If B2C communications is important to you, you have undoubtedly heard of Marketing Cloud. Marketing Cloud is a fairly recent acquisition of ExactTarget, and Salesforce has been taking steps to enhance the platform and bring it into the fold with the other Clouds.
Rebranding Marketing Cloud
Upon logging into Marketing Cloud for the first time, users have historically been presented with one of the most striking and obvious differences between Marketing Cloud and Salesforce; the look and feel. The stark difference leaves little question to which environment you were logged into. However, with the recent enhancements, you’ll notice Salesforce has made efforts to give ExactTarget more of a family resemblance by updating it to match Lightning.
Additionally, they built out the homepage to help you hit the ground running. There’s a calendar element to give an at-a-glance overview of all the automations happening so you can keep tabs on recent and upcoming messaging. The charts help you see recently run and edited automations so you can see new activity and pick up where you left off.
When you need to take a closer look at Marketing Cloud activity, you can track clicks, opens, and click-throughs, as well as visualize the performance of one email or multiple emails. There are also several out-of-the-box reports in Marketing Cloud. When Marketing Cloud is integrated with Sales or Service Cloud, you can use the Salesforce Builder to make you own custom reports with the data from Marketing Cloud.
Focus Messaging
One of the draws of Marketing Cloud is the control it gives you to segment your data and target your messaging for each segment. The Cloud Pages feature creates content that can be used as a microsite, in a Facebook tab or on mobile that can be used to capture data about your subscribers.
On top of that, you can sync subscriber records in Marketing Cloud to their Facebook accounts, Twitter Accounts, and Sales or Service cloud records. This gives you a comprehensive view of your subscribers and allows you to segment them based on their social presence, their interactions with your marketing, and their constituent data in Sales or Service Cloud. You can couple this segmentation with geofences or beacon messaging so you can update contacts when they’re at the right place at the right time.
Leverage Journey Builder
Possibly the most exciting feature Salesforce has brought to Marketing Cloud is Journey Builder -- this tool can take any drip campaign to the next level.
You can set up messaging from multiple platforms and control you flow with decisions based on interactions with previous messages, data from their record in Sales or Service Cloud or their Einstein Engagement score (e.g. their likelihood to make a purchase, open an email, etc.).
To get the most out of your Journey, you can find out what is most effective by randomly splitting your customers and with A/B testing.
You can utilize Journeys to drive engagement, encourage customers to finish a purchase, or engage people that join your Salesforce Community to ensure they get the most out of it. You kick off a Journey when someone fills out a sign up form, with automation based on activity in Sales or Service Cloud, or when someone joins your Salesforce Community or when someone abandons their shopping cart.
Final Thoughts
Marketing Cloud is an ever increasingly powerful tool that lets you listen to your constituents and give them the content they want and deliver it to them in the way they want to receive it. Stay tuned for additional features and benefits as Salesforce continues to align it with its other cloud offerings.
