Your Handbook to Optimise the Implementation of Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Imagine having a unified view of all the interactions a customer had with your brand. With the Journey Builder tool offered by Salesforce Marketing Cloud this is exactly what you get.

The Journey Builder tool provides visibility into customer interactions across all your marketing channels – email, mobile, social media, advertisements, and more - so you can connect these interactions to offer a seamless customer experience.  

At Journey Builder’s foundation is the customer journey, which is a series of steps your customer goes through during their interaction with your brand on any given channel. Interactions can include: 

• clicking an ad
• reading an email
• making a purchase
• returning an item in the store
• talking to a service agent on the phone
• downloading a whitepaper
• redeeming a coupon

Journey Builder is a campaign planning tool that lets marketers design and automate campaigns. Marketers can move their campaign planning and customer journey maps from the whiteboard to the Journey Builder tool and model them on the tool’s drag-and-drop interface to listen, connect, and automate the customer journey across all touch points.

Email marketing is still one of the most powerful means to grab customer attention. But it is crucial to implement the right strategies to get the most out of your email campaigns. And this is where Salesforce Marketing Cloud comes in. With capabilities like data-driven campaign management, marketing automation tools, content management, and native predictive intelligence, you can run highly effective email campaigns using Email Studio, Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s email marketing product. 

Email Studio offers easy-to-use, drag-and-drop tools to power your campaigns. You can also integrate online and offline data and create personalised email messages to boost customer engagement.

Here are some best practices that can help you power up your email marketing strategy for more clicks, better engagement, and an improved customer experience.

To expand your audience, and thereby your customer base, what you need are more subscribers. The first step to nurture prospects and convert them into subscribers is to offer multiple sign-up opportunities using their email IDs.

Here’s how you can enable sign-ups and expand your email audience:

• Registrations: Whether it’s accessing resources from your organisation’s website or using your mobile app, setting up a registration process enables customers to easily provide their email IDs. Giving access to your company’s valuable resources like webinars, white papers, e-books, etc. will entice your customers to sign up. Of course, having a teaser for these assets will increase the chances.
• Loyalty programmes: This suits B2C companies more as customers can get enrolled into loyalty programmes that offer additional benefits. Offer deals, discounts, contests, upgrades, and other incentives – and you will have customers wanting to sign up for your emails.
• Social media: Today, social media promotions on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn are a must if you want to entice new customers. Your organisation’s social media posts or ads can help interested customers get more information on the offer or product through email. For example, you can offer a link to subscribe to a monthly newsletter and those interested get to view your business page. This method is great to acquire subscribers.
• Opt-ins: A terrific way to get prospects to willingly give their email addresses, opt-ins can be plugged into your web and mobile pages. There are two types of opt-ins, single and double. Single opt-in requires a person to respond only once to receive future sends, while double opt-in requires a person to respond and then re-confirm their response before they get access to future sends. The latter is an effective way to ensure that an email address is entered correctly and validated.

Why rely on a single channel for customer outreach when you have the tools to leverage digital advertising, email campaigns, mobile messaging, and social media marketing? Salesforce Marketing Cloud lets you connect every interaction across all marketing channels.

You can enhance the effectiveness and scale of your campaigns by combining email and advertising for a consistent and personalised cross-channel experience. This will amp up your marketing efforts by increasing conversions.

Since most customers use their email accounts to sign into different social media accounts and mobile apps, marketers can leverage email campaigns to redirect customers to personalised display advertising on websites, social media platforms, or mobile apps. Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows marketers to securely create targeted advertising campaigns, while following the personally identifiable information (PII) guidelines. 

Besides integrating with email campaigns, digital advertising via Salesforce Marketing Cloud lets marketers launch synchronised ad campaigns on the entire digital display advertising ecosystem – YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.

Build connected advertising journeys for your audiences across email, mobile, and Facebook using Journey Builder Advertising. To use this feature, you must have both Advertising Studio and Journey Builder enabled in your Marketing Cloud account.

To link an advertising campaign to Journey Builder:

• Authorise a Facebook account in Advertising Audiences.
• Accept the Facebook Custom Audience Terms of Service.

Click here to learn more.

Today, mobile marketing is the heart of any marketing strategy. But while you ensure your email campaigns are mobile optimised, you need to consider other channels like SMS and WhatsApp too. But remember, your customers are particular about privacy and ad overload. 

With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, your team can send hyper-personalised mobile messages that can target customers based on their location and proximity. Geo-fenced messages can be sent automatically to customers entering or exiting a targeted area. Similarly, Bluetooth or low-energy beacon devices can be used to trigger specific offers when a customer is within a foot’s distance from a retail outlet. Attractive push messages can also be created with Salesforce Marketing Cloud to share visual content such as restaurant menus or event maps.

MobileConnect allows your marketing team to create, send, receive, and track SMS and MMS text messages. You can use this tool to increase engagement with your audiences in a consistent manner across channels and devices. To do so, identify the channels your audiences engage with you the most in and align their activity in these channels with perfectly crafted, relevant mobile messages that are instantly triggered.

Mobile messages triggered by audience engagement can range from welcome messages purchase or appointment alerts and promotional offers to transactions. You can set up automatic replies based on audience activity or quickly deliver personalised, time-sensitive messages using pre-built templates and a simple drag-and-drop interface.

To target the most suitable audiences and encourage them to engage with your app, draw user data from multiple channels. You can do this by integrating your push notification campaigns with any email, SMS, or social media campaign. You can:

• segment mobile contacts
• send targeted and personalised push notifications
• send in-app and app inbox messages
• use geofence and beacon messaging for location-based campaigns
• view customer engagement with analytics
• automate your campaigns with Automation Studio.
• integrate push notifications into customer journeys using Journey Builder

Once you have synced MobileConnect and MobilePush with user activity and campaigns in other channels, you need to be able to understand how much engagement was generated through your mobile messaging.

You can measure things like the number of messages sent and to whom, how many of these messages were opened by the recipients, understand how opens are defined, and the average amount of time users spent in your app and the growth of opted-in devices for the last 30 days and run reports.

Note: Android and iOS open rates are counted differently based on the limitations of the two operating systems.

After email, mobile, and digital advertising, the next big platform for marketers is social media. Social media campaigns can define your brand, capture your audiences’ attention, and create customer advocacy like no other channel, given the amount of time customers spend on social media platforms and their sheer popularity. 

Salesforce Social Studio is a one-stop solution for marketers to plan, manage, schedule, create, monitor, and measure social media campaigns.

Social Studio is a web-based application that allows the management of content among individuals and teams that may be spread across geographical distances, brands, or departments via a common interface with full planning and scheduling capabilities.

As an admin or user, your main navigation tabs in Social Studio will include:

Workspaces—a central place for you to plan, approve, and publish content. It is also an area for users to collaborate with a set of shared resources, social accounts, and calendars. You can use workspaces to organise content by: 

• social accounts
• discrete business units
• geographical markets
• external agencies

Performance—measure campaign performance, access engagement reports, and view analytics. Customisable reports help marketers gauge how content is performing across social networks (in real-time or past performance). 

Page Assist— enables marketers to navigate smoothly around Social Studio and get context-sensitive information and support based on what they are doing in the app.

Topic Profiles are a kind of social media search tool in Social Studio where a marketing team can define the keywords of their interest. Using Topic Profiles, marketers can monitor social platforms for broader conversations. These are social media conversations where the brand is under discussion but is not tagged or incorrectly tagged. You can use this feature to stay updated on conversations pertaining to your industries of interest to evolve campaigns and engage with audiences effectively. Topic profiles help collect and group social posts from across the web – social media sites, forums, blogs, customer reviews, etc.

Here are three components that make up a Topic Profile:

Keyword groups—Define groups of keywords used in social posts to filter what posts are included or excluded in your topic profile.

Filters—Refine the social posts included in your topic profile by selecting specific languages, media types, and regions.

Source groups— Use Source Groups to track and manage social listening sources that are important for your company. Source Groups are a set of sources that your topic profile looks at, such as a Twitter handle, Facebook page, websites, or blogs. Source Groups can be used for broad listening and other activities such as:

• Pulling in all the content from company’s owned social channels
• Identifying influencer posts that contain keywords that are relevant to a brand
• Excluding unwanted content or spam from selected sites
• Tracking the number of organisation-wide source groups in use

Publishing organic content is a great way to create brand awareness and to connect with audiences in a meaningful way. Publishing content on social media platforms helps companies establish a brand tone, share industry trends and news, demonstrate thought leadership, and foster brand advocates. 

Social Studio Publish lets you create, publish, and promote content to any number of social accounts across multiple social networks. The feature enables marketers to publish content in real time or schedule it for the future using Social Studio’s built-in content calendar.

Here are some tips on how you to publish engaging and rewarding content on social media platforms:

• Create a transparent communication model. Encourage your senior executives to become active on social handles like Twitter. Take your customers behind the scenes with walk-through videos of your shop floor or live stream important company events.
• Converse in a language that is simple yet impressive. Casual language usually performs better than corporate language on social platforms. To maintain a consistent tonality, create a content style guide for your employees, new hires, and brand ambassadors to follow.
• Leverage one of the biggest benefits of social publishing – the ability of content to be shared and spread virally. If 10 people with 1,000 followers retweet your post, you have increased the reach of your content by 10,000. Provide a way for your community to easily share your content to their own networks.
• Use a tracking code when publishing post links, such as those found using Google Analytics. Tracking codes help you follow which social networks are driving the most traffic. This data can guide your posting strategy for critical content and marketing campaigns.

Find innovative ways to repurpose your existing content. For example, create an infographic out of an old sales presentation or whitepaper. You can also revisit old emails to identify recurring customer inquiries and use them to create blog topics. 

Click here to know how you can reuse existing contnt using the Shared Post content feature.

Listening to what your audiences say about your brand and industry bear the best fruits when it culminates in drilling down to how your customers really feel about your brand. This is an opportunity no business should miss, as a deeper analysis of conversations with and around your brand can help you:

• Inform your marketing strategies based on the true interests, affiliations, and sentiments of your audiences
• Gather constructive feedback to improve your products and services
• Identify unmet and poorly met needs and convert them into opportunities for your brand

A popular method of staying attuned to conversations and forums your brand is mentioned in is keyword tracking. You can use Keyword Group Cards in user dashboards to view where keyword groups appear in a topic profile. The graphical representation of keyword mentions and trends make analysis easier. 

In addition to this, the following three components of Social Analyse that can help you dig deeper into audience interactions:

Conversation Threading

You can use conversation threading in iOS Social Studio Mobile to view conversations on Facebook and Twitter posts. Being able to see the entire thread of conversations can help you appropriately engage your audiences on the same platforms.

Einstein Vision

Tracking brand mentions in text-based conversations is relatively easier. But many businesses often overlook or miss out on the appearance of their brand and its identity markers in more evolved formats, like images. This can paint an incomplete picture of the engagement scenario between you and your audiences. On the other hand, you may also remain unknown of instances where your brand is inappropriately represented in an image.

With the use of Einstein Vision, you can get the answers to questions like — Where does my brand or its identity markers (like logos) appear in images?, Who is posting these images?, and Is my brand appropriately being depicted or attributed to in these images?

Sentiment Card

Human expressions are complex and can often carry layers of meanings hidden between the lines. Through sentiment analysis, you can get to the bottom of how your audiences react to stimuli and the sort of emotions it elicits in them. 

Sentiment Cards show the average sentiment your audiences feel towards your social posts and topic profiles or even your social accounts for that matter. It scores sentiments as positive,negative, and neutral. However, you can tweak it the sentiment model to enhance its scoring.

Marketers today operate in a volatile environment where customer expectations, market trends, and technology are rapidly evolving. Marketers must adopt data-driven marketing tactics for insights into what customers want, how effective the marketing campaigns are, what kind of ROI to expect,  and to enable faster, more accurate decision-making. 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud comes loaded with powerful data-focused marketing solutions such as Customer Data Platform (CDP), Interaction Studio, and Datorama.

Here’s how marketers can use these solutions to benefit from data-driven marketing strategies:

CDP is a solution that helps marketers drive personalised and contextual experience across every touchpoint by – capturing, unifying, segmenting, and activating all their customer data. 

The solution helps marketers:

• Unify customer data across multiple teams, devices, and systems, such as customer data available on CRM systems, e-commerce platforms, email database, etc. This way, marketers can create a single, consistent customer ID.
• Collate first-, second-, and third- party data to create and analyse specialised audience segments.
• Ensure customer consent and compliance with safe provisioning measures and dashboards for opt-outs and consent flags. Also, ensure automatic compliance with new legal standards such as CCPA and GDPR.
• Glean customer insights from across channels – marketing, commerce, sales, and service interactions - to optimise live campaigns.
• Advertise to the right segments and personas across social platforms, online ads, and beyond with tailored content. 

Here’s a quick checklist to address before the implementation of CDP to make the most of this solution:

1. Identify project stakeholders involved in data decisions. Also identify anyone and everyone whose job is impacted by this implementation, such as marketing specialists, IT specialists, and so on. Unifying all customer data and interactions across your business ecosystem and identifying all use cases for CDP requires top-down support.
2. Identify what systems and data sources need to be integrated for CDP to help you create marketing segments for planned campaigns. Find out who owns these systems and add them to the list of stakeholders.
3. Identify the users and admin for CDP to grant the required permissions.
4. Document all business requirements and use cases. Stakeholder and admin approved business requirements can help ensure you have a successful CDP implementation.

Learn more about CDP here.

Here’s how every B2C and B2B marketer can leverage marketing intelligence and optimise their campaigns using Datorama:

• View KPIs for messaging, paid advertising, web analytics, and CRM in one place with built-in pacing and benchmarking to understand what success looks like. Drill down these results into campaigns and campaign types to capitalise on what’s working and course-correct what’s not. Marketers can benefit from day-to-day recommendations offered by the built-in AI engine to keep KPIs performing on track.
• Find out how your channels stack up against one another. Datorama’s channel scorecard view presents KPIs for media spend, performance, and response across each channel and includes an index score to normalise your ROI across them all.
• View KPIs for spend, engagement, and conversion across campaigns to identify what’s resonating and converting. Leverage AI recommendations for optimising campaigns and budget allocations. 
• Connect ecommerce, point-of-sale, and product data on a single platform to align marketing efforts with business goals and availability for each product line. Get transparency into ROI to control your growth at the desired pace.
• See the direct impact of marketing optimisation on conversion and sales and how cross-channel activities are helping achieve business goals on a unified dashboard.

Click here for a demo of Salesforce Datorama.