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Salesforce for Marketing Campaigns: What is Marketing Cloud, Its Main Features and Benefits
• Date: February 2022 •
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
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Since the pandemic, 60% of consumer interactions with companies have been digital, compared to 42% pre-pandemic. With an increasing number of companies going digital, marketing automation solutions are also rising. And for a good reason!
To put it simply, Salesforce Marketing Cloud lets you automate your marketing campaigns. It provides you with a complete view of a customer journey to help you attract more leads, convert them into customers and retain with your services or product.
If you wonder what that means for your business, we've created a comprehensive guide to SFMC, its features, and benefits.
Contents:
A Quick Glance at Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is becoming a necessity for marketers, as it helps businesses boost marketing ROI and increase overall growth. In addition, marketing automation offers the following benefits:
- More Qualified Leads
- Detailed Picture of Customer Behaviour
- Efficiency with Reduced Staffing Costs
- More Time for Creative Work
- Accurate Reporting
- Better Data for Smarter Decisions
Marketing automation enables users to automate repetitive tasks and campaigns, collect customer data, and leverage it to make real-time business decisions. This way, you know who your customers are and how to engage them in the most effective way.
Marketing Automation Flow
Most marketing automation platforms have a limited capacity, providing you with one specific solution, such as email marketing automation, content management, or lead generation.
Typically, they create another source of data that is poorly connected to your CRM system with possible errors, irrelevant data and lack of training resources. Salesforce Marketing Cloud solves these types of issues.
An Overview of Salesforce Marketing Cloud
SMFC allows marketers to create, manage, and operate marketing campaigns in one place and in real time. With Marketing Cloud in Salesforce, businesses can benefit from integrated solutions, such as mobile studio, web personalization, content management, and data analysis.
Benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Adapting your Salesforce Marketing Cloud solutions according to your business needs enables you to enjoy the following benefits:
Personalized Customer Journey
Salesforce Marketing Cloud analyzes customers' past behavior to predict future actions, such as unsubscribing, sharing with a friend, or making a purchase. The SFMC then delivers a personalized customer journey armed with this knowledge.
Marketing Cloud Audience Studio
For instance, if a customer always visits your page or makes a purchase during the sale, they'll always receive pop-ups about upcoming and ongoing sales. Thus, Salesforce empowers marketers to create customer experiences according to their real-time preferences. This way, businesses can enjoy better response rates.
Multichannel Messaging
Salesforce Marketing Cloud journey builder helps you curate email and SMS messaging customer journeys. Leveraging multichannel messaging helps you:
- Empower Service and Support Case Communication
- Streamline Post-Purchase Communication
- Simplify Financial Communications
Application of Artificial Intelligence
Among Salesforce's digital marketing tools is its revolutionary artificial intelligence technology, referred to as Einstein. With Einstein, you can enjoy the following benefits:
- Engagement scoring to predict users likely to interact with your messaging
- Engagement frequency to determine how many messages you should send to an individual
- Sent time optimization to pinpoint the ideal time to send messages to users
Targeted Calls-to-Action
Salesforce's personalization capabilities allow you to send targeted CTAs based on a customer's profile attributes, interests, and behaviour. Moreover, it helps you send CTAs through the ideal marketing channel, whether through email, social media platforms, etc.
Integration Capabilities
Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers incredible integration capabilities that enable you to access data from various sources.
Salesforce allows you to connect to Salesforce's Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, SMFC, and various APIs like REST API and SOAP API. Using these APIs, you can augment existing contact information in SFMC, initiate automated sends, and import content.
Top Features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud
So what's under the hood? Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers an array of revolutionary tools to support every single marketing activity you can think of:
Advertising Studio (Marketing Cloud Advertising)
Advertising studio lets you boost customer acquisition with lookalikes and re-engage inactive customers. You can orchestrate advertising campaigns via Google, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and LinkedIn and coordinate campaigns with lead scoring, email nurturing and sales.
Social Studio
Social Studio helps marketing teams customize campaigns and advertisements. Tie your social accounts and start listening to reviews and mentions of your brand. Respond to customers via one social platform with customizable SLA and response rate analysis.
Audience Studio
Powerful data management platform to capture and analyse customer data with deep segmentation opportunities and native consent management framework.
Datorama (Marketing Cloud Intelligence)
Datorama is an all-in-one hub where marketers can connect all marketing data from various sources and visualize it for better clarity.
Read our full overview of Datorama
Data Studio
A great tool to discover your audience, acquire data, and make intelligent business decisions.
Email Studio (Marketing Cloud Engagement)
With SFMC, you can send transactional, promotional, and triggered messages. Personalize email messages with data from the Service Cloud, Sales Cloud, and more. Moreover, you can benefit from powerful segmentation, automation, and predictive capabilities.
Interaction Studio (Marketing Cloud Personalization)
Interaction Studio is an innovative tool that enables marketers to tailor content to customer behaviour for better engagement.
Read our full overview of Interaction Studio
Journey Builder (Marketing Cloud Engagement)
Journey Builder allows organizations to create personalized and customizable customer journeys across various channels.
Mobile Studio
SFMC encourages multichannel marketing and, thus, enables marketers to use SMS, MMS, push messaging, and group messaging.
Pardot (Marketing Cloud Account Engagement)
Pardot simplifies marketing automation and encourages B2B organizations to foster deep connections.
Read our full overview of Pardot
How to set up Marketing Cloud
Introducing Salesforce Marketing Cloud in B2C companies has proven to be effective. To help companies set up a perfect system, we have four main steps required to set up Salesforce marketing automation.
1. Set up the Marketing Cloud Connector
The smooth integration between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Salesforce CRM is a compelling feature of Marketing Cloud. While setting up Marketing Cloud Connector, companies often get the support that helps them automate marketing that further assists them in refreshing data.
Moreover, companies also set up synchronized data sources that update contact data to ensure a single source of accurate data.
2. Configure Email Studio
The next step is to configure your Marketing Cloud Business Unit that includes using assets from previous ESPs.
In this step, you have to ensure that you follow IP practices that include implementing a bounce rule that helps remove any bounced contact, which further minimizes sending emails with insufficient data, negatively impacting the sender's reputation.
Furthermore, you must enable Reply Mail Management (RMM) to support multiple languages if you have a wider audience.
3. Create Efficiencies with Automation Studio
Automation Studio is an essential tool to maintain data cleanliness. It helps in deleting duplicate records. Companies can use automation to refresh filtered data that they could use for segmentation.
4. Take Advantage of Training
Training is another essential element when we talk about adopting new tools. Companies often collaborate to conduct training sessions and create documents for Marketing Cloud, including data extensions and filters.
5. Contact an Experienced Consultant
With so many tools available, setting up and customizing Marketing Cloud can be a tricky task. Twistellar has a successful track of Marketing Cloud configuration for various business cases and industries: from creating customer journeys and email templates to orchestrating enterprise-scale marketing systems integrated with complex IT landscapes. We are always here to help you leverage your marketing automation projects.
The Bottom Line
Since the digital world is accessible to every nook and corner, reaching the maximum audience has become easy and effective.
If you have chosen Salesforce Marketing Cloud to boost your business, you can be sure to have an all-round solution to all your marketing challenges.
Twistellar's team has carried out a number of industry-oriented projects and we are always open to discuss yours!
Our deep understanding of Salesforce platform ensures successful handling of projects in any domain
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