The changing marketing dynamics require effective marketing and an integrated platform. Yet, many businesses struggle with scattered data across different platforms, due to relying on outdated techniques and disparate platforms that hinder the ability to understand customers. 

A Forrester report states a significant 12 hours are spent by employees every week on chasing data and driving meaningful results, and 80% of organizations said reducing data silos is their top priority. Having a platform that can help businesses with centralized customer data and identify valuable insights is helpful for better marketing campaigns.  

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) provides a platform that removes data silos by unifying customer data in one place, leading to personalized marketing campaigns across different channels. 

To explore how to capitalize on your marketing campaigns and leverage the full potential of SFMC, this blog helps you understand Marketing Cloud basics, its power-packed features, benefits, use cases, and so on.

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC)?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is an advanced, Einstein-powered marketing platform designed to improve your marketing strategy. With its powerful tools for email, mobile, SMS, social media, advertising, and web marketing, businesses can engage customers across multiple touchpoints. 

With a focus on personalization, Marketing Cloud allows businesses to tailor their marketing efforts to individual customer needs and preferences, providing a more effective and meaningful customer experience. By integrating customer data and insights, businesses can deliver the most relevant content promptly that drives higher engagement and better outcomes. Let’s understand it with an example. 

To understand this, suppose a customer, Sofia, adds a black leather jacket to her shopping cart on an e-commerce website but does not complete the purchase. Here, Salesforce Marketing Cloud automatically sends her an email after a few hours with the subject “Still thinking about the black jacket?” It also includes key features like a high-quality image of the jacket and offers 10% off with free shipping if she completes the purchase in 24 hours. If Sofia still does not complete the purchase, then SFMC triggers an email in 3 days or a week showcasing a similar jacket and suggesting complementary items such as gloves. 

How Does Salesforce Marketing Cloud Work?

Marketing Cloud Salesforce leverages its robust features to deliver a personalized experience to users. Here, understand how SFMC works:

Data Integration

Marketing Cloud gathers all the data from various sources such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Commerce Cloud, and more. It then creates a single, comprehensive view of customer profiles containing their preferences and behavior.  

Audience Segmentation

Marketing Cloud segments customers based on demographics such as behavior, interest, and past purchases, leading to target-specific audience segments with tailored marketing.

Campaign Creation and Deliver Personalized Messages

SFMC enables businesses to create cross-channel marketing campaigns across email, websites, social media, and mobile. Then, leveraging its AI-powered analytics helps to send personalized messages and recommendations promptly. 

Track Campaign Performance and Engage Leads

Marketing Cloud provides real-time analytics to analyze campaign performance by tracking click-through rates and open rates. SFMC then helps identify potential high-value leads and nurture them through personalized campaigns. 

By understanding these aspects, businesses can transform their marketing campaigns’ effectiveness.

Some Useful Insights for Salesforce Marketing Cloud

The recent State of Salesforce Marketing report (9th edition) highlights AI technology adoption and the priorities and challenges faced by marketers around the world. These are the key findings of the report:

• 68% of businesses say advances in AI make it more important for companies to be trustworthy. 
• 22% of decision-makers are less or not satisfied with the overall outcomes of their current marketing investments and efforts.
• Only 32% of marketers are delighted with how they use customer data to create more relevant experiences. 
• 32% of marketing organizations have fully implemented AI in their workflows. 
• 78 % of marketers are satisfied with their ability to cross-channel customer engagement. 
• An average of 43% of marketers still rely on a fragmented approach to personalization. 

These insights highlight the increasing value of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud implementation in the changing marketing dynamics. By leveraging its capabilities, businesses can reduce fragmented data issues and save time in creating personalized marketing campaigns.

Read More: Salesforce Marketing Cloud trends

Which Tools Does Marketing Cloud Include?

Marketing Cloud is a powerful platform that offers a wide range of tools to cater to different problem solutions. Here is the list of what the marketing cloud features includes:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Benefits

Leveraging Salesforce certified Marketing Cloud power-packed capabilities can lead businesses to achieve unexpected results. Here are some of the benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

Simplify Campaign Creation

By leveraging the Einstein Copilot (Conversational Generative AI) feature in marketing, businesses can develop campaigns, segment audiences, and create content. Marketers can complete these tasks by simply asking Copilot to perform specific tasks just like you talk with anyone. Only marketers have to know the target audience and message you want to deliver (like launching a new product or 50% off on the next order). It empowers businesses to automate repetitive tasks and improve efficiency by creating more targeted campaigns. 

Personalized Customer Experience

Salesforce Marketing Cloud features enable businesses to analyze customers’ purchase history, buying behavior, and interests, leading to providing tailored offers. It helps in creating more personalized content catering to individual customer preferences. This one-on-one marketing effort leads businesses to improve click-through rates. 

Its Journey Builder tool enables marketers to visualize the whole journey of the customer from the initial to the exit points. This helps you understand where leads or prospects are lost and touchpoints where improvement is required. It leads to optimized marketing strategies tailored to customer preferences and interests.  

Multichannel Marketing

Multichannel marketing in Marketing Cloud enables businesses to deliver marketing messages across various channels including email, SMS, social media, mobile push notifications, and more. Marketers can deliver a connected marketing experience by leveraging AI (Einstein) to optimize send times and personalized content and provide insights for better engagement. It allows you to design and deploy marketing campaigns, like offering free shipping on the next order or up to 20% off on the next order. 

Read This Blog To Know the pricing of Saleforce Marketing Cloud: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Editions Features, Suitability, Pricing

Dynamic Content

With the Content Builder in Marketing Cloud, businesses can create dynamic content and automatically adjust the content within an email based on subscriber data. It ensures a more tailored email and message reaching to audience, leading to higher conversion rates, and improved customer engagement and satisfaction. 

SFMC’s enhanced dynamic content enables businesses to import a delimited file with text and image URLs. It allows the creation of more complex dynamic content variations by eliminating the need to manually create complex dynamic content and rules for each variation. In this, variations are pre-defined and imported from the data file, helping businesses provide a more tailored experience to all consumers without the need for manual setup for each recipient. 

Automate Tedious Tasks

Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Automation Studio automates data management and repetitive tasks such as sending an email, running SQL queries, and moving data (file transfer or copy), by creating simple or complex workflows.  

Also, its Mobile Studio feature automates time-specific messaging campaigns, sends push notifications, tracks app usage, and personalizes in-app messages, leading to higher customer engagement and delivering relevant content on user preferences. 

Seamless Integration

Marketing Cloud can integrate with CRM like Sales Cloud, leading to automatically updating CRM records with campaign engagement data for sales teams. To integrate with e-commerce platforms like Magento, you need to set up a connection or use a dedicated connector between these two platforms.

It allows the sync of customer data, order details, pricing, descriptions, and other relevant data to Marketing Cloud for personalized marketing. Leveraging its integration capability with social media platforms like Facebook enables running ad campaigns from the SFMC platform and retargeting customers based on social media interaction.

Advanced Segmentation

The segmentation feature of Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the same as that offered by Data Cloud. With the Audience Studio in SFMC, marketers can capture customer data from different sources, unify them into a single profile, and activate data to create highly targeted audience segments. It helps to target high-value customers, improve conversion rates, and allocate marketing budgets accordingly.

While Salesforce Marketing Cloud drives personalized engagement across channels, its true strength lies in how it connects with other Salesforce solutions. By connecting with Data Cloud for unified customer profiles, Loyalty Management to boost retention, and Einstein AI for intelligent automation, it creates a seamless, end-to-end customer journey.

Conclusion

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful platform that streamlines the marketing efforts of businesses across various touchpoints. By leveraging the AI-powered platform’s capabilities, marketers can personalized campaigns and deliver more engaging customer experiences. 

If you want to reduce marketing challenges or achieve the wide range of benefits offered by SFMC, Connect with our Salesforce consultants. They will help you determine whether this platform is right for your organization. 

AUTHOR

Vishwajeet Srivastava

Salesforce Data Cloud, AI Products, ServiceNow, Product Engineering

Co-founder and CTO at Cyntexa also known as “VJ”. With 10+ years of experience and 22+ Salesforce certifications, he’s a seasoned expert in Salesforce Data Cloud & AI Products, Product Engineering, AWS, Google Cloud Platform, ServiceNow, and Managed Services. Known for blending strategic thinking with hands-on expertise, VJ is passionate about building scalable solutions that drive innovation, operational efficiency, and enterprise-wide transformation.