Email Studio or Journey Builder. 

Journey Builder is an omnichannel orchestration tool that designs lifecycle marketing campaigns (onboarding, engagement, retention) using its intuitive drag and drop interface. Journey Builder ‘listens’ to customer cues and responds accordingly. You can set up simple to highly advanced, data-driven journeys that react to a customer's journey with your brand by sending out relevant communication.   

Contact Builder accesses all the customer data in your account and provides a single view of a customer. 

Marketers can use any combination of these tools to create relevant, personalized, 1:1 messages to their consumers to build more meaningful and valuable relationships with their brands. If you'd like to learn more, get in touch with our certified Salesforce Marketing Cloud experts today. We will work with you to better understand your needs and devise solutions suitable for your business. Then follow Appnovation on LinkedIn.

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