This Tutorial Explains What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Why You Should Choose it And What are Various Marketing Cloud Products Through Interesting Videos:
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a CRM platform for marketers. It not only allows to manage customer campaigns but also creates and manages customer relationships.
It enables you to know your customers better and offers a personalized experience with intelligence across the entire customer journey.
What You Will Learn:
What Is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the only integrated Customer Engagement platform to deliver personalized customer engagement at scale. It is offered across all channels i.e. email to web, social, mobile, and digital advertising.
Here is a figure to explain Marketing Cloud:
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Things possible by Marketing Cloud are:
- Gain a unified view of the clients by connecting known and unknown profiles.
- Create a two-way, real-time engagement as per the customer’s wants.
- Make every interaction relevant to the data and artificial intelligence of Einstein.
- Measure, optimize and report on marketing performance impact and customer loyalty.
Here is a video that gives you an overview of Marketing Cloud:
In this tutorial, you will find the products associated with Marketing Cloud and gather insights on some of the commonly asked questions on Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Why Choose Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Marketing Cloud enables your organization to reach the next-level customer journey.
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The above figure shows the comparison of Salesforce Marketing Cloud with other Marketing Cloud products such as Adobe and IBM Marketing Clouds, as shown in Google Trends. We choose Salesforce Marketing Cloud as it shows an increasing path of growth worldwide.
What Are The Products Of Marketing Cloud?
Let’s discuss the various Marketing Cloud products.
The below figure explains the products:
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#1) Marketing Cloud Email Studio
Marketing Cloud Email Studio: Reach the customers with the # 1 Email Marketing Platform.
It builds a smarter email with data from every department with not only marketing campaigns but also a2 sophisticated 1:1 message.
The 3 essential things done by Email Studio include:
(i) Target Your Audience:
It is about creating segments based on profile data for inspiring engagement. Improve your subscriber list with drag and drop segmentation tools to keep your message always relevant. Create great campaigns with Automation, such as the distribution of custom reports, schedule messages, and importing data from the source.
Einstein gets used to great content. It helps to identify the highly engaged subscribers and increase conversions. Target the engaged and unengaged subscribers across digital channels. It pushes segments to your DMP (Data Management Platform) for leveraging the profile data from landing pages and user behavior.
(ii) Build Best Emails:
It is about creating great messages that engage. Optimize effortlessly and quickly for mobile devices and enable the emails to reach the audience, on whichever devices used. Use templates designed by experts that use content blocks to populate email design quickly.
Deliver real-time content much to the delight of your customers by using personalized scripting languages, HTML Code, or drag-and-drop functions. Drive every stage of the customer journey by strengthening customer relationships with email conversations.
(iii) Automate Messages:
It is about sending 1:1 message for customers. Enable the customers to look into the email at the most likely time by sending the messages at the top of the inbox, and prevent any accidental delivery of test messages by using guardrails.
It maintains a 1:1 relationship with your enterprise clients by leveraging the power of scalability and flexibility. Setting up a delivery schedule for a great brand experience increases efficiency. All these get done without a heavy manual workload.
Use A/B tests for running sophisticated performance reports and determine what things are working and what are not. It is to achieve the perfection of each campaign.
#2) Marketing Cloud Journey Builder
Marketing Cloud Journey Builder: Create Customized Personalized Journeys at Scale.
Journey Builder is a campaign planning tool for empowering marketers to design and automate campaigns, and it is for guiding the customers on their journey with the brand. It creates customer experience across every touchpoint inclusive of mobile, email, web, and advertisements.
The configured journey builder runs responsive campaigns automatically. The foundation of the tool comprises of the journey, the communication plan of the customers designed by the marketer. The marketers set canvas activities to direct Journey Builder to communicate and direct contacts in the journey.
The Functions of Journey Builder include:
(i) Define the Customer Journey:
It is about listening to customer cues. It defines the customer journey and uses it to harness the 1:1 customer journey. It helps to build personalized messages by leveraging the customer available from any source.
It builds on purchase history, browsing behavior, and attributes. Moreover, real-time events such as mobile app downloads closed service cases, or purchases help to trigger clients on a journey. The customer’s path gets adjusted with actual and predicted behavior.
(ii) Align Message Across Marketing Channel:
Connect the entire experience through simple or complex visual Journeys. It serves the purpose of revision and reference. Increases engagement by connecting all the departments i.e. sales, marketing, service that form a part of the entire customer journey.
It makes seamless communication across all channels i.e. web, apps, push notifications, emails, and SMS. It enables the customers with the right kind of information, wherever located.
(iii) Adapt to the Changing Needs of the Customers:
You may predict the changes in customer behavior by setting and maintaining automated journey logic. It serves the purpose of customer engagement, content tests, and random journey splits.
It leverages reporting for acting on performance and changing trends. The simple or complex personalized journeys work for hordes of individual clients.
Further Reading => Salesforce Marketing Cloud Vs Pardot – Know the Differences
(iv) Explore Distributed Marketing:
Creates a branded journey of teams across all channels of emails, advertising, and mobile for aligning with corporate brand standards. Moreover, the customer journey gets optimized by aggregating the journey data or analysis of individual engagement.
Finally, create personalized content with native tools in Sales, Community, and Service Clouds and make them available to the global teams.
Here is a video on Salesforce Journey Builder:
#3) Marketing Cloud Advertising Studio
Marketing Cloud Advertising Studio: Activate Your Customer Data to Power Digital Advertising and Create 1:1 Customer Experience
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Advertising Cloud enables you to enhance your email marketing goals with advertising. It co-ordinates campaigns with social, mobile, sales, and customer service efforts taken by you. Engage the existing customers by using Google Ads, Social Studios, Instagram, and YouTube.
The customer journey across the digital advertising leads to find new prospective clients or engage the inactive users. The advertising audience in the Advertising Studio activates the CRM data for targeting the audience and also helps in integrating with CRM partners.
The Functions of Advertising Studio include:
(i) Harness Customer Data:
Drive the advertising across search, social & display at scale, use the data from Marketing Cloud, Sales, and Service Cloud for shaping and guiding the advertisement.
It synchronizes customer records across any digital channel and makes the data up-to-date. Work in the trusted ecosystem of Salesforce and protect the data, made available anytime. Build audiences in the various social media platforms with Audience Studio – the entire ecosystem of display advertising.
(ii) Generate More Leads:
It drives customer acquisition campaigns while capturing Salesforce leads. Connect with Pardot and Sales Cloud. Connect with Marketing Cloud Data extensions in real-time with Facebook advertising leads by the Lead Capture feature of Advertising Studio. Co-ordinate advertising with nurture campaigns, lead scoring, and sales team.
It enhances nurture strategy and acquisition. Automate the leads from Facebook into Salesforce for immediate actions on the Marketing and Sales team. Journey Builder Advertising creates Facebook Campaigns in Journey Builder.
This form of advertising helps the reach of your email marketing with cross channel journeys across channels i.e. mobile, Facebook ads, and emails, with no need for digital advertising. It helps to segment your existing customer campaigns and prospects for increasing the ROI of Google AdWords strategy,
It drives customer acquisition campaigns while capturing Salesforce leads. Connect with Pardot and Sales Cloud. Connect with Marketing.
(iii) Connect Channels:
It integrates advertising with sales, service, and marketing and puts up the advertisement for the right person. Use Salesforce for gaining new prospects who behave similarly to your other high-value customers.
It reaches out to more of your target audience through the coordination of advertising with email. Increase the intent to purchase by sharing messages in both the channels with clients. Identify and reconnect with those who are not interacting with your brand and campaign to the non-performing segments.
It uses real-time customer data to give relevant advertisements.
Given below is a video that explains the concept of Marketing Cloud Advertising Studio.
#4) Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio
Marketing Cloud Interaction Studio: Instantly Deliver Contextually Relevant Marketing Experiences
It delivers contextually relevant real-time experiences across your channels. Get omnichannel next best action and allows you to orchestrate with real-time insights from customer journeys.
Interaction Studio interacts in real-time with consumers in the owned channels of the brand, including online through email, social & mobile, or offline through in-stores or kiosks.
The business units in the marketing cloud map to the Interaction Studio workspace called space. Real-time interaction management enables the user to visualize, track, and manage customer experiences. It drives engagement at the right moment, as preferred by the audience.
It is possible to connect journey builder with Interaction Studio for sending context information, interaction, activity, and others from Interaction Studio to the Journey Builder.
The below figure explains the connection between Interaction Studio and Journey Builder.
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The Functions of Interaction Studio include:
(i) View Cross-channel Cross Customer Insights:
Visualize the customer activities across touchpoints and on any channel. Display the end-to-end journey of the customers. Take on your channels in one view, irrespective of the channel or device adopted.
Create customer segments for re-engaging by identifying the customers who have dropped out of the journey. Create real-time context across owned channels and listening to customer activities.
(ii) Connect Every Interaction:
It guides the customer across the most appropriate path and orchestrates across owned channels. It triggers interactions whenever required.
It offers a unified experience with connected messages. The message must be relevant and consistent across all channels. Control the message frequency for related experience. It also connects online interactions with offline ones.
(iii) Optimize the Experience:
Anticipate and drive the next conversation. Make use of a sophisticated decision engine and orchestrate contextually relevant experience. Make message, journey, offer suitable to the customer, making use of business rules & frequency capping.
Prioritize all the critical offers, interactions, and messages, leaving behind all others.
(iv) Deliver the Impact:
Increase the ROI and the engagement with a solution meant for you. Communicate in real-time with marketing, sales, and services by triggering events for real-time communications.
The business user’s job is made easier with easy-to-use, customizable configurations. Make use of click-driven integrations and instrumentations with mobile SDKs, codeless tags and APIs across interactions.
Here is a video that explains you further on an Interaction Studio:
#5) Marketing Cloud Mobile Studio
Marketing Cloud Mobile Studio: Personalize Mobile Marketing to reach customers on any device.
Mobile marketing enables you to reach your clients through digital marketing while on the go. You create marketing campaigns by sending text messages. You can even monitor and send clients with notifications whenever they come close to your store. Mobile Social Studio comprises the mobile marketing apps of the Marketing Cloud.
Mobile Studio uses apps for the following Use-Cases:
a) Group Connect: It allows sending messages to contacts with messaging apps and supports Facebook Messenger and LINE mobile messaging app. The LINE mobile app integrates into Content Builder and Journey Builder.
b) Mobile Connect: It enables us to create, send, receive, or even track SMS or MMS messages. Use a drag-and-drop interface or templates to send alerts and transactional messages to subscribers. It also enables us to perform tasks such as manage keywords or automatic responses to incoming messages.
c) Mobile Push: It encourages the use of apps and enables them to create and send notifications.
Some of the tasks possible by Mobile Push are:
- Send Inbox messages.
- Send targeted & personalized push notifications.
- Use beacon messaging and geofence for location-based apps.
- Use Automation Studio for campaign automation.
- Manage segmentation of audiences for mobile contacts.
- Integrate the push notifications with Journey Builder
- Use analytics to view customer engagement.
The Functions of the Mobile Studio include:
(i) Build and Send Easily High Targeted Messages:
Automate your mobile campaigns. Use custom templates to serve the purpose of text-response, email-opt-in campaigns, text response, and multi-media messages.
Increase app usage by driving in-app purchases by marketing with discounts, mobile phone alerts, and deals. Capture user behavior, attributes, and preferences for the chat messages to build complete user profiles. Also, combine data from CRM tools and data from disparate sources.
(ii) Send Relevant Messages:
Use a drag-and-drop tool for segmentation of customers. Send personalized messages based on demographics, location as well as preferences.
Use an open API platform to deliver transactional, time-sensitive messages such as shipping reminders, alerts, and updates. Combine the power of Marketing Cloud and Service Cloud to transform a broadcast or transactional message into a conversation.
(iii) Drive App Engagement:
Automatically send discounts or promotions to the customers with messages created with geofencing for the customers at the targeted time. Draw attention to customers with Bluetooth low-energy devices and deliver messages at closer proximity.
Create contextual messages meant for mobiles and deliver them with the right amount of push capabilities. Clearly understand deliverability and engagement, while on the go with monitored mobile and performance reports.
(iv) Reach Your Audiences Anytime, Anywhere:
Create a consistent customer journey across a wide range of mobiles and devices. Deliver mobile messages along with web campaigns, emails, etc. to identify the channels mostly used by the customers to drive engagement with the brand and make an effort to communicate better.
You can further boost engagement with the brand based on user interactions with the brand.
Here is a video that explains Mobile Studio:
#6) Marketing Cloud Social Studio
Marketing Cloud Social Studio: Connect Social Data with Marketing, Sales, and Service
Social Studio offers a one-stop-solution to manage, schedule, monitor and create posts. It is possible to organize the posts in brands, regions, multiple teams and individuals in a unified interface. It offers real-time publishing and engagement of Comprehensive content marketing by social networks and platforms.
A single interface offers a fully customizable team-based collaboration platform. It analyses conversations from any source to find out the choice of the fans.
The Functions of Social Studio include:
(i) Listen to Conversations:
Gain feedback from marketing service and sales campaigns. It gets done with reporting tied to your social networks on mobile apps. Customizable dashboards display fresh topics and trends.
Listen about brands across channels and use the insights for diving the marketing strategy. Drill down to the post level to catch every comment. Use machine-learning sentiment analysis and image-recognition to monitor audience discussions and extract meaningful insights.
(ii) Engage Your Community and Provide Customer Support:
Manage your community by responding to social posts. Deploy a single platform for all your social media engagements, and cutting across departments. You can securely manage access and roles with the help of team and user workspaces.
Direct the social posts to the CRM, to get a complete picture of the customer across all channels i.e. social, email, and others. You can also gauge brand sentiment and prioritize the posts with machine learning. Then direct the customer activity to the appropriate role, concerning marketing, sales, and service.
It allows us to open and create service cases based on feedback and interactions from social. It provides detailed reporting with response rates and customizable service-level agreements. It enables in understanding the effectiveness of the activity.
(iii) Publish on Social Media:
Create and Approve content for Multiple Social Networks, Accounts on desktop or Mobile devices. Manage the social media presence of your company across teams. Achieve brand consistency by creating workspaces and access based on role and group.
Access stock photos, trending topics on the desktop or mobile app. Get a real-time snapshot on a content channel with intelligent reporting. Obtain a central view of social marketing and improve campaigns.
Boost high-performance social posts with built-in social advertising.
(iv) Monitor Engagement:
View data from 3rd party and other sources with the command center and live display of marketing, sales, and service activity. Track brand health, customer interactions, and campaign results.
Get a comprehensive multichannel view of every customer relationship and obtain in-depth explorations of brand journey, social care, and email campaigns. Develop insights on real-time customer discussions.
Display insights based on region, words, and post popularity related to the product. Brand the products, events, and campaigns and then share the command center display on all the screens in your office.
Here is a video that explains you further on Social Studio:
Some Commonly Asked Questions On Marketing Cloud
Q #1) What does CRM software do?
Answer: Customer Relationship Software (CRM) software manages all your company’s relationships with clients as well as prospective clients. It has a simple goal i.e. improve business relationships.
Q #2) Is Marketing Cloud a CRM?
Answer: Marketing Cloud in Salesforce is a CRM platform for marketers to create and manage marketing relationships and customer campaigns.
Q #3) Is Salesforce a Marketing tool?
Answer: Marketing Cloud in Salesforce helps to maintain the relationship with customers other than app or website. It offers marketing tactics to boost the brand of your organization and also helps in building community as well as to measure audience behavior.
Q #4) What are the different Salesforce clouds?
Answer: There are many Salesforce Clouds, such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Community Cloud, and Analytics Cloud.
Q #5) What is the use of Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Answer: Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a Customer Relationship Management platform (CRM) made explicitly for marketers. It creates and manages marketing relationships as well as campaigns.
Q #6) What is the difference between the Salesforce Sales Cloud and Marketing Cloud?
Answer: The Salesforce platform offers two different types of cloud system services i.e. Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot. Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides to message at every step of the customer journey, and 1:1 content personalization but Salesforce Sales Cloud handles marketing and sales leads & opportunities and quotes.
Sales Cloud also manages communities for sales.
Q #7) How much does Salesforce Marketing Cloud costs?
Answer: For the first time marketers, starting their services, Sales Cloud is recommended. Essentials cost $25 per user per month, and Lightning Professional begins with $75 per user per month. But, Lightning Enterprise costs $150 per user per month, and Lightning Unlimited starts at $300 per user per month.
Q #8) How does Salesforce Marketing Cloud work?
Answer: Marketing Cloud Connect helps to integrate data from various sources such as Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, or App Cloud. The entire data inside the Salesforce ecosystem is then available inside the Marketing Cloud.
It is inclusive of objects such as leads, campaigns, and contacts and generates reports.
Q #9) What are the three major components of the Marketing Cloud?
Answer: The three major components of the Marketing Cloud are:
- Clouds, products, and channels.
- Builders, channels, and platforms.
- Websites, Marketing Cloud Connect, and Mobile.
Q #10) How to enable Marketing Cloud in Salesforce?
Answer: You need to follow the below steps to enable Marketing Cloud in Salesforce:
While using the Marketing Cloud Production Support environment, you need to follow the below steps.
Click Advanced Settings and select Sandbox from the Marketing Cloud Environment list.
Q #11) What is the difference between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot?
Answer: The primary difference between Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Pardot is that Marketing Cloud works for B2C companies, but Pardot acts for B2B companies.
Moreover, Pardot is the Marketing automation platform that allows the companies to find their best leads, keeps track of engagements & marketing campaigns, and also provides faster follow-ups. Finally, Pardot operates on Email and Social channels, whereas Marketing Cloud operates on Email, SMS, Social, and display advertising channels.
Q #12) Is it possible to pick and choose Marketing Cloud products to purchase?
Answer: Yes definitely. There are various subscription plans to choose from, and you need to select the appropriate plan for your marketing strategy. Any accounts executive from Salesforce can help you with this.
Q #13) What is the difference between Sales and Service cloud?
Answer: Sales Cloud is a sales module in Salesforce, but Service Cloud refers to customer service in Salesforce.com.
Sales Cloud spans across Leads, Contacts, Opportunities, Contracts, Quotes, Price books, and Campaigns. It acts for the entire sales process and generates revenue. It has a feature such as web-to-lead support and that supports online lead capture with the help of auto-response rules.
On the other hand, Service Cloud handles Accounts, Cases, Contacts, and solutions. It comes with a lot of features such as Web-to-case, Public Knowledgebase, Self-service portals, and Call Centre. It allows supporting client requests for product service and billing etc.
Q #14) How does Marketing Cloud help map the customer journey?
Answer: Marketing Cloud helps to visually plan and map interactions that take place for groups of clients during each stage of the customer lifecycle.
The plans are not based on a single event but span across the entire customer lifecycle. It unfolds in a coordinated series of interactions and events based on business objectives and customer behavior.
Conclusion
Marketers face challenges in creating and maintaining product awareness. However, the primary issue faced by organizations is the lack of enough resources. Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers an out-of-the-box solution for organizations to achieve business goals.
Moreover, if we look at the figures from Salesforce, we can notice that the companies deploying Marketing Cloud show an average 43% increase in Marketing ROI, a 46 % faster campaign deployment and also a 44 % increase in lead volumes.
Furthermore, we came to know that when compared to similar products from IBM and Adobe, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has a continuous path of growth, thereby resulting in its adoption all over the world.
Finally, we hope that you would have gathered enough information on Marketing Cloud with this tutorial.