Salesforce Marketing Cloud For Dummies

Chester Bullock, Mark Pollard

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781119122104
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Digital Marketing
• Index: Business

Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Take your digital marketing on a journey!

Everything seems to be moving to the cloud these days—and digital marketing is no exception! Salesforce Marketing Cloud For Dummies guides you through the use of Salesforce's exciting suite of cloud-based digital marketing solutions, which have the power to help you plan, personalize, and optimize your customers' journey. Written by a leader of the Salesforce training and development team, Salesforce Marketing Cloud users will find essential information on using the suite of tools and tips and tricks that only an insider would be able to share. With easy-to-follow instructions, this guide helps you discover how to incorporate your data sets into the tools to create models, campaigns, and customer maps that enable you to create a positive experience for your customers.

As Salesforce.com's multi-channel digital marketing platform, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud focuses on helping you manage one-on-one customer journeys. Leveraging a variety of features, this suite of tools offers email marketing, mobile marketing, social media marketing, content and messaging, predictive intelligence, and more. Your ability to navigate these features and functions will determine your digital marketing campaign's success, so it's critical that you make the most of this tool!

• Navigate and manage the Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Define and understand your customers' journeys—and how you fit into them
• Engage your customers across devices, ensuring consistent communication
• Use predictive data to optimize engagement

Salesforce Marketing Cloud For Dummies helps you make the most of your investment in the digital marketing world!

Part 1

Getting Started

IN THIS PART …

Take a walk through the history of online marketing to get to the technology we have today.

Understand how the power of data lets online marketers create specific messages tailored to each customer.

Envision how you can automate repetitive tasks to free yourself for creative problem solving.

Meet Salesforce Marketing Cloud: online marketing platform and home to at least a dozen useful apps.

Tour Marketing Cloud's administrative screens.

Chapter 1

Introducing the One-to-One Customer Journey

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding email marketing

Learning about customer journeys

Understanding how Salesforce Marketing Cloud fits into customer journeys

Email marketing has grown into a direct marketing powerhouse. Because you have access to so much data about the people you're sending emails to, you can create automation that tailors your messages to each customer's unique needs and circumstances. Email marketing not only delivers marketers unparalleled value but also ensures that customers actually want to read the messages they receive from you.

No other marketing channel is so customizable at such an affordable price. You can personalize the content of your email even more than the content in a direct mailer, plus your email doesn't require printing or postage, isn't subject to the mail delivery schedule, and doesn't use paper. At the same time, your email marketing campaigns can be as broad reaching as a television commercial because, after you've set up your marketing campaigns, each additional email might add only a fraction of a second to send.

Add to this the capability to get feedback on your campaigns through testing and then to use that feedback to optimize the campaigns going forward, and there is no question why email marketing continues to drive so much business.

Over time, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has added communication channels to supplement your email marketing campaigns. Now you can use Marketing Cloud as the central place to manage all the components of your online marketing campaigns, including web pages, text messages, and your Facebook page.

The Dawn of the Customer Journey

We're at a tipping point in digital marketing, where data, tools, and predictive analytics are coming together to drive a concept known as the customer journey. Before we can dive into the depths of modern-day customer journeys, however, we need to take you on a journey of our own. We're going to go back to where it began — email marketing — to understand email marketing as a channel and how we got from there to where we are today.

Early email marketing

The technology to send email messages emerged in the early 1970s, but only government and educational institutions really had access to it. In the mid-1980s, commercial networks began opening up the potential of this messaging channel to private citizens — mostly early adopters who loved technology for its own sake. Email as a common messaging medium, with practical applications for average citizens, didn't really take off until the 1990s.

At that time, major commercial networks, such as CompuServe and AOL, started connecting to the Internet and allowing messages to pass among competing systems. These messages were mostly text based and basic, as shown in Figure 1-1.

FIGURE 1-1: Early email was basic.

It's impossible to say who sent the first email that contained a marketing message or when they sent it, but it was probably pretty early. Even when the technology is unsophisticated and certainly not built with marketing purposes in mind, innovative marketers always find a way to use new tools to get an edge! Early email marketers borrowed strategies from direct mail to send electronic versions of what they would have sent to your mailbox.

Today, companies develop tools specifically for designing, automating, and delivering your email marketing, and marketing strategies and best practices exist that are specific to this channel. The tools that deliver these messages are available from companies called email service providers (ESPs). Salesforce Marketing Cloud is one such tool.

Email marketing is a highly effective method of delivering one-to-one marketing messages (messages to just one customer at a time, such as a thank-you message after an order) or one-to-many marketing messages (messages to an entire list of customers, such as a monthly newsletter). However, some marketers have misused email and given it a bad reputation. The term spam refers to unwanted marketing messages. Spam is the digital equivalent of all the junk mail you receive in your physical mailbox, but it causes even more irritation: In the early days of email, consumers oftentimes had to pay by the minute for their online time, and having to waste that time to read and delete unwanted messages made them angry.

The backlash grew further when mobile devices became popular for reading email. Again, consumers were paying a price for precious online time and sifting through unwanted messages felt expensive.

The great irony is that email marketing offers the power to provide highly customized messages that customers want to receive. The fact that email marketing developed a bad reputation for creating too many unwanted messages says more about the techniques used by marketers than the technology itself.

To combat this reputation — and to get more value out of email marketing efforts — online marketers began to develop best practices to ensure that subscribers could control their own email marketing experience and not develop so much resentment. For example, it's a best practice to offer a link in every email that a customer can click to unsubscribe from your email list.

As evidence of how important this particular best practice is, unsubscribe links are now required in marketing messages by law. Among other things, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003 requires that subscribers can opt-out of your email lists. Brands that ignore the wishes of their subscribers may find themselves in...