How Small Businesses Can Get the Most Out of Salesforce Marketing Cloud

For any small business, landing more customers and boosting revenues is a work in progress. It can prove to be an uphill battle when you’re in the same ecosystem as big players with no dearth of resources at their disposal. What if we told you that you could leverage a digital channel with a substantiated average ROI of 4200% for improving conversions, sales and boost revenues? That channel is email marketing and chances are you’re already using it in some shape and form. How close you come to leveraging that optimal ROI depends on how effectively and smartly you craft your email marketing initiatives.

That’s where a successful CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tool like Salesforce Marketing Cloud comes into the picture. But what is Salesforce Marketing Cloud? How can small businesses leverage it? What are its benefits in boosting your marketing campaigns? Let’s find out to help you redefine your email marketing approach:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud for Small Businesses

For small businesses, email marketing is a more practical and effective marketing channel for reaching out to a wide cross-section of the target audiences than any other marketing or sales initiative. For a simple reason that it promises a bigger reach at lower costs. However, creating successful email initiatives isn’t just about design and send. Every campaign you run, every email you send has to be carefully crafted, keeping in mind the end goals and a strategy to reach that goal.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud makes that easier for you by providing you a network of tools designed to churn out customized, accurate journeys. To begin with, the form builder tool on Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps you build and grow your subscriber list, helping you consistently reach a wider audience.

With it, you can set up different email triggers and automate emails for welcoming subscribers, thanking customers for shopping, updating them with shipping details, announcing new offers, and much more. This ensures that you are constantly engaging with your audience despite your limited resources. Besides, you can set key performance indicators (KPIs) for every email trigger to assess how well they’re performing, and tweak them using pointed insights.

SFMC also makes for an ideal ESP for small businesses owing to the diversity of its email templates, copy, and layout options that allow you to leverage interactive elements and dynamic designs for better engagement.

Packed with a host of cutting-edge features and functionalities, it streamlines the most crucial sales and marketing processes, thereby freeing up more resources. As a result, you can enhance the effectiveness of your campaigns, make them on par with the current industry standards and customer expectations, while also cutting costs.

As a small business with limited resources – both in financial and human – optimizing outreach without overshooting capabilities is perhaps your biggest goal. Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps you achieve just that.

Its range of comprehensive features that simplify creating campaigns, monitoring progress, and making changes where necessary, include:

• Real-time segmentation
• Client journey builder
• Profile management
• Email tracking
• Cross-channel content customization
• Detailed campaign reports
• Push notifications

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Features Small Business Can Leverage

Salesforce Marketing Cloud comes loaded with features and functionalities that can help you create cutting-edge email campaigns. These include:

• Content Tools

Personalization continues to be a dominating email trend in 2021 as well, and it’s likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Businesses report an increase in engagement by focusing on personalization. All of these tailor-made emails – including this one from AirBnB email on a booking update designed using Salesforce Marketing Cloud – are crafted using Artificial Intelligence. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud content tools are driven by AI to help you create impactful campaigns, tailored to the unique needs of your diverse customer base.

• Event Triggers

Knowing when to send out emails is just as crucial to their success rate as deciding what kind of emails you want to send. Brands that have aced the email marketing game narrow it down to the time at which the likelihood of an email being opened is the highest. You can leverage SFMC to predefine event triggers and send out emails to the right customers at the right time. Take, for example, this email sent out by AARP, welcoming the new subscriber. With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder, you can set behavior-based triggers to automate highly personalized emails. The SFMC system will automatically generate and deliver an appropriate email once an event is triggered.

• Email Templates

With modern email, rich, intricate visuals and interactive elements such as GIFs and videos can be shared just as easily as text. That’s why more and more marketing emails today are leveraging interactive elements for better engagement. For example, this loyalty reward email from Chipotle created with Salesforce Marketing Cloud creatively uses a GIF to grab and hold the reader’s attention.

With ready-to-use Salesforce email templates, you can create visually appealing, highly interactive emails that are sure to strike a chord with your target audience. Leveraging this functionality requires code-level know-how, and partnering with the right SFMC specialists can make your email campaign journeys more seamless and streamlined.

• Tracking and Testing

If you launch campaigns, send out emails, and then simply forget about them, you’ll never be able to gauge how effective or ineffective they were. That’s why tracking is an integral part of successful email marketing. The Email Studio feature of Salesforce Marketing Cloud comes pre-loaded with email tracking tools that help you gain clarity on open rates, CTRs, and more.

Just like tracking, testing your emails for effectiveness is also a central component of successful marketing through this digital channel. Given the dynamic nature, diverse outreach of emails, and the human factor involved, putting in place a standardized set of best practices to optimize them isn’t really an option. That’s why a CRM with testing tools is essential for discerning which emails are working and which ones are being consigned to the trash or spam folders.

• Built-in Analytics

Analytics can do a lot more than just track and test your emails. They perform a deep dive into your recipients’ interactions with your email, thus churning out valuable insights. So, when you integrate your email marketing initiatives with SFMC, it can gather and analyze data on customer behavior, and draw concrete, actionable conclusions from it. These can be used to create more focused campaigns. In short, by tying your email marketing to analytics, you make informed decisions regarding your marketing strategy rather than just shooting in the dark.

• Segmentation

Segmentation is one of the email marketing best practices that can drive up revenues by 760%. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud Email Studio allows you to target your audience by creating segments based on profile data. The in-built segmentation tools with simple drag-and-drop functionality make sorting your subscriber list into smaller, more targeted groups. This helps drive up engagement by ensuring that your messaging is always relevant to the audience. Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you can sort through and filter millions of profiles in a matter of seconds, and use these segmented lists to create tailor-made campaigns.

Benefits of Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Given these cutting-edge features, it’s amply clear that Salesforce Marketing Cloud has the potential to transform your email marketing game, the size of your business notwithstanding. Now, let’s see what it means for your bottom line with these tangible benefits:

• Shaping Customer Behavior

With features like predictive analysis and advanced analytics, you can assess future behavior patterns based on insights and evidence. By basing your email marketing campaigns on these predictions, you can not only ace the personalization game but also influence customer interactions with your business by offering them exactly what they need.

• Creating Custom CTAs

Again, thanks to vast mounds of customer data and advanced analytics to draw actionable insights from this data, you take customization of emails to the next level, tailoring CTAs based on the recipient’s profile, past behaviors, interests, and characteristics. Needless to say, the more pointed the CTA, the higher the likelihood of your customers engaging with it.

• Audience Segmentation

Audience segmentation is the Holy Grail of email marketing in the current ecosystem. After all, it is the key to delivering personalized experiences. Salesforce Marketing Cloud not only captures crucial data to base audience segmentation on but also creates different personas depending on customer’s interest, engagement level, or any other parameters that you specify.

• In-Depth Customer Base Knowledge

To support your email campaigns, this tool sources and links information from different resources to your marketing activities. With all crucial pieces of the puzzle carefully assorted and at your disposal, you already have all you need to know about your customer base to meet their expectations.

Conclusion

That email marketing is worth the effort is a foregone conclusion, well, provided it is done right. SFMC has all the requisite tools and functionalities to help you understand your customers and fine-tune your marketing campaigns as per their needs and expectations.

If you need assistance or hand-holding while integrating this CRM tool in your existing infrastructure and leverage it optimally, our certified specialists are here to help.