The Salesforce Marketing Cloud (formerly ExactTarget) has many tools in its box. It’s scaled for mass market communications and generally considered the B2C option in the Salesforce family. Marketing Cloud helps you engage with customers and prospects across all channels including web, mobile, social, ad and email. (Quick note on Marketing Cloud: while it can handle B2B communications, it doesn’t offer the easy to implement drip campaigns, robust lead scoring and one-off email and tracking capabilities that are part of Pardot’s appeal for B2B marketing.) The reason to utilize the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is simple: Studies show that marketers who coordinate their direct marketing, like email and mobile campaigns, with advertising see 80% higher engagement than those who don’t (Salesforce.com).
Here are 5 ways to use the Salesforce Marketing Cloud:
1.) Blur the lines between product and customer experience
Marketing Cloud allows marketers to create 1-to-1 journeys across the entire Salesforce Customer Success Platform. There will be 6 billion smartphones, 75 billion connected devices and trillions of customer interactions by 2020. In this new connected world, the lines between product and customer experience disappear.
The lines between product and customer experience disappear.
These 1-to-1 journeys not only include digital marketing, but sales and service as well. Relationship management is crucial, but not without relationship engagement and relationship intelligence, as well as the data collection, data analyzation and synchronized action needed to make those relationship strategies happen. With Marketing Cloud Connect, Journey Builder and IoT Cloud, Salesforce can help you dissolve the line between product and customer experience.
2.) Use 1-to-1 journeys to optimize the marketing funnel
The Marketing Cloud is home to Journey Builder, which represents the digital customer journey.
Through the Marketing Cloud Journey Builder, data can be easily utilized to determine the best funnel for B2C customer conversions. What are the trigger points that determine conversions? What are the clickthrough rates on a particular page? What is the right dynamic content for a particular email campaign for a designated segment? Every organization needs to know what their customers’ journeys are and how to optimize their marketing funnel.
Breakdown in communication is the #1 reason a prospective buyer falls off of the page. If they don’t feel the need for the product, they will not buy, whether the product in question is a widget or a diamond. By utilizing the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can ensure there is solid communication at each crucial point along the way.
Email delivers very high ROI in digital marketing.
3.) Simplify email marketing
There’s a funny saying: The number of emails it takes to complete a task is the number of people involved in the project, squared.
All joking aside, email is one of the most common activities for adult U.S. smartphone users. It also happens to deliver very high ROI in digital marketing. Rich, dynamic, interactive, personalized content for any business will deliver the best results, but defining what precludes this definition for any marketer can be daunting.
This is where the Salesforce Marketing Cloud comes into play. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud simplifies data management, segmentation and campaign management and actions made by your contacts/leads including transactions, confirmations and replies.
4.) Answer the question of what to send—and when
Once the customer has made a transaction, confirmation, or reply, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud utilizes predictive intelligence to make the customer journey smarter.
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud keeps the business on-message with each business unit and franchise. It innately gives the marketer the tools to understand the best content, product and offer to send to each customer segment. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud can also be used to make predictions about the best time at which a campaign should be sent to increase engagement and conversions.
Automation cannot completely eliminate manual intervention, but it should enable you to optimize your communication strategy. While the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful tool, it should not replace the marketer, who needs to keep messages from sounding robotic or being received in a predictable pattern, so the brand is still fresh and dynamic in the minds of the customer. Intelligent automation replaces and improves manual processes, helping marketers reach their customers more efficiently and giving them more time to spend on the other tasks on their to-do lists.
CRM is the new advertising.
5.) Move to identity-based advertising
CRM is the new advertising. With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud advertising platform, marketers can move from mass, impersonalized media to personalized media at scale. It does this by automatically tying a brand’s known customer database to its digital advertising programs. It allows marketers to coordinate their direct marketing, such as email and mobile campaigns, with powerful digital advertising.
Bottom line
While experienced marketers are needed to provide and define customer journeys, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be utilized to make the process more effective and efficient.
Summa boasts deep experience in creating fast, flexible, reliable and secure connectivity between cloud, on-premises, new and legacy core applications, as well as IoT and mobile devices. As both the implementation partner and the customer engagement solution architect for our clients, we achieve business results using Marketing, Sales and Service Clouds and other platform components of Salesforce.com. In 2015, we won the Salesforce.com Partner Innovation Award for Non-Profit Success for our work innovating new fundraising, donor and volunteer management solutions for The United Way of Southwestern PA. Plus, Salesforce.com is one of Summa's fastest-growing practice areas. As Gold Partners, we're excited to do more, excel more and produce more transformative solutions for our clients.
