Salesforce is a robust Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform, powered by Customer 360. It further offers a complementary suite of enterprise applications that focus on Marketing Automation, Data Analytics, Customer Service, and Application Development. Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a provider of analytics software and marketing automation services.
This blog talks about the Marketing Cloud in Salesforce in detail highlighting its benefits, use cases, and purpose. It also gives a brief overview of Salesforce before jumping onto the main topic.
Table of Contents
What is Salesforce?
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Salesforce serves as an integrated CRM platform that provides a single, shared view across all your departments including Sales, Service, Commerce, and Marketing. Salesforce can help you empower and develop your Sales teams with integrated Lead Management, Forecasting Tools, and the ability to Quote, Price, and Configure every deal. Salesforce provides a comprehensive Cloud platform (Sales Cloud) that gives you the Customer Management Solution that is the right fit for every growth phase of your business.
Sales Cloud is an all-in-one Sales tool that also doubles as CRM software. Sales Cloud is flexible enough to accommodate business use cases of any industry or size and scalable for anything you might need from it. It allows you to access data on the go through its mobile app. It can also help maximize Sales with AppExchange integrations thus boosting business growth.
Here are a few salient Salesforce features:
- It allows you to build mobile-ready Salesforce apps for every employee. This helps boost productivity and helps build a more connected workforce. Apart from this, it also helps you streamline the employee helpdesk for faster self-service.
- Salesforce offers a boost on its core services with additional functionalities such as Application Integration and Artificial Intelligence. This includes building custom-branded mobile apps; easy integration of data from ERP, IoT, and databases; and addition of predictive capabilities to every service and Sales application.
- You can make your apps more personalized and smart to meet your engagement, service, and purchase needs in real-time.
- With Experience Cloud, you can evolve on a fast, flexible platform and maximize your return on experience. It allows you to build stronger relationships with a Single Source of Truth.
- Salesforce provides a highly curated library of industry-specific expert help. This includes process flows, apps, templates, and components built to tackle every single issue faced by the user.
Salesforce ensures a personalized experience with its Customer 360 Platform. Some of the key products offered by Salesforce as a part of their suite are as follows:
- Salesforce Service Cloud: Salesforce Service Cloud offers all the tools you might need to strengthen Customer Engagement. It allows you to automate business processes with intelligent workflows, support customer interactions across each channel, get actionable insight into every customer interaction, and drive revenue with the power of Artificial Intelligence.
- Salesforce Analytics (Tableau CRM): Tableau allows you to leverage intuitive drag-and-drop analysis at every skill level. It also allows you to quickly spot visual patterns and share insights across teams to drive growth.
- Salesforce Commerce Cloud: The Salesforce Commerce Cloud allows you to convert more customers with personalized buying experiences. You can implement your strategies faster with easy-to-use tools. This allows you to stay agile and start generating a higher ROI (Return on Investment) sooner.
- Salesforce AppExchange: Salesforce AppExchange is an Enterprise Cloud marketplace. It allows you to find proven experts and apps that help you solve business challenges fast and extend your Salesforce Customer 360 from anywhere. This can be extended across any Department, Industry, and Product. It also offers app guides to help you zero in on the right apps to suit your unique business challenges.
What is Marketing Cloud in Salesforce?
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Marketing Cloud in Salesforce allows you to Deepen Customer Relationships across every touchpoint with integrated Marketing tools.
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Here are a few key Salesforce Marketing Cloud Products:
- Datorama: Datorama serves as the one-stop platform for your investments, KPIs, Marketing data analysis, and decisions.
- Interaction Studio: With Interaction Studio, you can track, visualize, and manage real-time customer experiences. This helps drive valuable engagement at the right moment, just the way your audience likes.
- Advertising Studio: This allows you to target and streamline 1-to-1 advertising by utilizing your CRM data to re-engage old customers and acquire new ones.
Automation Studio
Automation Studio is a Salesforce Marketing Automation Cloud application that is used to enable Data Management and multi-step Marketing activities and initiatives on a triggered, immediate, or scheduled basis.
You can use Automation Studio’s workflow canvas to build simple or multi-step automation. It also includes an overview page to show the status of each automation. To enable recovery, error information is displayed in line with the corresponding automation.
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- Transformations: Hevo provides preload transformations through Python code. It also allows you to run transformation code for each event in the pipelines you set up. You need to edit the event object’s properties received in the transform method as a parameter to carry out the transformation. Hevo also offers drag and drop transformations like Date and Control Functions, JSON, and Event Manipulation to name a few. These can be configured and tested before putting them to use.
- Connectors: Hevo supports 100+ integrations to SaaS platforms such as Salesforce, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, files, databases, analytics, and BI tools. It supports various destinations including Salesforce CRM, Google BigQuery, Amazon Redshift, Firebolt, Snowflake Data Warehouses; Amazon S3 Data Lakes; and MySQL, MongoDB, TokuDB, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL databases to name a few.
- Real-Time Data Transfer: Hevo provides real-time data migration, so you can have analysis-ready data always.
- 100% Complete & Accurate Data Transfer: Hevo’s robust infrastructure ensures reliable data transfer with zero data loss.
- Scalable Infrastructure: Hevo has in-built integrations for 100+ sources, that can help you scale your data infrastructure as required.
- 24/7 Live Support: The Hevo team is available round the clock to extend exceptional support to you through chat, email, and support calls.
- Schema Management: Hevo takes away the tedious task of schema management & automatically detects the schema of incoming data and maps it to the destination schema.
- Live Monitoring: Hevo allows you to monitor the data flow so you can check where your data is at a particular point in time.
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What can you do with Marketing Cloud in Salesforce?
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Marketing Cloud in Salesforce is a feature-rich platform that houses products with numerous intuitive capabilities across the Marketing domain. This includes the following features that can help improve efficiency and boost productivity:
- Social Media Engagement, Advertising, and Listening
- Customer Engagement in Real-Time
- Email and Marketing Automation
- Customer Marketing Analytics
- Mobile (SMS) Messaging and Push Notifications
1) Multi-Channel Messaging
SFMC Journey Builder lets you build journeys that consist of SMS Messaging and Email (you can also include direct mail using AppExchange partners). There are various use cases for Multi-Channel Messaging such as:
- Post-Purchase Communication: You can use SMS and emails to enable post-purchase communications. For instance, you can create a journey with emails for shipment status till something is delivered. SFMC can then send an email to the customer to inform them about package delivery. You can then follow up with a product registration email and a customer survey at a later stage.
- Financial Communications: You can use SMS and Emails to relay the financial status related to credit or loans. For instance, emails can help remind customers of upcoming loan payments. An SMS message can come in handy on the actual due date. This can help ensure they don’t miss their payment and face late payment penalties.
- Support Case and Service Communication: You can use emails to share content related to support and service for a customer. You can also use SMS to communicate more timely information. (For instance, a change in your support/service case status such as a closure or service personnel on their way).
2) Data-Driven Messaging
Data-Driven Messaging allows you to deliver messages to each contact based on the individual’s current data. It allows you to trigger new messages based on real-time customer interactions and data changes. The Customer Journey can branch off in different directions- and the decisions can be taken on different branches for Data-driven Messaging on the basis of the following criteria:
- Journey Data: This data represents how the contact has interacted with the SFMC journey. This could be Email Clicks or Opens. One instance of journey data is a Welcome Journey. After a customer completes a purchase, they may receive multiple emails (Email 1-welcome, Email 2-product registration, Email 3-Product Usage, and so forth). Marketing Cloud in Salesforce can detect who is interacting with every email. This allows you to send a customer down a branch to resend a specific type of email. You can do this after a specified time, say 5 days if someone doesn’t click or open the email. Or you can send them down a branch to receive Email 3 if they have opened and interacted with Email 2.
- Contact Data: Contact Data refers to the data in the Marketing Cloud related to the contact you send information to. This could be any change in their data or the data associated with a contact. It can help determine the journey a branch will take. For instance, a contact could be in the communication journey for prospects but subsequently gets converted to a customer. The change in their Contact Data can move them from a Prospect Journey to a New Customer Journey.
3) Dynamic Components
SFMC possesses some Dynamic Components that can build personalized experiences for email recipients and further boost engagement. These include the following elements:
- Dynamic Sending Profiles: This allows you to create custom sending addresses for an email. A common use case of Dynamic Sending Profiles is building an email and having the sender differ based on the salesperson interacting with the message recipient.
- Dynamic Content: Dynamic Content consists of creating highly tailored subject lines and email content based on an individual’s attributes and associated data and rules applied to them. The email content will vary for every message recipient. This will allow you to deliver a personalized experience without sounding repetitive.
What are the benefits of the SFDC Marketing Cloud?
Here are a few benefits of Marketing Cloud in Salesforce that make it an indispensable tool:
- Application of Artificial Intelligence
- Integration Capabilities
- Third-Party Applications
1) Application of Artificial Intelligence
Einstein is Salesforce’s Artificial Intelligence technology, known for various interesting applications like:
- Engagement Frequency to understand how many messages to send to every individual.
- Engagement Scoring to predict who will interact through messaging.
- Sent Time Optimization to forecast the best time to send a message to every individual. This improves the likelihood of the message being opened.
2) Integration Capabilities
Marketing Cloud in Salesforce has extensive integration capabilities that can deliver data from multiple sources. This plays a crucial role in making the Data Management features valuable. Apart from integrating with Salesforce’s Service Cloud (via Marketing Cloud Connect) and Sales Cloud, SFMC boasts various APIs. This includes a SOAP API and a REST API. You can use these APIs to import content and initiate triggered sends.
3) Third-Party Applications
Marketing Cloud in Salesforce also houses an expansive set of third-party applications, including ones from Salesforce AppExchange. This allows you to increase its abilities and tailor it for your specific business goals
What are the different Use Cases of CRM Marketing Cloud in Salesforce?
Marketing Cloud in Salesforce is considered to be an enterprise-level platform. But in reality, Marketing Cloud in Salesforce houses various editions that make it flexible enough for organizations of all sizes.
SFMC provides you with a vast array of add-on features to choose from. You can use these features to customize SFMC to your specific needs. SFMC has been designed in a way that it can easily adapt to your customer’s changing needs.
Here is how Adidas is utilizing the Marketing Cloud in Salesforce to make significant strides as a leader in athletic sportswear:
- Service Cloud allows Adidas to empower its agents to deliver smarter and faster service to its ever-growing customer base. It has helped improve the efficiency of customer service for the company significantly while making it more personalized.
- Commerce Cloud has allowed Adidas to form long-lasting relationships with shoppers across the world. It has also helped Adidas answer key questions about the customer in each interaction.
Conclusion
This blog talks about the Marketing Cloud in Salesforce in explicit detail. It also gives a brief introduction to the features and benefits of Salesforce before eliciting the features of Marketing Cloud in Salesforce.
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