Tips to get the best out of Salesforce Marketing Cloud

According to the Salesforce relationship survey, Salesforce marketing cloud improves the efficiency of businesses by: 

• Increasing marketing ROI by 25%
• Increasing lead volume by 27%
• Increasing lead conversion by 30%

Therefore, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that Salesforce marketing cloud works as an impeccable marketing automation software. In fact, Salesforce has emerged as the leader in marketing automation and serves as the preferred email provider across the globe.

With 64% of customers preferring email communication over other digital channels, it is imperative that you leverage Salesforce to the core to have an edge over competitors. Salesforce marketing cloud has a set of key tools to cover-up all your marketing needs. Let’s briefly look into them:

Journey Builder

Journey builder takes the help of data management tools to create communication scenarios for a variety of customer segments in an engaging way, thereby facilitating data-driven customer-focused marketing. 

Email Studio

Email Studio facilitates effective communication with customers by covering features like 

1. Customer segmentation 
2. Personalized email templates
3. Dynamic content
4. Responsive and optimized email design
5. A/B testing support
6. Email analytics
7. Preview and test

Salesforce DMP

Salesforce Data Management Platform (DMP) collects and stores data from a variety of customer touchpoints like phone calls, social media, emails, live chats, etc. It helps the marketing team extract insights about the subscribers. As a result, segmentation and personalization become easy, thereby increasing both customer engagement and revenue. 

Data Studio

Data Studio works as a marketplace of second-party data. It is a data-sharing solution that helps purchasers and data owners connect directly for exchanging information in a safe environment.

Social Studio

Marketers can leverage Social Studio to build their social media presence by communicating with customers on social media while creating engaging content and promoting marketing campaigns. 

Advertising Studio

Advertising studio makes use of data stored in Salesforce for sending relevant advertisements to the customers through Google Search and various social media platforms.

Mobile Studio

Mobile studio allows marketers to send personalized messages and push notifications to a variety of customer segments. It even helps in sending time-sensitive and geofence messages. 

Interaction Studio

Interaction Studio works towards capturing each and every customer interaction with your brand in real-time. It helps the marketers in leveraging the data in the right way when its advantages can be extracted completely. 

Now, since you know it all about the various Salesforce tools, here’s how you can make the most out of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Take a look:

1. Set up an initial point and leverage the Salesforce tools

As mentioned above, there are a lot of Salesforce tools that you can use for seamless functioning of your business. However, you can’t implement and harness the power of all the tools at once. Therefore, it becomes imperative for you to get hold of your business priorities while processing the needs and wants of your customers. This would help you in determining an initial point and facilitate easy implementation of your Salesforce strategy with the tools that would best suit your business needs. 

2. Build the right team

For successfully implementing your marketing cloud strategy, it is critical to find the right team. Therefore, it is important to choose team members who aren’t only focused on showcasing your business strategy but, also have the capability to understand the customer’s needs and embrace changes without fearing the unknown. In addition, make sure they have a strong technical background. It would enable them to create an effective strategy while determining the market requirements correctly. 

3. Always take help

You have already set up your initial point and your business team is ready too. So, what’s the next step? Seeking out help. Yes, there’s no harm in asking for help if you need any. So, take a look at the work required, analyze the spots and gaps and determine if it may require any help from a qualified partner. 

4. Have well-defined, clear goals

Having a realistic and measurable goal is the key to success in Salesforce marketing cloud implementation. Remember, well-defined and clear goals don’t only relate to business objectives seamlessly but also facilitate the easy demonstration of ROI while streamlining your business strategy smoothly.

5. Know your audience well

Once you have established the goal, the next step is to define your target audience. Make sure you do it from a technical and business perspective, both. Further, you need to reconcile any inconsistencies prevailing within your CRM and collect the necessary data for targeting your audience. You can take the help of Data Studio to extract relevant data and reach a new audience base. 

6. Keep a close watch on your customer’s journey and analyze

It is important to keep a check on your customer’s sales funnel position. It would help you understand your customer’s current status in their journey. In short, it is critical to analyze all the channels and touchpoints they experience with your brand. Consequently, you can take the help of Interaction Studio to understand how a customer’s journey is unfolding whilst interacting with your company.  This would give you a chance to identify all the key challenges and modify the customer journey accordingly. 

7. Documentation is the key

It is important to document anything and everything that goes within your business. Though certain things might look so obvious and unforgettable, chances of them being forgotten when you need them a few years down the line become really high. So, you’ll save yourself from a lot of problems by setting standards for processes like folder structures and naming files. You must also document the blueprint of Data models, the map of your internal data and a list of API interactions. 

8. Communication is critical

Formulating a communication plan is imperative for targeting your sponsors and stakeholders. Once you communicate the adoption of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it would help you in managing change and creating accountability. 

9. Keep moving forward

Remember, there are going to be a lot of surprises, unanswered questions and doubts coming your way throughout your Salesforce Marketing Cloud adoption journey. Don’t allow these deter you from your aim. In fact, go ahead, move forward towards your launch date and teach your team to be fearless, flexible and open to changes. 

10. Take out time for analysis and review

The last but not the least is taking out time for analysis and review post-launch. It would give you a clear insight into what worked for your business and what didn’t. Make sure you analyze everything from your team’s perspective along with the customer’s perspective. The feedback collected will help you take corrective measures wherever needed and improve your marketing cloud strategy over time. 

Wrap up

The wide range of marketing cloud services offered by Salesforce has made it a go-to name for marketers. In fact, Salesforce Marketing Cloud works seamlessly in delivering relevant personalized journeys to your customer base across the right channel and devices. It also allows you to take advantage of its various integrated solutions such as email studio, journey builder, etc. All in all, Salesforce marketing cloud with its unique customer management approach, is helping businesses achieve their objectives and build new goals while giving a clear visualization into the customer’s journey. 

Moreover, with 1600 customers paying 1 million US dollars a year for the Salesforce services, its importance and popularity in the tech world are quite clear. Therefore, if you wish to be ahead in the race to perfection, it’s high time you make the most out of the Salesforce cloud services. Keep in mind the above-mentioned tips and you will be good to go.