salesforce marketing cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio is the leading enterprise email marketing platform allowing marketers to deliver an intelligent personalised message at scale. Connecting commerce, sales, service and customer communities for a consistent customer journey. Now each message can be tailored using an intuitive UI with drag and drop tools, easily customising content for your target audience. While personalising unique content for each subscriber. Email marketers can leverage Einstein AI to predict the needs of their customers, empowering them to suggest the right product at the right time. With automation, brands can connect with customers with one-to-one messages even at the scale of millions. Email studio lets you easily switch between templates or code when creating the right look and feel for your message. Once your message is ready, email studio allows you to review each email before sending to each subscriber is delivered the right content. Once emails are sent, marketing teams can use first-party data to target and attract new customers through advertising across the web or connect with them on their mobile devices. Real-time analytics empowers you to monitor campaign performance across the entire customer journey. View campaign metrics to optimise campaigns and ensure users stay engaged. You can approve content, deliver campaigns and monitor performance, and manage users from anywhere. Before we talk about Design Strategy, let's look at what you can do with Marketing Cloud e-mail Studio. TARGET YOUR AUDIENCE Create profile data based segments to drive engagement. Deliver great content to your target audience Use drag-and-drop functionality to segment and fine-tune your subscribers, to deliver relevant messaging. Filter millions of profiles at the click of a mouse and get real-time counts for sending. Become more efficient by automating most tasks. Effortlessly import, segment, and filter data from any source to allow you to deliver focused campaigns. Discover the right audience with inbuilt intelligence Keep your most active subscribers engaged more often, and improve overall message deliverability by reducing messaging frequency to inactive subscribers. BUILD YOUR BEST EMAIL Create sophisticated, engaging messages. Deliver responsive design based messages to customers on any device Effortlessly optimize messages for mobile so that your emails appear exactly as you intended whenever and wherever they’re opened. Always. Use a library of customizable templates to build your emails Get creative with best-in-class templates and populate emails content in to time. Deliver dynamic messages that inspire call to action. Take advantage of user-friendly dynamic features like a personalized scripting language, drag-and-drop functionality and carousels to delight your subscribers in real-time. Engage customers throughout their journey with personalised messaging Foster strong customer relationships with conversations that engage at every stage of the customer lifecycle. PERSONALIZE YOUR CONTENT Deliver relevant and engaging email experiences in no time. Deliver data-centric content. Get the most out of your data using dynamic content and scale personalization across your campaigns. Enhance and enrich the subscriber experience. Deliver multi-dimensional, engaging, and delightful experiences to your subscribers’ inbox. Leverage Einstein to power personalization. Use AI to tailor content for each message based on individual user behaviour. Automate intelligent messages. Create your message once, and leave it to AI to deliver the best and freshest content every single time. Review metrics to refine your content over time. SCALE YOUR CAMPAIGNS Reach customers with 1-to-1 messages, even at the scale of millions. Send with confidence. Preview and test every message before sending to ensure quality and establish criteria to disallow accidental delivery of test messages. Automate the email journey. Boost your marketing team’s efficiency and simplify your job. Set up delivery schedules for messages so that customers experience your brand exactly the way you want with the minimal manual workload. Build 1-to-1 relationships with customers. Leverage flexibility and scalability of email studio and empower yourself to maintain engaging 1-to-1 relationships even with an audience of millions. Fine-tune on the go. Make iterations to your journey as you go, and run tests quickly. Understand what’s working, and what isn’t, and driving perfection in your campaigns. From building your email strategy to delivering seamless journeys, here are the 5 best email campaign design practices to help you drive customer engagement at scale. STRATEGIZE Develop your email plan of action. Know your audience, establish clear goals, and build a content strategy to maximise the impact of your email messaging. Build in-depth personas. Develop persona profiles having information about day-to-day work habits, challenges to conversion, and key questions. Leverage CRM data. Use your CRM to understand demographic and behavioural data, which allows you to segment your audience effectively. Identify consumer needs. Clearly identify the journey of your target audience. Whether it be onboarding or a re-engagement email journey. Set a clear vision for email marketing. Set specific goals. Outline the objective you wish to achieve through your email campaigns such as brand awareness, deeper engagement, or driving sales. Create useful content. Understand how and why your audience should connect with your message and how you can deliver content that meets their needs. Chart your path. Define how you intend to measure the success of your email strategy both for your business as well as your audience. Develop an effective, customised content strategy. Map clear journeys. Plan for different email journeys, such as transactional and onboarding journeys, that show you a connected flow from one email in a journey to the next. Make a schedule. Create an outbound email calendar that details the frequency of your outgoing communication. Collect useful metrics. Determine the data collection mechanism to measure the success of your outreach program. Parameters such as open rates, click-through rates, landing page impressions, sales originating from your emails, can help you get clarity on the effectiveness of your campaign. DESIGN Content is vital to great email design. Engage your audience with effective content. Sender ame: Cleary reveal your identity to the viewer Subject line: Create an effective subject lines that reflects the content in the email to encourage engagement. Header: This is at the top of your email area  that includes your brand’s logo. Navigation bar: The navigation bar mirrors your website navigation and drives traffic to key entry points of your site. Primary message: The primary message includes your main reason for reaching out to your audience. Social media bar: Include links to your brand’s pages on social media networks. Footer: This includes an unsubscribe link, compliance information or link, and disclaimers.   Device friendly Content.   Automatically tailor messaging, that’s fits any device.     Design to inspire engagement.   Create and truly responsive designs powered by live content     Start with coding.   Use CSS3 to adjust font size, frame width, and image size for a richer experience.   DELIVER Send every email with confidence. Ensure inbox delivery and avoid the spam and junk folders. Get permission twice. Ensure that you are sending emails only to an engaged audience by using double opt-ins like email or SMS to confirm with new subscribers. Set clear expectations. Ensure subscribers know what they’re getting and when is the communication expected. Determine the best time for engagement. Boost your reputation. Establish a good sending reputation by using a sender authentication package, a collection of products that optimizes email delivery. Clean your list. Clean your subscriber lists regularly by reviewing data such as open rates. Segment subscribers who haven’t engaged with your emails over a certain period, and launch re-engagement emails. Avoid ambiguous “from” addresses. Avoid using no-reply@business.com or other such impersonal sender addresses. Steer clear of being marked as spam by subscribers and email service providers. Keep it legal. Abide by the CAN-SPAM act. Include a clearly visible unsubscribe option, honor unsubscribe requests, and choose a legitimate “from” address. ANALYZE Test emails to optimize performance. Go deeper into demographic, behavioral, and contextual data and personalize every email. Demographic data: Aggregate demographic data that may include subscriber’s name, gender, date of birth, mailing address, and other information collected on a signup form. Behavioral data: Track actions across multiple channels. This may include includes browsing activity, downloads, purchase history, email opens, and more. Contextual data: Marketing teams can use contextual data to deliver just in time experiences, the moment an email is opened. Measure metrics to understand email performance after sending. Track positive results data. Track the delivery rate, open rate, click-through rate, conversion rate, to have a deeper view into the engagement levels. Learn from negative results data. Adjust your strategy based on what’s not working. Assess unsubscribe rates bounce rates to re-align your campaign. Know your testing audience. Test campaigns with new subscribers because they haven’t been influenced by previous marketing or communication campaigns. Avoid targeting segments that are dormant that can potentially dilute results. ELEVATE Evolve your email strategy as you grow. Know the consumer experience. Take stock of all other consumer touchpoints across your company’s channels, including social media, SMS, website, app, and even sales and service interactions. Assess the role of email. Understand how email fits into each individual consumer’s journey. Identify opportunities to boost experiences in awareness, acquisition, onboarding, engagement and retention. Inform your adjustments. Test the consumer’s journey before going live. Modify and optimize the journey before your subscribers actually experience it to give your marketing teams the best chance at success. Contact Girikon today, a certified Salesforce Consulting Partner to help you create engaging, objective-oriented email campaigns that deliver results. Questions? Our reps have answers. CONTACT AN EXPERT

If delivering personalized experiences to your customers at every touchpoint is a priority, leveraging Salesforce Marketing Cloud makes sense. Organizations can leverage this omnichannel marketing platform to plan, personalize, and optimize their marketing campaigns to make their workflows effective and efficient. However, to tap into the complete potential of the Salesforce marketing cloud, it’s essential to ensure its’ successful implementation. Reaching out to a certified and experienced Salesforce Consultant can be advantageous. It’s essential to take note of the following best practices to ensure the strategic and successful implementation of Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Determine a Starting Point: Salesforce Marketing Cloud is made up of multiple tools. However, it isn’t easy to implement them instantly and leverage their benefits. So, it is essential to set your business priorities, customer needs and processes while determining a starting point and then figuring out which tool to start with. Gather the Right Team: It is essential to bring the right people aboard to ensure the successful implementation of the marketing cloud. It is vital to have people who can represent your business and associates with strong technical acumen in your team. It is also crucial to identify sponsors and stakeholders who will be involved in the implementation process.  Establish a Clear Goal: Once you have determined the starting point and have brought the right team in place, it’s time to define a clear goal using Marketing Cloud for your first project. Choosing a measurable goal is suggested related to business objectives to exhibit greater return on investment. Define Your Audience: Once you have set your goals, it’s time to define your audience and then after your plan has been established, clarify your audience (both from business and technical perspectives) and then resolve any discrepancies in your CRM. Recognize and gather data required to run a campaign for your target audience. Map the customer journey: Make sure you factor in all the channels and touchpoints to evaluate the existing state of your customer’s journey. Also, ensure to identify the significant challenges and recreate their journey to make the most of the marketing cloud product you are leveraging.  Communicate Effectively: Effective communication is a significant aspect of managing change, creating liability and transparency. It’s essential to develop a plan for stakeholders and sponsors to communicate your adoption of the marketing cloud. To keep making progress, make sure to raise performance, increase learning, and remove roadblocks. Move Ahead with Urgency: Don’t allow anything to hinder your adoption of Marketing Cloud. Make sure you move toward the launch date with urgency by imbibing flexibility within your team’s culture. Take Time to Review: Finally, take some time out to retrospect what worked in your favor and what didn’t and all this from a team and client perspective. Rejoicing success and collecting feedback is critical to improving your cloud practice over time. Final Words: It takes time and patience to get started with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Every participant part of the implementation process should have a strategic mindset to work through the lengthy implementation process. Once done successfully, the results are attained in saved time, streamlined workflows, and augmented productivity. It is essential to seek Salesforce support from a reliable implementation partner to ensure successful implementation.

The business landscape is constantly evolving. Organizations should thus lookout for new ways to grow their business. One such option, which organizations should leverage to remain competitive, is a ‘Marketing automation software that can help organizations streamline and automate their workflows and marketing activities. Marketing automation software can help improve operational efficiency, which further translates to greater ROI. However, it is crucial to select the right marketing platform that can power up your marketing efforts. According to a research report shared by Frost & Sullivan’s, revenue generated from global marketing automation software stands at $550.7 million and is projected to reach $1.9 billion by 2020  Before zeroing in upon the right platform, businesses need to consider their specific needs. Salesforce Pardot and Marketing cloud are two powerful marketing platforms organizations can leverage to streamline their marketing activities. But before making a choice, it’s essential to delve in a bit deeper to know more about each of them:  Users: While Pardot is positioned for B2B organizations, Marketing cloud is designed for B2C use cases. Since, Pardot caters to the b2b segment, it primarily revolves around lead management as a result of a longer sales cycle. Consequently, Pardot users focus on preparing email campaigns with an objective of lead nurturing. To support lead nurturing, Pardot offers a set of lead grading and scoring tools, which allows users to allot scores basis the actions of customers and their engagement with the emails, website, etc. The features of the Salesforce marketing cloud allow users to offer a completely personalized experience to every customer. From creating roadmaps of the customer journey, planning campaigns and promotion to data management and cross-channel messaging, SFMC with its array of features offers support to different marketing segments. Though the Salesforce marketing cloud has a more powerful and comprehensive marketing suite than its counterpart, it misses out on the sales-and-marketing alignment part i.e. lead scoring. However, it is possible to integrate lead scoring in the Salesforce marketing cloud.  Channels: Since, Pardot caters to the B2B space, users can expect complete support when it comes to channels such as emails, website, and social media. However, cross-channel options are limited in Pardot. The SFMC platform supports various channel engagements as it has in its arsenal several tools that help users to provide support to its customer via every channel including web, SMS, advertising, social media, and email. Each of them can be managed via separate applications on the platform.  Integration: It’s important to know that to leverage the full potential of Pardot and SFMC, a database is required. Though Pardot is commonly integrated with Salesforce’s Service or Cloud (CRM), it also integrates well with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Sugar CRM, and NetSuite. Offering a full marketing suite, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be integrated with Salesforce solutions such as Sales, service or Community Cloud besides other CRM systems. Though, the platform doesn’t offer a database as a part of the package, a Data Management Platform (DMP) can be integrated into your Marketing Cloud by paying some extra cost.  Price: Since, Pardot and Salesforce marketing cloud serves two different models i.e. (B2B and B2C), they have different pricing structures. For Pardot, the pricing is available online and is segregated in three different categories i.e. basic, intermediate and advanced, basis the automation features one wishes to access. However, there are no standard pricing options available online for the Salesforce marketing cloud. Though the cost will certainly be more than Pardot, it’s more likely calculated basis the volume of data as B2C companies deal with daily customer interactions and transactions. The pricing for the Salesforce Marketing Cloud also takes into account the cost of implementation and the number of users using the platform.   Which is the Right Fit for Your Business?  Both Pardot and marketing cloud have their share of pros and cons. However, the right platform for your business would depend on your specific business requirement and business type. So, it can be inferred that while the Marketing cloud is ideal for B2C customers, Pardot is appropriate for businesses looking to nurture their sales process by aligning the sales and marketing teams. If you are still on the fence regarding the best fit for your business, you must consider partnering with a reliable  Salesforce consultant.   Girikon – A reputed name in the IT space offers end-to-end Salesforce consulting services for businesses looking for reliable Salesforce implementation and consultation. 

Automation has now become an indispensable part of every software and service, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a packet of digital marketing automation and analytics. It’s good to see website analytics and email data that run together seamlessly and where we require it. More profits have come out with the partnership between Google Analytics 360 and Salesforce. It allows trailing campaign data and website performance metrics from Google Analytics and makes it available within Salesforce Marketing Cloud. With this integration, transactions that occur outside of email, or landing page templates generated by the tool are traced. Google Analytics serves as a data hub covering the success of different campaigns from different tools, marketers can get a more comprehensive picture of their email journey and mobile marketing efforts and how they affect website behaviour and conversions. Integration has allowed a new set of metrics accessible in the Marketing Cloud interface: Site Usage Sessions Bounce Rate Goals Goal Completions Goal Value Goal Conversion Rate Abandonment Rate E-commerce Ecommerce Conversion Rate Revenue Transactions Average Order Value Till now, there was no way to view Google Analytics data along with email metrics. The most simple solution to this problem has always been to use constant campaign tracking parameters, export data from diverse systems, and mix them together in a third reporting suite. Now the process has become simple which means marketers have perspicacity at an arm’s length. It tracks traffic on the website, check clicks to the website and determine the source of traffic on the site. Google Analytics 360 provides easy reporting. The integration uses campaign tracking parameters from emails to correlate website visits with a Marketing Cloud campaign. When you connect this data with the offline exchange and qualified lead data from Salesforce Sales Cloud, we are proposing the free-flowing marketing data paradise we’ve all fantasised of. With this increased feature, we as a Salesforce Consulting Partner are delighted as we can provide our customers with satisfying solutions.