The A to Z of Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Customers are sure of what they want from a brand. They seek autonomy over how they interact with a brand and how it meets their expectations. That's where a marketer comes in, whose responsibility is to manage the customer and their expectations using the best available customer engagement techniques spread across all possible channels and touchpoints. Therefore, digital marketers are constantly in search of tools and platforms that can help them automate their marketing operations to create better brand awareness and improve customer satisfaction. 

Enters Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) - a powerful and rich platform loaded with top-of-the-class capabilities for marketers to deliver great digital experiences, for both new and existing customers. This customer relationship management tool allows brands to build long-lasting customer relationships through their data-first digital marketing approach. That’s why big brands like PepsiCo, Estee Lauder, and Sonos leverage SFMC to deliver bespoke customer experiences and tap into the market. 

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

SFMC is a digital marketing platform that automates marketing operations and processes using AI-powered innovation to help marketers create personalized customer experiences. SFMC helps marketers bring all their marketing channels like emails, social media, SMS, websites, and more under a single platform. This empowers marketers and also makes their tasks easier as now they can view a customer's journey with a brand. Based on how a customer interacts with a brand, marketers can send personalized messages using the right channel, at the right time. With the help of its Journey Builder feature, SFMC enables marketers to map user journeys and personalize every interaction across all touchpoints on all digital channels.

What is the use of SFMC?

About 71% of customers testified their interest in spending more on brands that offer personalized experiences. Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps automate multiple marketing facets like executing multi-channel campaigns, creating dynamic content across journeys, pre-, and post-campaign analytics, audience building and segmentation, social media engagement and advertising, and data management. With SFMC, marketers can identify user behavior and send tailored messages to the right customers, at the right time, through the right channel. Also, you can use SFMC for:

• Real-time customer engagement
• Email marketing
• Send push notifications
• Targeted SMS
• Social media engagement
• Marketing analytics of customers

Who should use SFMC?

Whether you are a small company, mid-sized organization, or a large enterprise, you can leverage the benefits of SFMC for your business. SFMC is well-suited for B2C, B2B, D2C, and non-profit organizations that want a 360-degree view of their customers and desire to craft customer-centric experiences for focused engagement. 

What are the different integrated marketing tools in SFMC?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud suite includes two types of modules:

Builders: A collection of tools that help you to manage data and automate campaigns across different digital platforms.

• Journey Builder: SFMC offers integrated marketing solutions using Journey Builder - a feature that helps marketers with customer journey management to help them manage the customer life cycle. It helps businesses identify customer patterns and behavior throughout their interaction with the brand at all touchpoints. This solution will further help brands customize journeys, recommend products according to their previous interactions, and send personalized messages to engage them at scale. This is not a stand-alone product, and to leverage its benefits in building personalized journeys, it needs to integrate with other studios.
• Content Builder: Collect and combine images, documents, and content in a single location in the marketing cloud with the help of this cross-channel content management tool. 
• Analytics Builder: Set marketing goals and refine customer journeys by gaining deeper insights into customer behavior and interests across channels. Also, Analytics Builder helps you measure email campaign engagement rates and performance.
• Personalization Builder: To create relevant content and recommend the right products to each customer in real-time, build user personas. Personalization Builder helps build personas by better understanding your customer's behavior and requirements. It gives a multidimensional overview of each customer and whether their needs align with your unique business aspects. 
• Audience Builder: Segment your subscribers in multiple ways to target your content with a deeper understanding of your customer behavior and their unique characteristics. 

Studios: A collection of tools that help you to connect your contacts through different digital channels. The different studios are:

• Email Studio: It helps brands create smarter, targeted, personalized, and dynamic email campaigns for each customer at every stage of their journey. 
• Mobile Studio: It helps to maximize your reach through personalized SMS marketing and push notifications for customers on the go. Also, you can build and automate mobile campaigns for your customers with custom templates. 
• Social Studio: SFMC's Social Studio helps brands analyze social media conversations and understand customer sentiments towards them. SFMC Social Studio is a one-stop solution for marketers to manage, schedule, create, and monitor posts.
• Advertisement Studio: SFMC's Advertisement Studio helps the brands to create different tailored ads for searches, social, and display channels through available customer information. 
• Interaction Studio: Deliver relevant content to customers at every phase of their journey with Interaction Studio as it helps marketers easily visualize, track and micro-manage customer experiences.
• Data Studio: It helps marketers acquire relevant customer data and extract meaningful insights to make intelligent marketing decisions.
• Automation Studio: It helps digital marketers to automate their repetitive marketing operations on a regular basis. Moreover, Automation Studio helps in advance audience segmentation through reason-based programming language and creates meaningful journeys by integrating with Journey Builder. 
• Datorama Reports: It is a customizable tool that allows you to build and edit dashboards as per your needs by drawing out deeper insights with its cross-channel marketing capabilities. 
• Web Studio: Create, manage, and publish all your customized content for landing pages, microsites, and mobile apps across the web and apps with Web Studio.

How can you map customer experience with your brand?

Mapping customer journey across the customer lifecycle with your brand is simple with SFMC's Journey Builder. To map customer experience, follow these steps:

1. In-depth research to get a comprehensive view of your customer.
2. Build personas and craft a story around these personas.
3. Collect your customer data based on qualitative and analytical research.
4. Map your customer journey with stories, different touchpoints, and other relevant inputs. 

What are the key features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

SFMC offers digital marketing automation to boost conversion and retention. It is an AI-led marketing automation tool, based on customer interactions at every stage of your customer journey in real-time. 

Some of the key features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud are:

Email Marketing Automation: Strategize, create, and send targeted emails to the right people at the right time for effective lead nurturing to drive sales from existing and potential customers. It helps time promotional emails along the customer journey. 

Audience Segmentation: Target your customers even better with personalized, high-impact content by dividing your audience into multiple sub-categories based on common behavior patterns.

Data Management: Store and manage various data types (email address, phone, date) in the marketing cloud from multiple data sources using data extensions (tables) and create specific data models to allow more complex audience segmentation. 

Campaign Analytics: Gain in-depth insights about campaign performance, response, effectiveness, etc., along the consumer's path and optimize them based on these insights. 

Activity Tracking: Capture your customers' browser-based, real-time activities with your brand to create tailored customer experiences. 

Omnichannel Platform: Create unified, real-time, personalized interactions for your customers from any channel and device to engage with them on their choice of platform. 

Third-party API integration: SFMC allows you to integrate numerous robust APIs to enhance the functionality and flexibility of your marketing cloud with your application to drive value. 

How does SFMC integration benefit your business?

SFMC benefits your business in multiple ways.

Get a 360-degree view of each customer: Collect data from various touchpoints throughout a customer’s journey with your brand to improve customer experience and retention across all digital channels and marketing campaigns.  

Takes personalization to the next level: Deliver 1:1 customer experiences across all touchpoints, at any given point in their journey, with in-depth insights of each customer. 

Deliver engaging journeys: Engage your customers on their preferred channels with targeted, scalable content, ranging from notifications to promotions. 

Optimized marketing campaigns: Deliver relevant content at the right time, through the right channel to your customers based on their unique characteristics and preferences.

Bridging cross-channel experiences: Engage your customers consistently and timely on a wide array of communication channels (online and offline) through tailored interactions across mobile, web, email, call centers, ATMs, Kiosks, in-store, etc., 

Ensure optimal results against business-wide goals: Track and analyze campaign performance from time to time on the web, in-app, or any channel to maximize conversions, clickthroughs, revenues, increased sign-ups, purchases, and downloads. 

In a nutshell, it’s all about customer experience!

The better the customer experience you give, the more likely they will return to you and remain loyal to your brand. With SFMC, you can sharpen your marketing capabilities to retrieve valuable insights about customers, get a 360-degree view, and build customized experiences for each.

So, if you want to evolve your marketing practices and redefine your targeting processes, you can consult certified Salesforce experts or get in touch with us to know how digital marketing automation with SFMC can help in reimagining customer journeys with a focus on 1:1 personalization across all digital channels.