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The Marketing Cloud Journey

The Martech stack is evolving faster than ever, and to keep up, companies must adopt emerging products with technology advances of data consolidation, personalization, AI, ML, predictive analytics that will transform and accelerate their business. Th eleft brained marketer is now a right brained marketer as well. The Don Draper days have relinquished and Agile Marketing has taken shape. Which means, your technology platforms must be more versatile than just an ESP or a CMS. That’s where Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) comes in.

Originally known as ExactTarget back in the early days of email marketing, Buddy Media for Content creation, Radian6 for social listening, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has evolved from an email marketing software solution into a leading omnichannel marketing automation platform. Oracle Marketing Cloud and Adobe Marketing Cloud soon followed. With a robust suite of tools that covers and connects a variety of different channels in the customer journey, Marketing Cloud allows you to get a 360-degree view of your customers and engage them with the right message at the right time in the right channel.

And this transformation is resonating for brands. Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s revenue, along with Commerce Cloud, grew 28% year over year in 2020 as more brands moved to Salesforce as their innovative, 1:1 messaging engine.

S. Ernest Paul

But while it is easy to recognize at a high level why your business could benefit from Marketing Cloud, really understanding the power of the platform, along with how to implement it and connect it to the rest alleviate some of that burden by taking you through an overview of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, along with the benefits that the platform can provide and the keys for a successful implementation.

“ Marketing Cloud’s revenue, along with Commerce Cloud, grew 28% year over year in 2020 as more brands moved to Salesforce as their innovative, 1:1 messaging engine.”

S. Ernest Paul

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Capabilities

The first step to realizing how Marketing Cloud can transform your business is to better understand its capabilities.

Personalization

As consumers’ expectations for personalization continue to accelerate, so do their expectations for omnichannel experiences. In 2019, consumers averaged nearly six touchpoints across channels when purchasing an item – and 50% regularly use more than four during their customer lifecycle – which is a staggering increase from 15 years ago when the average consumer used two touchpoints and only 7% used more than four on a regular basis.

Marketing Cloud works to meet those consumer demands by enabling brands to create seamless customer experiences across every touchpoint, including email, mobile, advertising, web, direct mail, sales, commerce, and service. It is a platform that allows your messaging strategies and customer engagement to shine.

Features

Salesforce Marketing Cloud to Elevate Digital Transformation                                  

Most brands are striving to achieve a full omnichannel setup. But often this is attempted using different and fragmented platforms and stand- alone channels, leading to disparate tracking data without a unified customer experience. Additionally, the effort to unify the offline and online experience is a huge challenge, with separate business departments typically creating silos. Marketing Cloud provides one robust platform that can handle all global and local marketing efforts in one place so that businesses can overcome these challenges.

Benefits which Payoff

Marketing Cloud gives a tremendous boost to business transformation because it provides the opportunity and instruments a brand needs to essentially rethink and redesign its go-to-market strategy.

“Keys to successful implementations, analytics, and support”

S. Ernest Paul

A common mistake that businesses make when implementing Marketing Cloud is to just use the platform to deploy emails, treating it as an email marketing service like MailChimp. With this approach, the ROI will not be realized, as brands are missing out on maximizing what they can achieve with automations, data insights, Einstein, and so much more.

01  Marketing Automation

The need for personalized, 1:1 experiences delivered via Pardot to every customer cannot happen through manually built and scheduled campaigns alone. Customers expect tailored messages delivered in the moment wherever they are, and no brand has the manpower to manage this on its own.

You must rely on automations to help drive engagement, from transactional emails (order confirmation, shipping, etc.) and next-best-action (abandoned cart, abandoned browse) to automated and personalized content blocks within your general campaigns.

02   Data centralization and CDP

While messaging activation is the main output of Marketing Cloud’s capabilities, a solid data foundation is critical to a successful implementation. Make sure you have a well-scaled first-party data asset that is rooted in customer intelligence. A CDP – specifically Salesforce CDP – can be your centralized hub for segmentation, identity management, and consent that pushes data.                                                                

“ Your brand still has to be organized to operate in a way to make the most out of the technology you have and reduce operational costs and deployment errors and improve time to deployment.”

out to your Marketing Cloud platforms and provides both a single view of your customers and the ability to personalize experiences.

03   ESP implementation and migration

It’s critical to ensure that the right solution is designed during the implementation, as this will be key to a scalable and successful marketing automation program. Use the implementation process as an opportunity to refresh your existing programs. Be ambitious, set high goals, and use this step to build all your key requirements that meet your business objectives.

04   Social Studio, Interaction Studio, and Advertising Studio integrations

Our recommendation is to pick and choose these solutions based on your brand’s needs. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing. If your business relies on a lot of social behavior, then you will want Interaction Studio to better understand and target based on behavior. But there is also some service crossover if you already have Service Cloud. So, evaluate your business needs and choose accordingly.

05   Operational audit

Just having the technology isn’t enough for success. Your brand still has to be organized to operate in a way to make the most out of the technology you have and reduce operational costs and deployment errors and improve time to deployment. An operational audit offers an in- depth review of your existing operational process across your people, processes, technology, and data. This will help to build an operating model that covers the entire marketing journey across touchpoints based on industry and platform best practices.

06   Third-party integrations

Despite how robust the Marketing Cloud platform is, you will still likely need to rely on third-party tools for specific and targeted tactics. Salesforce’s connectors allow the platform to integrate easily with nearly any external tool, and for added simplicity and ease in the integration, see which platforms can be installed and integrated directly into Marketing Cloud using Salesforce’s AppExchange.

07  Deliverability and inbox placement

Many brands face challenges that limit their email marketing effectiveness, with the most common challenges being inbox placement and email deliverability. Meaning, did your emails reach your customers’ inboxes and do they have the highest probability of being seen? Many times, inbox-placement issues result from poor list hygiene. If you have a large number of inactive subscribers, for example, that will impact your deliverability and diminish your engagement metrics. Starting out with a clean list from the outset is the best way to ensure your messages are hitting the right inboxes

“Keys to successful campaign management and journey management”

S. Ernest Paul

Once you have the pieces of Marketing Cloud in place, you will be ready to start running campaigns. Here are some tips for successfully managing customer journeys and campaigns.

01  Journey creation

Remember, journeys are non-linear. The retail purchasing cycle can be long, rapid, sporadic, and unpredictable. Consumers expect brands to meet them with continuity where they are and on their terms.

Utilizing Journey Builder can help you map cross-channel touchpoints against customer-need states to identify highs, lows, and gaps in the experience across the lifecycle.

02  Behavioral and triggered email campaigns

While emails that promote your latest deals and products are undoubtedly important, to get the most out of Marketing Cloud, you need effective behavior and triggered emails. These are emails like abandoned cart, abandoned browse, and post-purchase transactional emails that provide transparency and encourage customers to take action.

03  Campaign segmentation and deployment

An important part of personalized experiences is not just that customers receive the content that matters most, but also that they don’t get any content they don’t care about. Audience segmentation is critical to maintaining an engaged based and preventing churn. So, not only do you want to avoid overwhelming subscribers with messages, but you also don’t want to turn them away by sending them deals or announcements for products they aren’t interested in buying.

04   Content creation

Leverage Marketing Cloud’s Content Builder for building highly engaging and mobile-optimized content in just minutes thanks to its intuitive and codeless platform. Content Builder allows for brands to use their own templates or built-in templates, and the drag-and- drop method adds flexibility and simplicity to the content-building experiences. The content you create can then be leveraged throughout email, SMS, and mobile, and by incorporating Journey Builder, you can then execute omnichannel journeys.

Connecting Marketing Cloud to the rest of your technology stack

S. Ernest Paul

While Marketing Cloud can serve as a standalone platform, it works best when connected with Sales, Service, Experience, and Commerce Cloud. If you have one view of the customer, with all the data in one centralized place, it’s easier for a brand to engage with them at the right time. Salesforce allows you to connect with your customers in real time in a singular view instead of having the connection broken. It also provides the customer with a seamless experience whenever they are engaging.

Implemented Salesforce Marketing Cloud in 14 countries with outstanding results

S. Ernest Paul

Conclusion

Marketing is now an always-on experience as brands try to meet consumers’ needs and stand out in a crowded marketplace. From the acquisition stage through post-purchase loyalty, 1:1 messaging is a necessity and Marketing Cloud is increasingly becoming the platform of choice to power those critical messages. And while the sophistication and intuitiveness of the platform will make these experiences easier to produce, plenty of work still must be done from brands themselves to ensure they have the resources, processes, and capabilities to make the most of what Marketing Cloud has to offer.

Some Content Courtesy of Dentsu