Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Benefits & Implementation processes

In today’s fast-changing marketing world, marketers face many challenges like handling lots of customer data, dealing with spam emails, and staying ahead of tough competition. Keeping customers interested in products and services has become harder than ever

As traditional marketing does not help counter these changing requirements, businesses must adopt innovative ways to connect with customers. 

Here, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) is transforming business marketing. Along with its powerful tools and features it also leverages the power of AI that helps businesses combine their efforts and connect with the right audience with the right interaction at the right time. 

In this guide, we will explore everything about SFMC how it works, its benefits, and implementation. 

Firstly, here we start by introducing what SFMC is.

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What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud? 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an advanced, Einstein-powered marketing platform designed to improve your marketing strategy. By using its powerful tools for email, mobile, SMS, social media, advertising, and web marketing, it enables businesses to 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, and it provides a more effective and meaningful customer experience. By integrating customer data and insights businesses can deliver the most relevant content timely that drives higher engagement and better outcomes. Let’s understand it with an example.

“To understand this, suppose a customer recently purchased sports shoes from your brand. Now, they may like to receive recommendations for related sports accessories. But if they get emails and promotions for the same sports shoes, it can frustrate them. It is where Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps you understand customer preferences by analyzing customer purchase history and providing more personalized marketing.”

How Does Salesforce Marketing Cloud Work?

SFMC cloud leverages its robust features to deliver personalized experiences to users. Here, understand how does it works:

Data Integration: Firstly, SFMC gathers all the data from various sources such as website interactions, CRM systems, and social media. It then creates a single, comprehensive view of customer profiles containing their preferences and behaviour.  

Audience Segmentation: Marketing Cloud segments customers based on demographics such as behaviour, 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, website, social, and mobile. Then, leveraging its AI-powered analytics help to send personalized messages and recommendations timely.  

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

Last year, Salesforce announced the result of a marketing cloud study conducted by Forrester Consulting. The study titled “The Total Economic Impact of Salesforce Marketing Cloud” cumulated the resultant data of five companies using this cloud. Therefore, these companies achieve a 299% return on investment (ROI) over three years. Here are the other key findings of this report: 

• The revenue of these companies exceeded $5 million.
• They saw a 60% increase in their site conversion by the end of the third year. 
• Their average order value increased by 35%.
• Their post-campaign reporting efforts were reduced by 90%. 
• They noted a 60% reduction in creating and running marketing campaigns. 

These insights highlight the increasing importance of Salesforce Marketing Cloud benefits in the current marketing scenario. Utilizing the SFMC platform effectively enables businesses to increase their revenue, reduce reporting efforts, and save time taken in creating and running marketing campaigns.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Tools?

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 includes:

To dive deeper into all these aspects, refer to the complete guide on Salesforce Marketing Cloud features.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Benefits 

Marketing Cloud in Salesforce is a robust platform that combines your marketing efforts. Leveraging its power-packed capabilities can lead businesses to achieve unexpected results. Here are some of SFMC’s benefits

Personalized Customer Experience

Salesforce Marketing Cloud features enable businesses to analyze customers’ purchase history,  buying behaviour, 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 Messaging

Multichannel messaging in Marketing Cloud enables businesses to deliver marketing messages across various mail, sms, social media, and mobile push notifications. Leveraging AI can deliver a connected marketing experience and help in decision-making for a better engaging audience. It allows to design and deploy points like offering free shipping on the next order or up to 20% off on the next order. 

Dynamic Content

Marketing Cloud provides dynamic content that changes based on user preferences and behaviour across various touchpoints. With the pre-built templates and AI, businesses can increase email campaign efficiency and create custom emails. Its consolidated library also provides the right content for the right audience. 

Leveraging the conversational platform allows customers to connect with your brand directly with bidirectional messaging platforms like WhatsApp and Line. This helps understand customer engagement, such as appointment confirmation and add-to-cart products, leading to building a strong brand-customer relationship.  

Automate Tedious Tasks

Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Automation Studio automates marketing workflows and customer journeys. For activities like transferring or extracting data and sending an email, businesses can define an activity to perform. Also, its Mobile Studio feature automates time-specific messaging campaigns, sends push notifications, tracks app usage, and personalized in-app messages. Its social media management tools Social Studio streamline schedule posting at optimal times across different platforms and set automated responses to common questions. 

Advanced Segmentation

The Audience Studio feature of Marketing Cloud enables businesses to create and manage complex audience segments. By combining data from multiple sources, it allows businesses to apply advanced filters and create custom segments. You can segment the audience based on criteria such as purchase history and demographics. Leveraging advanced segmentation helps to target high-value customers, improve conversion rates, and allocate marketing budget accordingly. 

Seamless Integration

Marketing Cloud can integrate with CRM like Sales Cloud, leads to automatically update CRM records with campaign engagement data for sales teams. It can easily integrate with e-commerce platforms like Magento, allowing to sync of customer data, order details, pricing, description, 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 Marketing Cloud and retargeting customers based on social media interaction.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Pricing

Salesforce Marketing Cloud editions pricing starts from 25 USD/ User/ Month for the “Starter Suite” edition. It offers different editions suitable for every business needs. Here is the cost structure:

Here is a comprehensive view of the pricing to help you understand it better. 
Choose the right Marketing Cloud Engagement Edition that is primarily focused on the basic functionalities required by businesses to get started.

Salesforce offers you Marketing Cloud Account Engagement Editions that focus more on lead engagement and sales alignment.

Apart from the above editions of marketing cloud offerings, Salesforce offers personalization editions as well, which allow you to highly customize your org. Let’s understand the same:

Businesses can pay further to avail of additional features and benefits according to their requirements, such as: 

Data Cloud for Marketing: $108,000/Org/Year 

• For unifying and connecting data to promote personalized interactions.
• Building strong connections with data-driven advertising.
• Measure, analyze, and track all the marketing efforts.

Marketing Cloud Personalization: $108,000/Org/Year 

• Cater personalized yet relevant interactions to all the customers.
• Offers testing and reporting capabilities.

Marketing Cloud Intelligence: $3000/Org/Month 

• Get intelligent solutions for all your marketing, data and analytics needs.
• Incorporate data governance in your business.
• Leverage visualization and market-friendly AI tools.

Follow the Complete Prosses of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Implementation.

Here is the Implementation Guide that you must refer to, to get started: 

Pre-Requisites of Implementation 

Opt for the Right Edition Among the Offerings

Consider the various features and functionalities that different editions provide, and choose the edition that best aligns with your business objectives. 

Roles and Responsibilities Assignment 

Create your team, including the right people with relevant roles, responsibilities and permissions. It would eliminate end-time chaos and result in a seamless Salesforce implementation.

Consider:  

• Salesforce administrator with all necessary permissions for Salesforce tasks. 
• Marketing administrator with complete access to the marketing cloud permissions set and must know how to configure setup pages, publish, and activate campaigns and segments. 

Configure Basic Requirements

• Tick on the necessary security practices and authentication measures for email and SMS.
• Configure various consent settings, such as reviewing, importing data, customizing preference and landing pages.
• Enable setup tasks:
  • Configure your domain using an existing or new domain. 
  • Apply the domain to various landing pages. 
  • Enable the ‘optimize with Einstein AI’ option to leverage its capabilities into your marketing activities. 

After you follow all these prerequisites, move further with the implementation process:

1. Login to Your Marketing Cloud 

Click on this link

2. Create and Configure Business Units 

Users can access them to manage different brands or regions efficiently. If you want to share these items with users in other business units, place them in a ‘shared items folder’ located in the Content and Subscribers sections of the application.

3. Add Users and Roles

• Click on Setup > Business Units > Select the business unit you want to work on.
• Click on ‘Manage roles’
• Select a role to assign or remove.
• If you want to assign the role to a child business unit, i.e., a subpart of the business unit, select ‘force inheritance.’
• Click on save. 

4. Configure Security Settings 

These settings help in maintaining optimal security in your cloud and avoiding any threat from entering your system. The foremost thing to do is enable multi-factor authentication in your system. It creates multiple levels of security to first let the user pass the authentication check and then access the environment to prevent phishing attacks and account takeovers. Make sure your system takes into account the following points: 

Manage Session Timeouts 

Start with session timeout control, as to how long the application will remain open in your browser and after what time the system will automatically log it out. It is recommended to set a shorter time period of 20 minutes to avoid allowing any unauthorized party to enter your system. 

Manage Usernames and Login Expirations

Set an inactivity time duration for a user and restrict their login after a certain period of days. To reinstate access, they can reset their credentials and access the org. It restricts unauthorized users from gaining access to old accounts and ensures safety. Salesforce recommends 90 days as an inactive period.  

Control Invalid Login Attempts that Lead to the Lockout of User Accounts

It is recommended by Salesforce to allow a maximum of 3 login attempts; after that, the account should be locked out in order to prevent repeated password guessing. In order to activate the account, the user must pass the authentication check or request the administrator for the same. 

5. Check on Your Account Settings

Marketing admins are responsible for reviewing the key information stored and can also modify it. 

• Click on setup 
• Configure your Account Settings as per your business needs.
• Configure User Settings 
• Configure Security Settings 

Here, you must review your account name, ID, display name, email address, and more. Make the necessary changes, if any, and save them. 

6. Connect Marketing Cloud with Salesforce CRM

If you’re using both the Marketing Cloud and Salesforce CRM, you must create a connection between the two platforms. It allows you to sync objects and their associated data from Marketing Cloud to Salesforce. 

The connection can also send important data, such as email opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, etc., back to Salesforce CRM. By establishing this sync, you’ll be able to streamline your marketing efforts and gain valuable insights into your customers’ behaviour, all while keeping your data organized and up-to-date.

7. Create a Marketing Cloud Data Model

Create data extensions and relationships between them to leverage the data model for your business processes. It will help you guide your team members as to which direction they have to move forward with the task. 

8. Design Email Templates and Messages

Creating email templates saves you time and maintains consistency in your email campaigns. You can create highly personalized emails in marketing clouds. 

9. Set Up Email-Sending Domains and Sender Profiles 

These profiles determine the name and email address from which the emails will be sent. It will be visible to the customers who receive or view the email. 

10. Check on Marketing Cloud Feature Settings 

Make sure the relevant feature settings are enabled: 

Email Settings: 

Go to Setup > Email Optional Features and check if the settings are good to go. It authenticates customers through different measures, such as sending confirmation emails, allowing only plain text formats, and more. 

It configures domain verification settings, URL expiration mail sending, and reply mail management, i.e., whether the customer can reply to the template mail or not. 

Mobile Studio Settings: 

Enable MobileConnect and manage all your promotional messages and notification scheduling. You can set a defined period during which the notifications will be blocked. Using this setting, you can enable or disable message replies from customers and configure unsubscribe settings. 

Not only this, you can create an application through the MobilePush App that manages all your push notification activities and settings. Be it scheduling, sending notifications to customers at odd hours, or deleting unused or unsubscribed accounts.  

11. Set Up Alerts 

To receive alerts for batch email sending and triggering, use Alert Manager. 

• Navigate to Quick Find Box > enter ALERT
• Click on Alert Manager 
• Click on edit. 
• Further, select the user you want to receive alerts for. 
• Click on save. 

12. Start Preparing for Your First Marketing Campaign

Create automation and a journey for designing personalized, automated customer journeys across multiple channels. Automation and journey builders are the drag-and-drop interface that guides formulation and automation marketing strategies.

Following these steps enable you to successfully implement Marketing Cloud.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Implementation Use Cases

Here is the real-world use case of how Marketing Cloud implementation enables the business to acquire more customers:

Case: Difficulty in Acquiring Targeted Customers 

The agency deals in travel planning and management, primarily in the US, Canada, and Europe. They have a website listing all travel packages from exotic travel destinations to practical logistics like transportation and accommodations. 

But even with a passion and planning for travel marketing, they struggled to connect with potential customers due to a lack of resources and weak planning. This agency needs a strategic direction to apply marketing initiatives.

Challenges Faced

Here are the main challenges faced by this travel agency:

• Lack of Personalization for End-Users

A lack of a personalization approach causes customer retention rates. They need a tool to curate a customer-oriented personalized experience.  

• Traditional Marketing Approaches 

Due to traditional marketing methods, businesses were not getting the expected results. They need better marketing strategies to acquire higher outcomes.  

• Unable to Extract Meaningful Insights 

This travel agency is unable to analyze customer data and determine what services should be offered to customers.  

Solution

We at Cyntexa implemented Salesforce Marketing Cloud for this travel agency and provide solutions catering to each solution. 

• More Personalized Experiences

The Journey Builder feature helped in creating and managing personalized customer journeys. Marketers were able to design and execute multi-step campaigns based on the interactions and behaviours of specific customer segments. It helped their teams determine the touchpoints and interactions to revert to customers proactively. 

• Well-Planned Marketing Strategies

Email Studio enabled the company to design and personalize emails, automate them, and track their performance. This enabled them to nurture customers and focus on developing long-term relationships, thereby increasing customer loyalty.

Moreover, the AI capabilities of Email Studio allowed marketers to develop intelligent, target-specific, and dynamic email campaigns. It improved customer engagement at an individual level and promoted the brand.

• Analyze Customer Feedback for Meaningful Insights

Interaction Studio and Analytics Builder worked the best in deriving feedback and insights. On one side, it helped them visualize, track, and micro-manage each customer’s experiences and deliver content related to their interests. 

On the other side, the implementation of Analytics Builder shared essential insights into customers’ activities. This allows them to decide what further steps can be taken to decline turnover rates. 

These solutions lead the travel agency to achieve successful marketing outcomes with its robust functionality. It enables effective planning and execution of strategies that drive high conversion rates. 

Conclusion

This comprehensive guide to Salesforce Marketing Cloud and its implementation might have helped you get an idea of what this tool is and how it benefits your business. However, if you still have confusion regarding the implementation process, you can consult with a partner who provides top-notch Salesforce cloud implementation services. The experts can help you with all the technicalities and intricacies of implementation and guarantee the success of your business. 

It’s decision-making time; why not hire Salesforce marketing cloud developers, who would be delighted to help you strategize your marketing efforts?