In April 2022, Salesforce announced that many of their SFMC products will be getting a new name. According to company insiders, the name change aims to unite all SFMC capabilities to i) “more easily connect each moment in your customer relationships” and, ii) introduce a new vocabulary to better describe these capabilities.
If you are wondering how the change could impact your email marketing program, this article is for you. Here’s everything you need to know about Marketing Cloud Engagement.
What is Marketing Cloud Engagement?
Marketing Cloud Engagement includes:
- Email Studio
- Content Builder
- Journey Builder
- Mobile Studio
- Marketing Cloud Advertising
- Intelligence Reports for Engagement
The integration of these tools into one unified platform enables brands to build a data-first email marketing strategy focused on customers. It helps unite data, teams, and technology to help you understand your customers better and use this knowledge to personalize and optimize each interaction with them at scale and in real time in order to build meaningful relationships.
Email Studio is a great way to create targeted and scalable messaging and content for a wide range of campaigns — from automated triggers to one-off promotions. Each campaign can be customized with readymade templates and SFMC’s AMPscript scripting language.
Email Studio is complemented by Content Builder to build content for emails, landing pages, and even text messages. With this tool, you can easily build reusable content blocks to maintain brand consistency and get campaigns out faster. If you want to deliver dynamic messages, Content Builder and Email Studio will help you add interactive content like carousels and weather reports that delight subscribers in real time.
Journey Builder will help you build 1-on-1 customer journeys. Each journey can contain multiple paths and you can optimize it by:
- Leveraging first-party data to predict preferences and create compelling content that resonates with each customer
- Sending automated messages for more relevant interactions via email
- Using built-in drag-and-drop tools to automate journeys and easily connect experiences
- Using one “voice” across every marketing channel including email
- Automating decision splits and actions at the speed of every customer’s engagement
- Analyzing results and acting quickly to optimize your email marketing program’s performance
Marketing Cloud Engagement incorporates Einstein AI to tailor the content in each email based on individual user behavior. You can also automate intelligent messages, deliver fresh content at any time, and refine campaigns over time to continually engage with subscribers and maintain brand relevance.
Intelligence Reports for Engagement provides prebuilt dashboards for email and journeys so you get a single view of campaign performance and can act quickly to optimize campaigns and maximize their impact. You can also create custom dashboards, share important KPIs with key stakeholders, export granular data to build personalized messages and journeys, and group large data volumes across any metric with pivot tables.
Together, these tools will help you create relevant, connected customer journeys for each email campaign. You can also build and personalize campaigns to win subscribers and engage with them “in the inbox”. Plus, these tools bring the power of unified data and AI-powered insights to help you send the right message to the right subscriber and at just the right time.
Marketing Cloud Engagement: Get the Facts Right
Fact #1: Integrations
Integrations are available that connect SFMC’s Customer Data Platform, Personalization, Engagement, and Intelligence. Moreover, as we have already seen, Intelligence – formerly known as Datorama – is now embedded right into the Engagement experience. The aim is to unify analytics and help you leverage AI insights to improve your interactions with each customer in real time and at scale.
Fact #2: No immediate changes
Despite the name change, there will be no immediate changes to login access, URLs, or other infrastructure considerations. The Salesforce team is still planning these changes and will publish more information in time.
Fact #3: How updates will be made and communicated
Salesforce will make changes in a phased manner, starting with the website and then with marketing and sales communications. In the second half of 2022, updates will be made to the products, Help and Training, Customer Success, Support, and external certifications.
Fact #4: Marketing Cloud Engagement is suitable for many industries and use cases
The product name change will not affect the usefulness of SFMC for a wide range of industries and use cases, including:
- Communications and media
- Financial services
- Healthcare
- Life sciences
- Tech
- Manufacturing
- Retail
- Consumer goods
In any of these industries, marketing teams can use Marketing Cloud Engagement to:
- Implement intelligent, data-driven marketing to reach new audiences
- Deliver tailored customer experiences at every step of the brand journey
- Engage with personalized and relevant communications
- Build trusted relationships with relevant messaging
- Engage with prospects and leads to build the sales pipeline
- Harness a single view of customers to understand them better and engage with them to promote brand loyalty and advocacy
What Can You Do with Marketing Cloud Engagement
Marketing Cloud Engagement is much more than a platform for designing and sending email campaigns for every customer at scale. With its tools and AI-enabled features, you can also:
- Target the right audience by creating subscriber profiles, segmenting real-time big data, and leveraging drag-and-drop segmentation
- Send triggered communications based on customer actions
- Automate email workflows and campaigns
- Leverage data and SFMC Einstein to deliver more relevant messages, find the optimal range of message sends, identify over and under-messaged contacts, and retarget subscribers with email marketing campaigns.
- Increase conversions with A/B testing, personalized subject lines and message content, and triggered email responses to specific customer activities
Marketing Cloud Engagement also includes capabilities to help you increase the efficiency of your email marketing program. Set custom user roles and permissions for different tiers of agents. You can also share data and set cross-departmental event triggers to unite sales, service, and marketing efforts, improve collaboration between these teams, and remove the silos that cause inefficiencies and reduce transparency. Do keep in mind that some of these features are only available in the more advanced editions (see the sections below)
Marketing Cloud Engagement: Editions
Marketing Cloud Engagement is available in four versions or “editions”:
- Basic: Suitable for personalized promotional email marketing
- Pro: Includes capabilities for personalized email marketing automation
- Corporate: Includes strategic solutions for personalized cross-channel marketing
- Enterprise: Best if you need to manage multiple businesses or build sophisticated customer journeys across channels, brands, and geographies
All four editions include capabilities for email marketing and content creation. However, the Basic and Pro versions do not include Journey Builder. Building journeys is a great way to build deeper relationships with customers and also measure the effectiveness of each interaction your brand has with them. So, if you need to design customer journeys that trigger responses to activity throughout the customer lifecycle, you will need the Corporate or Enterprise editions.
Further, the Corporate and Enterprise editions incorporate SFMC Einstein, a powerful AI engine to guide and improve your email marketing efforts. So, the Basic or Pro versions will not suffice if you need AI support to:
- Optimize and create personalized email content, subject lines, and calls to action
- Generate predictive models to determine a subscriber’s likelihood to open your emails or click links
- Monitor campaign open rates, click rates, and unsubscribe rates
- Determine the most optimal time to send a message to subscribers to increase the likelihood of opens
- Understand if subscribers are over- or unsaturated by the number of emails they receive from your brand
Only the Corporate and Enterprise versions include Einstein features like:
- Einstein Engagement Scoring
- Einstein Messaging Insights
- Einstein Send Time Optimization
- Einstein Engagement Frequency
- Einstein Copy Insights
- Einstein Email Recommendations
Marketing Cloud Engagement: Pricing
Marketing Cloud Engagement offers tiered pricing depending on the edition you choose (which itself would depend on your specific email marketing needs). The cost of the Basic edition starts at $400. The Pro and Corporate editions cost $1,250 and $3,750, respectively.
| Basic | Pro | Corporate | |
| Cost | $400 | $1250 | $3750 |
| Period | Monthly | Monthly | Monthly |
| Billing cycle | Annual | Annual | Annual |
Salesforce does not publish the cost of the Enterprise edition of Marketing Cloud Engagement since it depends on contact and message volume.
Regardless of which edition you select, these numbers refer to monthly costs and you will be billed annually. Nonetheless, you can purchase licenses of Salesforce Essentials with a monthly or annual contract and get started with a free trial. It’s best to talk directly with a Salesforce sales representative to discuss payment and billing options for the edition you need. They will also explain whether you can upgrade to a different edition, when, and under what conditions.
Conclusion
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement unites multiple capabilities to bring a more unified solution that helps you connect each moment in your customer relationships. Contact Email Uplers Team If you need further information about Marketing Cloud Engagement or how it may affect your email marketing program, contact the Email Uplers team.