What is Salesforce marketing cloud – how can you benefit from what it does

The short answer is this:
“Salesforce marketing cloud helps digital marketeers manage marketing campaigns that enhance customer journeys.”  This includes:

• Connecting to your customer where they live (e.g., email, mobile, web).
• Offering tailored recommendations, reminders, and discounts.
• Providing customer service in real time.
• Listening to what they have to say on social media and respond to their needs.

In sum: it’s a digital marketing hub that integrates mobile, social and email marketing communications, to the highest level of personalisation, sophistication, and integration with Salesforce core (that is sales or service cloud). Securely.

To answer the question ‘what is marketing cloud’ in a bit more detail, I’m leveraging a few 1-2-minute-videos by Salesforce.

The first video is a brief overview of the overall benefit and usage of the digital marketing hub, and of how the various studios inter-relate. The following videos details the studios.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps you join individual customers on 1:1 journeys, with the right messages, sent through the right channels, at the right moment for them.  As a marketeer, you create customer journeys / marketing campaigns with set goals, which you then can analyse and optimise these, based on actual, real-time data.

As an integrated marketing hub with drag & drop tools and a point & click interface, you can create sophisticated digital marketing campaigns.

Here are some examples. You can set triggers based on real-time customer browsing behaviour. Present a prospect who has just visited the sofa sales-section of your website, with new sofa arrivals or an online living room interior design tool. A visitor to the pricing section of your high-end products, can trigger a telesales follow-up within 20 minutes to see if the customer has all the info needed to make a purchase. Or prompt an online chat window to open up, if that’s more appropriate.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud consisting of 10 studios and builders, to set up the various aspects of your digital marketing. Let’s go over each in turn.

Email Studio lets you build lasting 1:1 relationships   with customers, sending them promotional email as well as critical purchasing messages.  

You can leverage customer preferences, profile and historic and real time behaviour, as well as predictive intelligence to furnish ads and information that perfectly matches the current step in their journey, using real-time email sends.

You can automate every step, any message, for any device. You can track and optimise campaigns.

Interested to learn more? Talk to us on how we help:

BTW. Email Studio is not just for ‘regular’ email – you can also build very sophisticated, interactive emails that can further your customer engagement and optimise opt-in rates and shorten business processes.

Learn more here: Salesforce Interactive Email.

We revel in orchestrating in taking it further for clients, with sophisticated segmentations and sending triggers.

Talk to us about how you can trigger emails based on Salesforce record updates made by your colleagues in sales, or your customers’ activities in your community portal. We can configure it all for you.

In the meanwhile, read on, because we’re going to need some of the other builders and studios to build a total solution for you.

This studio will not be a first love for the beginner marketeers.

But it sure is a favourite for those who are into scaling their laser targeted segmentations and hyper personalised email journeys.

Associated with Studio, is Journey Builder – the very digital marketing tool that got me interested in working with Salesforce.

You can plan, personalise and optimise amazing branched drip programs.

Journey builder automatically adapt with every customer using predictive intelligence, becoming more powerful over time.

These nurture programs allow you to nurture and support customers at key moments in the entire customer life cycle.

Journey builder interact with the other tools and studios in the Salesforce digital marketing suite, such as Advertising Studio, and Mobile studio.

It’s this interaction that allows you to create these awesome marketing drip programs and lead nurturing tracks.

Want to see what go me so excited about this? Let us give you a demo:

Using Active Audiences, you can make advertising work like a 1:1 channel in Advertising Studio. You communicate with and manage your followings on social media, such as linkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Build audiences from social topics. Then use Social.com to create advertising campaigns.

Learn more: Salesforce Marketing Cloud Advertising Studio Video: Demo & talk @ London SFUG

Salesforce Marketing Cloud MCP or just MCP for short was previously called Interaction Studio.

Marketing Cloud Personalization is an integrated personalization and Real-Time Interaction Management (RTIM) platform.

It gives marketers the capability to deliver contextually relevant and real-time personalised interactions and experiences for customers at every touchpoint on their journey.

This solution reacts to a consumer’s real-time behaviour as he or she interacts with a brand across email, social and mobile, and offline via in-store or kiosks.

To win customers, and keep them longer.

With its built-in listening to every interaction with your brand in real time, you can discover what consumers really want. It matched this real-time insights with relevant off-line information. You can see how a customer goes through life cycle stages, and how he/she interact with what messages and respond to what experiences.

Let’s assume she clicks on a certain offer from a brand and then logs into the mobile app or calls the service centre. Then, Interaction Studio instantly updates that individual consumer profile with those real-time actions. Based on this, you, the marketer can present them with their best next experiences: promotions, discounts, offers or content.

That’s where CloudPages Reside.

You can use the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to deliver web experiences that are unique to individual customers. Instead of static pages, customers are shown dynamic pages based on their preferences and behaviour. This can result in better customer experiences and sales results.

Use Web Studio, to quickly build landing pages, micro-sites and mobile apps. This video shows how Web Studio works and how it integrates with other studios and builders, such as Content Builder and Journey builder, to create personalised customer journeys on the web, by email and via SMS.

You can also use CloudPages to create advanced AMP – quality emails. Learn more here: Salesforce Interactive Email.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Mobile Studio lets you create templates for any time of mobile sends: SMS, push notifications and messaging.

This Studio offers tremendous potential. Two reasons: 1) You love it: SMS text messages have a 98% open rate 2) they love it:  31% of people prefer text messages to phone calls.

Some examples: Photo promos can be offered when a known-customer enters a store. At POS, send an email sales confirmations. Or share product videos and audio tutorials for on-boarding clients.

Targeted push-notifications get customers to come back to your story. To your store. To your brand.

In short, Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Analytics Builder is a tool that builds reports – Datorama reports and regular reports. That’s not just any kind of reports. It’s granular, in context reporting.

SFMC Analytics Builder lets you measure and optimise your performance by channel, and every campaign element along the entire customer journey. Like so:

Einstein is Salesforce’s reference to Artificial Intelligence.

There are 4 Einstein components in Marketing Cloud: Messaging and Insights, copy insights, content selection, and Email recommendations.

Technically not part of Marketing Cloud but replacing one of its builders is Salesforce CDP.

Salesforce CDP lets you build highly targeted audiences. Learn more here: Salesforce CDP for a single customer view

This last video adds another advantage of Salesforce Marketing Cloud over other packages. And that is its integration with Salesforce’s Sales Cloud and Service Cloud.

This integration allows you to create a more complete customer view, more seamless customer journeys, matched with more streamlined your team tasks and workflows across the clouds.

In Conclusion

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive digital marketing hub, that offer many best-of-breed features and innovative capabilities through its ever expanding studios and builders.

CloudAnalysts has extensive experience and are leaders in marketing with Salesforce – with its Marketing cloud, Marketing cloud account engagement (Pardot) and related.

We show marketing innovators like yourself how to best leverage the platform to propel sales revenue and loyalty, while realising delightful personalised customer experience.

Take a first step towards your greater marketing success in a way that suits you best:

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Book a demo or talk with an expert today.

Contact us and we’ll reach out to you to answer your questions.