Steps to Extract Marketing Cloud Data: An Easy Guide

Table of Contents

• Introduction to Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Data Extract Activity
• Steps to Extract Marketing Cloud Data
• Conclusion

Introduction to Salesforce Marketing Cloud 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a digital marketing automation provider, integrated inside the Salesforce ecosystem, that helps marketers understand their customers better. Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, marketers can get a unified vision of their customers by bringing together data from multiple sources. By combining data with the Einstein tool, customer interactions can be organized using artificial intelligence. 

Marketing Cloud allows marketers to have two-way, real-time interactions with customers. It allows marketers to create tailor-made content for their customers in the form of ads, emails, or user communities. 

Marketing Cloud uses tools like Journey Builder, to create tailor-made customer journeys through multiple channels, Email Studio and Social Media Studio for email marketing campaigns and social media marketing campaigns respectively. Other tools like Mobile Studio, Audience Studio, Advertising Studio, Interaction Studio, etc. make Marketing Cloud a very versatile tool.

Data Extract Activity

Automation Studio’s Data Extract Activity is used to convert an XML file into a comma-delimited, tab-delimited, or pipe-delimited file to import it into your account.

Here are the steps to achieve that.

Steps to Extract Marketing Cloud Data

Here are the steps to extract Marketing Cloud Data:

Step 1: Click Create Activity.

Step 2: Click Data Extract.

Step 3: Add for the activity, a name, an external key, and a description.

Step 4: The activity needs to know what name to give to the file it creates. So, enter a naming pattern. These are the personalization strings to be used in your file name:  %%Year%% %%Month%% %%Day%% %%Hour%% %%Minute%% %%Second%%

Use when you’ve set up a workflow to drop a file whose auto-generated filename matches a pattern into the file location.

For the date, include placeholders, or enter a static name. Note that they are case-sensitive.

Include a .zip extension for tracking extract and .csv to a data extension extract.

Step 5: Choose an extract type to determine the web-analytics tools used to interpret the extracted file. This will determine what data you can include in the file. 

Step 6: Select an extract range to fix the date range that you want to include in the extract file for the information. This range can be 1 day, 7 days, or 30 days.

Step 7: Determine the type of file encoding to use.

Step 8: Choose the fields that appear in the data extract file:

Select a field name that you want to include.

If the data extract has a column delimiter field, insert the character that you want as a delimiter from ‘,’, ‘tab’, and ’|’. 

Finally, you can see a summary of your data extract.

Conclusion

In this blog post, you have seen how to extract Marketing Cloud data using in-built integration. However, this process can be tedious and time-consuming.  Also, for effective analytics, you need to get data from multiple sources. This is where Hevo Data can help you!

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Tell us about your experience with Extracting Marketing Cloud Data! Share your thoughts in the comments section below!