What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud & How Is It Beneficial
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive marketing automation platform that enables marketers to create personalized customer experiences and organize the complete customer journey from the first touchpoint to the final transaction. It is a SaaS platform that combines marketing automation tools—like lead management and reporting—with customer engagement solutions and social media.
With Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC), you can build rich digital experiences that engage your customers at every interaction point. Whether it’s via email, mobile, or in-app messaging, SFMC is the only platform to deliver the conversations across today’s multiple channels while linking together with CRM and other enterprise applications.
Benefits of Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform integrates and manages many facets of marketing, including multi-channel campaign execution, dynamic customer journeys, and analytics. It does this by using components called “Studios” and “Builders.”
Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides tools for creating multi-channel journeys, automated workflows, and personalized customer experiences. A customer journey enables you to plan how your customers will move through their lifecycle with your company, optimizing the experience along the way. Journey Builder makes it easy to create automated journeys that are tightly connected with Marketing Automation, Salesforce CRM, and Chatter, as well as, any external web services.
Use the Salesforce marketing platform to engage with customers and prospects, automate your marketing activities and measure their impact, and create a personalized experience that can be tailored to each user’s needs.
The business uses the Salesforce marketing platform to create, distribute, manage and measure content across websites, blogs, mobile apps, and social networks. It also helps the business tackle a variety of marketing processes such as social media listening and engagement, email marketing automation, and marketing analytics.
Let’s delve into some of the key benefits of using Sales Marketing Cloud in detail:
1. Unleash the Power of Data-Intelligent Messaging
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a customer success platform that enables companies to engage with customers in real time and automate marketing processes to improve their customer relationships.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a customer success platform designed to help companies listen and engage with customers across channels. It helps you create more relevant, personalized experiences for your customers so they fall in love with your brand. If you’re wondering why it’s important to have a marketing platform that works together; the prime reason is that Salesforce Marketing Cloud triggers messages based on the real-time customer interactions that in turn can be based on different data points enumerated below:
a) Contact Data – Contact data is automatically loaded into SFMC from your Marketing Cloud account and includes details of the contact you send information to, such as their name and email address. The data associated with a contact could determine which journey branches to take. For example, when contact is converted to a customer, the big data in your Marketing Cloud account can automatically remove them from a prospect journey and place them into a new customer journey.
b) Data From Customer Journey – Journey data allows you to track what types of emails an individual opens and clicks in the SFMC journey. It also tracks if they click past an email in your journey, enabling you to “nudge” them back on track, just like a friend would do if they missed a meeting.
2. Make Messaging a Multi-Channel Affair
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder allows you to construct journeys that consist of email and SMS messaging (and can also include direct mail using AppExchange partners). There are multiple use cases for having multi-channel messaging, including allowing your target audience the ability to opt-in at their own pace. For example, you may choose not to send out an email communication to new customers until they have been with your company for a while and already have received some SMS messages. Or maybe you’d like to send different content via email versus SMS messaging; Salesforce Marketing Cloud would allow this too!
There are many used cases for making messaging a multi-channel affair:
a) Leveraging tailored email marketing services – This service is designed to help you communicate with customers and manage your service/support cases by providing the ability to send emails and texts.
b) Facilitating Financial Communications – Financial communications help you stay in touch with your customers on a personal level. For example, if you sell credit cards or loans, financial products can often take a few weeks to process and finalize, meaning customers need reminding that they have a payment due in the near future. Financial communications are also useful for helping people remember the actual day when they need to make their payments – reminding them through an SMS message the day before will encourage them to pay on time and avoid unnecessary fees.
3. Managing the “Dynamic” Affairs
Salesforce Marketing Cloud has some dynamic elements that help you extend the level of customization to all the receipts and further optimize engagement, including the following:
a) Dynamic Content – Dynamic content is a powerful strategy that allows you to personalize your email content, as well as your subject lines. Dynamic personalization creates email messages and emails that are customized to who the message recipient is. You’ll have the ability to modify emails based on demographics, behaviors, purchasing history, and more specific attributes such as geographical location, preferences, and interests.
b) Profiles for dynamic distribution – This feature enables creating custom sending addresses for an email. A common use case is when a sender’s address should vary based on the salesperson that has the relationship with the message recipient.
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) provides a robust platform for orchestrating communications and driving customer engagement with your brand. With its strong capabilities in marketing automation, predictive analytics, content management, and audience targeting, SFMC helps drive customer engagement and create a positive relationship between your brand and your audience.
SFMAC is a marketing platform that provides you with a single point of access to all your data. This is accessed from anywhere and anytime, enabling you to create a 360-degree view of your customers, who will be tracked in real time.
4. The Platform Facilitates Data Management by Orchestrating Your Relational Database
Data management in Marketing Cloud is done using data extensions that can be associated to form a relational database, which is supported by SQL.
In order to manage data in Marketing Cloud, data extensions (a table) can be associated to form a relational database, which is supported by SQL. SFMC’s data management system is unique in that it is a “relational database,” meaning that it can store many different types of data. This allows for more complex audience building and segmentation within SFMC to reach your desired audience.
Data management is a critical aspect of marketing and sales. SFMC gives you the ability to manage data with the ability to create complex data models within its platform, which can be associated to form a relational database. This provides a great advantage when compared to some of the more restricted platforms that only allow for certain types of import and support limited data models for segmentation purposes.
5. Maximize Your Integration Capabilities Including REST API
Salesforce Marketing Cloud has extensive integration capabilities that can provide data from various sources (another factor in why the data management features are so valuable). In addition to the expected connection to Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud (via Marketing Cloud Connect), SFMC also has various APIs, including a REST API and a SOAP API.
SFMC has extensive integration capabilities that can provide data from various sources (another factor in why the data management features are so valuable). In addition to the expected connection to Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud (via Marketing Cloud Connect), SFMC also has various APIs, including a REST API and a SOAP API. Maximizing your integration capabilities with the help of Salesforce Marketing Cloud includes various APIs. For example, you can use a REST API to import contact information from another system, or a SOAP API to initiate triggered sends.
Salesforce Integration Capabilities including REST API and SOAP API, allow you to harness the power of this platform from within your custom applications.
6. Leverage Salesforce AppExchange for Enabling Third-Party Applications
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful suite of applications that work together to help you improve marketing success using data. It integrates with existing data sources and Salesforce products, including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Heroku; so no matter what you do today, SFMC will make it even better. One of the most interesting features of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud technology branded as “Einstein” is that it keeps customers engaged and happy by leveraging the principles of artificial intelligence.
With Salesforce Marketing Cloud you have the ability to set up engagement scoring to predict who will interact with messaging, sent time optimization to predict the best time to send a message to each individual, so it’s most likely to be opened, and engagement frequency to understand how many messages to send each individual. These capabilities serve to increase the engagement that consumers have with your brand while at the same time providing a personalized experience (and hopefully preventing disengagement).
How to Decide On Whether Your Organization Needs Salesforce Marketing Cloud
The general rule of thumb for any company to embrace Salesforce Marketing Cloud would be to look into the advantages that the platform provides, including the positive implications on an array of integrations, data being made available from analytics and reporting (that will also impact the bottom-line metrics for your organization), ability to deliver an optimized customer experience while endeavoring to drive your bottom line.
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud has supported B2B companies since its inception, and one of the best features is that it can adapt to your changing needs. If you are working in a B2B industry, and looking for marketing software to help you improve lead generation, nurture, and conversion rates, then Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an option worth considering.
Wrap Up
Marketers in organizations of all sizes, from small businesses to large enterprises, are leveraging Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s digital marketing solutions to transform their organizations into customer-centric businesses. This platform is known for its agility, flexibility, and adaptability. This means that even the smallest organizations can adopt Marketing Cloud and get started with it in no time.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a platform that has a variety of uses and can be tailored to your needs. You can begin with your own application, or you can use one that Salesforce has built for you. Regardless of the type of business you have, this flexible platform can help increase sales and improve customer retention.
Apart from the functionalities and benefits discussed in the blog, Salesforce Marketing Cloud facilitates some additional competencies such as Advertising Studio and Social Studio that can be availed by spending some surplus amount.
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