This is an age when marketing and advertising are everywhere. From checking Facebook as soon as you wake up to listening to a podcast on the way to work, and from the dozens of promotional emails you receive in your inbox daily to watching a couple of ads for every YouTube video you watch before going to bed, there’s barely a place where you don’t find yourself not being sold a product or service.
As a marketer, this is both an opportunity and a challenge rolled into one. It’s an opportunity thanks to the plethora of marketing channels that you can leverage to reach customers. However, at the same time, it’s a challenge because engagement beco Salesforce Marketing Cloud mes all the more difficult to achieve.
To succeed today, you need to maintain a fine balance between knowing exactly what to communicate and how often to do it, besides knowing whom you’re talking to. Thankfully, with Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) by your side, this job becomes much easier.
SFMC makes use of predictive analysis techniques with the help of which it can leverage historical data to predict future trends. This allows marketers to plan their marketing strategy efficiently. The platform offers various tools which allow marketers to understand their customers and shape their experiences proactively.
Let’s look at a few marketing challenges that Salesforce Marketing Cloud easily helps us tackle.
1. Enhancing engagement with effective communication
You have a decent-sized pool of customers who have signed up for your emails. However, every time you send out an email (and a very beautifully crafted piece of communication at that), very few open it and even fewer click on the Call to Action (CTA) links. On one hand, this lack of conversion is affecting your sales and on the other, you’re slipping further out of the customer’s headspace.
This is a scenario that affects companies both large and small. There’s probably no faster way of losing a customer’s interest than by sending a piece of communication that has nothing to do with their preferences, browsing history and previous purchases.
SFMC to the rescue…
SFMC gives you a complete profile of your customers, including their likes, clicks and purchases. This profiling enables you to tailor and personalise the content you send out.
Creating custom content is easy to do with Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s user interface. Just drag and drop dynamic content blocks, adjust your delay times, set action triggers, and your campaign is good to go. You can also test out multiple campaigns by A/B testing them to see which one performs the best from a conversion and Average Order Value (AOV) point of view.
Remember, retaining a customer is much easier than acquiring a new one, so don’t let them go!
2. Getting deeper insights about your target audience
Are you sending out emails advertising nappies and baby products to a 23-year-old man who has previously bought a guitar from you? Or putting up ads about your “trending graphic tees” and not targeting them according to an age group or location? Knowing what your customer will respond to stems from knowing who he or she is.
Customer data helps in a number of ways. It gives a face to the person you’re talking to. For instance, if one of your customers has had a poor experience with your brand previously, getting a faulty product for instance, it might be prudent to not send him too many promotional emails and instead try to ask him to rate the customer service you offered them.
SFMC to the rescue…
Salesforce Marketing Cloud gives you several options to access customer data and provide personalised content. Take the Audience Builder, for instance. This is a tool that lets you segment your customers into audiences which you can use to send specific messages. Say you have an e-commerce website for sports gear. Using Audience Builder, you can bucket your customer base by the type of sport they are interested in, like football, cricket or swimming.
The Journey Builder, another SFMC feature, lets you map out the communication journey, using all the different channels available, helping you plan each step with precision. You can build multiple journeys with the same objective (getting two different sets of customers to download your app, for example) and have different journeys with different objectives for the same customer (download the app or check out a new product collection).
3. Extending superior customer experiences
Stories have a power that no marketer can deny. Besides, they are a great way to stand out from the crowd of brands vying to catch your customers’ attention. Gone are the days when people would go out seeking brands. Nowadays, not even top brands are exempt from this pressure. Which is why, storytelling becomes so important.
For large companies, this means integrating all your communications into one 360-degree campaign. For smaller firms, it’s a chance to build communities by using a mix of creativity and data insights.
SFMC to the rescue…
With SFMC, you get a customer’s behavioral history at your fingertips. This includes everything the person has bought, every instance of abandoning a purchase, every product page they have browsed and more. This can help you identify customers who are early adopters, for example. This means, targeting this group of customers with your new spring summer collection will ensure better conversion, than sending it to a group of users who only buy discounted products. Therefore, having an Early Adopters or Discount Customers journey planned will help you increase engagement, conversion as well as customer satisfaction.
Wrap Up
Marketing involves tackling business challenges day in and day out. The ones that are described here are only the tip of the iceberg. However, nothing helps in this fight like access to data and the right tools. When you have a software like Salesforce Marketing Cloud at your disposal, you can make quick work of most of these challenges. So, whether you belong to a start-up that is trying to carve a niche for itself in the market or an established business looking to improve engagement and conversion, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is your best choice when it comes to digital marketing automation and analytics software and services.