September 07, 2018
This post is the fifth one in the Salesforce solution series and in it we will discuss the different features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud that makes it the ultimate tool for future marketers.
Ask any digital marketer out there, what keeps them from unleashing their complete potential to boost the growth of their company? Most of them will answer that it is the amount of time that is consumed to manage and analyse siloed systems.
Indeed, the data analytics and digitisation of services in all the possible sectors have made it easy for the marketers to formulate perfect digital marketing strategies, to attract, convert, and retain customers all along the buyer’s journey. But the segregated platforms make the whole task a time-consuming affair, keeping marketers from taking the most benefits from their efforts in real-time data analytics.
Now Salesforce being the ultimate solution provider of organisations has proven time and again how it is the ideal Customer Relationship Management partner for its clients. The same thing has been brought to light again when it acquired ExactTarget back in 2014, to add a more integrated marketing automation tool in its suite. Since then, the tool has been upgraded to meet with the ever-changing market requirements. Today, it stands as the most advanced and marketing automation tool that combines the efforts of all marketing and business teams. Following the example of Salesforce in being a true partner of its clients, we too are putting forward efforts to educate our clients in extracting the most value out of their investments in Salesforce development. With this aim, we have previously posted features on Salesforce Sales Cloud, Salesforce Analytics Cloud, and Salesforce Integration Cloud, for a more comprehensive approach with best Salesforce practices, you can click on the link and bookmark all these posts for future reference. So without further ado, let’s dive in and learn more about the Salesforce Marketing Cloud and its features.
With Journey Builder from Salesforce Marketing Cloud, your marketing team can create a personalised journey for each of your customers, on scale. With the tool, you can also enable your sales and marketing team to collaborate and give your customers a more relevant experience in a more connected manner. You can also enable the customers to choose how, when, where, and on what channel they would prefer to engage with you. In short, the tool allows you to put the old saying of ‘customer is the king’ on the pedestal, and formulate all your marketing and sales strategies with scalability and growth in mind. With it, you can automate the engagement optimisation for the customers on all the steps of the funnel. For example, for the customers on the onboarding stage, you can set rewards programs, and for customers who have abandoned their cart, you can provide details for discount and loyalty programs. Other functions you can streamline with this tool include marketing through the customers’ preferred channel and ensuring ideal after-sales services.
Email Studio by Salesforce is one of the most prominent email marketing tools, especially for the Salesforce users, that allows the marketers to include more personalisation in their efforts. With it, they can connect with customer, with the most relevant information, and then set them on a consistent journey of your brand in a more personalised manner. And what makes it more exciting is how it simplifies the entire process by allowing the marketers to do all their tasks with simple drag-and-drop functionalities.
Now you can also connect your sales, marketing and service teams with your customers on social media channels. That way you can get real-time details on what your customers are saying about your brand and competitors. You can also get an insight into their sentiments to offer them a more personalised solution right there. Your sales and services team can also respond directly to the queries and grievances. Apart from this, you can, of course, streamline your social media optimisation processes. You can quickly add content on your social media campaigns with integrated partner apps. It also has a built-in photo-editor app, so that you can customise your post’s images right there on the said platform. You can also use the tool to boost your organic content or manage your social advertising by adding a budget and setting the timelines, much like what you do on the social media platforms themselves.
Advertising studio from Salesforce allows you to synchronise your advertising efforts with your business’s CRM data. That way you can better optimise your efforts to create a seamless and more relevant one-to-one journey for your customers. Furthermore, all your data will also be held in a more secure environment where it can directly be used for the optimisation of your advertising campaigns. The tool also allows you to create personalised advertising experience for your customers, regardless of their position in the customer journey. Connecting the tool with Journey builder will give you more leverage for streamlining your advertising efforts through multiple channels, including emails, social media, and google search. You can also use it to manage your display advertising ecosystem, by taking insights from your buyer persona’s lookalikes and then creating campaigns to target them as well.
Salesforce, taking into consideration the ever-increasing reliance of people on smartphones, has also included a dedicated Mobile studio in its marketing cloud suite. The primary function of the studio is to allow you to connect with your customers through mobile messaging. With it, you can send personalised content to your customers via SMS, push notifications, and even chat app messages. There are also some pre-built templates that reduce your overhead so that you simply focus on the personalisation of the messages and increase the outcome of your efforts. Considering the convenience and preferences of the customers, the tool also makes it easy to personalise and send messages for opt-ins to grow your subscriber base. There are standard templates for all kinds of notifications including messages for real-time shipping tracking, appointment reminders, time-sensitive fraud alerts, and alerts for changes in customer accounts. The studio can also get connected to your apps in customers’ mobile phones to collect insights and send them information on your sales. You can also use it to send personalised notifications to your customers whenever they are within the set radius of your physical store, and once they are in the store, you can send them information on discounts and sales in your store, creating a deeply personalised experience for all your customers that will, in turn, convert into loyalty.
The Interaction studio creates a seamless journey for your customers at every touchpoint of your brand. The built-in features of the tool allow you to integrate all the information of your customers’ engagement with your brand. That is, you will get a complete overview of your customers’ journey with your brand, including information from online as well as offline touchpoints. That also means, your marketing and service teams will have real-time insights from your customers that will allow them to build an engagement profile over their intents and preferred channels. All these information collected through the interactive studio can then be integrated with the action-tools of the suite like the journey builder and mobile studio so that you can take the next best step for promoting your marketing efforts at the precise right time.
Analytics builder simplifies the entire process of analysing customer data for a more relevant one-to-one experience. Like any perfect analytics solution, the Analytics Builder from Salesforce Marketing Cloud has all the basic tools for getting real-time, and comparative insights from the varied channels including email, mobiles, social media platforms, and advertisements. It also provides complete ease in the creation of custom reports that collect and shows insights from all the above-mentioned channels, to draw even more actionable insights. With easy drag-and-drop functionality, a matrix-of-sort can also be created to get a better visualisation over the multiple campaigns and their effects on the attributes like customer loyalty status.
Remember what we mentioned about how the management overhead of the siloed systems affects the productivity of marketing efforts? Well, while all the tools in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud are designed for a harmonious customer journey, there’s another dedicated tool that combines all the efforts of your marketing, service, and sales team for better collaboration. Marketing Command Center acts as the centre of all your marketing efforts, where the whole of your company can track and get valuable insights on how the customers are interacting with your brand across different channels. It provides real-time insights into their digital interaction, while also creating an overview of your marketing campaigns progress across all the channels. You can also monitor the progress of your brand, product and even those of your competitors’. The built-in tools allow you to discover the trends in your market niche and learn about what your customers and their lookalikes are excited about, who are the new influencers, and what news and images are trending. You can also monitor how your social servicing team is resolving issues by tracking the progress of one-to-one customer journey.
With Einstein, you can get more predictive insights on each stage of your customer journey, so that your journey for improving customer growth gets simplified. It employs data-science to grow your customer base in less time, by optimising your marketing efforts with predictive outputs. For example, you can use it to improve your email marketing efforts by optimising them on the basis of the customers’ likelihood of opening the email, clicking on the link, making a purchase, or unsubscribing from your service. It does so by assigning scores to the individuals on the basis of the key factors that it discovers from your market’s study. You can have Einstein apply these scores to your existing customer base to sort out the best customers and create campaigns for them. Not only that, it also creates segments of interested individuals (lookalikes of your best customers who are yet not your customers), so that you can optimise your efforts on the basis of this new target audience segment, and improve the overall ROI. The latter approach is especially beneficial to extend your reach. And once your target audience starts converting, you can use the same tool to create an intelligent journey for them, using the same approach of predictive analysis.
With easy drag-and-drop tools, Audience Builder simplifies it for your marketing team to engage with your customers and collect all the data in one place, in a more normalised manner. They can then use all that data to correlate among the various variables and manipulate the data as per the requirements. Audience builder can also be used as a unified platform where marketers can combine first-party, third-party and predictive-analytics data to get a better understanding of your most important customer segments. This will help them in driving a more personalised customer journeys on the basis of the customer’s past, present, and predictable future interactions with your brand.
It is easy to see why Salesforce Marketing Cloud has emerged as the ultimate tool for the marketers across varied industry verticals. It contains all the things that any digital marketer could have wished for. From deeper insights on the customers to exclusive knowledge of the market and prevailing trends, it collects information from all the different channels in one place to create a one-to-one journey between your brand and the customers.
To know more about these tools/features of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and understand how you can use them to strengthen your business’s marketing strategy, hire salesforce developer from Dotsquares today! Our developers have an in-depth understanding of these tools, and hiring them would relieve you from the customisation overheads. They also possess an experiential knowledge of customising these tools for the businesses from different domains. Therefore, they can optimise these for you in a more efficient manner to improve your overall ROI. You can also avail the services of our consultants, who have helped many businesses before in achieving their personal goals through Salesforce marketing cloud.
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