Salesforce For Email Marketing: Interview with Mar Tech expert Mounir Nejjai

Marketing Cloud provides an expansive range of tools that can be used for different types of customer engagement processes. One of them is Email Studio.

Our team is constantly involved in setting up Marketing Cloud for various industries, and often gets questions like "Does email marketing work at all?" or "Is Salesforce good for it?". So we decided to talk a bit about the basic business values of email marketing with Mar Tech expert Mounir Nejjai. He shared some tips about strategy creation and helpful tools for email marketers.

I had an IT engineering degree and was hired as a Management Consultant by one of the biggest consulting firms in France. My first assignment on a marketing automation project was in the finance industry. I recall telling my partner that I didn't know anything about marketing. His answer was: "Neither do they!"

In fact, I was pretty lucky: I started in that field just when Marketing & Technology got engaged… A few years later, they would adopt Data… and my engineering background gave me the necessary hard skills needed while I was learning marketing concepts.

For the last 15 years, I helped 100+ companies with their martech projects. I worked as Design Authority, Subject Matter Expert or Program Architect on 20+ projects over 5M$ integration cost. And in 2021, I decided that instead of delivering Business Consulting, our mission was to deliver Business Value.

Now I run a Salesforce Marketing Cloud ISV to create immediate value for clients through packaged solutions available on Appexchange.

I also give career advice to Salesforce Marketing Cloud professionals and build a community around that shared vision of client success and self-improvement.

Now and then, somebody will come up with a catchy statement like: "Email is dead!".

Some marketers mistakenly believe that social networks are gaining momentum and don't leave room for email. They don't operate on reliable facts, and think that representatives of some generations don't use email at all. And so on, and so on.

But, whether you're talking about B2B or B2C, there are no marketing operations without data. You need a Database. Acquisition is mainly List Building. And the simplest and most powerful entry in a list is an Email address.

Now you've got Email and an option. Do you really want to use another channel? You've got the cheapest access to your customer already!

Of course, this inbox is saturated. Of course, there has been a lot of abuse. But if your brand has built a great relationship with the customer, and that means Trust, emails are the most effective marketing tool.

For 90% of one-way communications, Emails will remain the best tool at every stage of the funnel. If we talk about industries and types of companies, I would rather rely on facts.

So, as you see, email marketing fits corporate and personal sales both online and offline for most industries.

When it comes to email marketing, you build your stack according to your size and maturity. You will consider Salesforce Marketing Cloud (either Engagement or Account Engagement) once you have data in your CRM and want to use it. In this case, Salesforce Marketing Cloud competitors would be Adobe, Oracle or Braze.

But Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a great solution if you consider the platform. You can easily use your CRM data, you have powerful Artificial Intelligence features with Einstein and one of the most powerful Customer journey orchestrators with Journey Builder.

Once you've stepped in, you can build up for scaling long-term: Customer 360, Personalization, Intelligence and now Genie.

As for me, Salesforce meets the needs of both SMB and enterprise companies, but be careful with budgets: of course when customization needs are rising, you have to pay for that. But exactly the CRM gives you that opportunity.

Every marketing communication has 3 components. The customer, The message and The brand.

If you're using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you have all you need to optimize send time, subject, pre-header, content, and so on!

Always be testing. Use A/B Testing. Spend time on reports.

We can't just say that the customer today needs high personalization and then just assume that we can come up with a 5-steps email journey as a one-size fits all strategy for welcome… Where are the facts?

You have a pretty good view of your performance using Salesforce Marketing Cloud reports. A bit more if you use Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence (ex-Datorama).

Deliverability is a continuous fight. You can stay ahead using Litmus or InboxMonster. They can help to reach the inbox of your customers and stay there. I would also recommend that you also be attentive to the sources of the database formation and respect the user's permissions for receiving commercial communications.

Whatever, Openings mean your objects are clear, personalized but also that your customer has been waiting for something. Personally I believe in gifts and scarcity. The basis of consumer behavior has always been, is and will be psychological factors. So I'll go with 2 apps we've published on Appexchange:

As Email marketing mantra should be "always be testing"... go for easy to use, drag-and-drop tools. You need a few minutes to install and use the 2 mentioned apps, so you can quickly send emails and assess added value during the free testing period.

For beginners in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, I write a weekly newsletter that you can check out here.

There are a lot of materials to get started with email marketers, too!