What is Marketing Cloud in Salesforce?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a platform wherein relevant and personalized journeys are delivered across various devices and channels. In this section of the Salesforce tutorial, you will be introduced to Salesforce Marketing Cloud, along with the related details of why you should choose the same.

The following topics are covered in this blog:

• What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
• Need for Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• What can you do with Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
  • Data-driven Messaging
  • Multi-channel Messaging
  • Dynamic Components
• Products in Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Salesforce Marketing Cloud Benefits
  • Data management
  • Integration capability
  • Third-party apps
  • Artificial intelligence
• How does the Salesforce platform deliver power to take marketing further?
• List of Companies Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Conclusion

Watch this video on Salesforce Full Course for Beginners:

Basically, this marketing cloud enables marketers to deliver accurate messages to the right people through the right channels. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides several functionalities; the following image illustrates some of these functionalities:

From the image, you can see the functionalities that Salesforce Marketing Cloud has for your organization, namely, contact management tools, analytics builder, journey builder, and other channels including Mobile Studio and Email Studio.

You can do the following things with Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

• Support data and Einstein Artificial Intelligence in order to make each interaction related
• Create two-way and real-time engagement whenever a customer is in need
• Connect known and unknown profiles to gain a consolidated view of a customer
• Measure, optimize, and report marketing performance to increase your organization’s impact on customers, thereby increasing customer loyalty

The total market share of Salesforce Marketing Cloud is approximately 24 percent, which is the second-highest after Adobe Marketing Cloud. Here is a Google Trends chart for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. You can see that the demand for Salesforce Marketing Cloud has increased rapidly; it stands among the best marketing clouds.

Source: Salesforce

But what makes Salesforce Marketing Cloud stand out among all other marketing clouds?

• It is a platform for planning, personalizing, and optimizing a customer’s journey.
• It maps a software customer journey across several devices, channels, and customer life cycle stages.
• It integrates with other software such as Sales Cloud, Salesforce CRM, etc.
• It provides better and deeper insights for customers.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) helps users with various functions in the marketing field. Some of these are as follows:

• Real-time customer engagement
• Automation of marketing and email
• Push notifications
• SMS
• Social media engagement
• Marketing analytics of customers

SFMC is able to deliver messages according to the current customer data. It can then trigger more messages according to the changes in the data and interactions. This journey has various branches and what goes on which branch is based on the following:

• Contact data: Contact data covers the data related to the contact that was sent the information. If there is a change in contact data, SFMC will automatically decide the journey it will take. For example, if a customer was earlier listed under prospective clients and then they become a client, the data listed for them in SFMC will change accordingly and their journey will go from prospect to customer.
• Journey data: Journey data covers the data related to a customer’s journey. For example, when a new customer joins a company, you usually send them emails about certain things. SFMC can detect if an email has been opened or interacted with by a customer. So, if a customer has not opened an email, it can be resent to them in a few days.

SFMC includes a Journey Builder that lets users create a Journey. This Journey consists of SMSs and emails. Some of the use cases of multi-channel messaging are as follows:

• Support and service: You can use emails to provide support- and service-related messages to customers and use SMSs to provide more timely information to them.
• Post-purchase: You can use emails and SMSs to share all the post-purchase information with the customers.
• Financial: You can use emails and SMSs to convey all financial information to the customers such as loans, credits, etc. Reminders about an upcoming loan payment can be sent via email and an SMS reminder can be sent two to three days before the actual due date.

There are some dynamic components in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud that help to customize the experience for email recipients. This includes:

• Dynamic content: Customized email content and subject is created according to the data allotted to a particular customer. This is also populated according to the rules applied to the customer without having to create different versions of the email.
• Dynamic sending profile: This allows users to create different email ids for different customers. This is very helpful when a customer has been in touch with a particular sales representative.

All this helps in creating more customer engagement with your brand and drives potential customers to you.

By now, you have learned that this marketing cloud empowers you to engage and personalize every customer touchpoint. Further, you are introduced to the different products offered by Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Benefits

The benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) are as follows:

• Data management

Data extensions are used to enable data management in the SFMC. This can be put together to create a Relational Database System. This is enabled by SQL.
SFMC can store various types of data and lets you create a particular data model. This is a huge advantage over other competitors as they have a limit on the number of data models allowed.

• Integration capability

SFMC is capable of integrating various data sources. This is another reason why having so many data models is an advantage. SFMC has connections to Sales Cloud and Service Cloud, both of these via Marketing Cloud Connect.

• Third-party apps

SFMC has a lot of third-party apps available; these apps help users meet their business goals.

• Artificial intelligence

Salesforce Einstein, Salesforce’s Artificial Intelligence, has some apps included in SFMC. These apps help in scoring engagement to predict which customer will interact with what message. They also help to predict the best time to send a specific message to a specific customer by Send Time Optimization.
Salesforce Einstein also enables users to understand how many messages have to be sent to a particular customer.

Salesforce has its own ways to make marketing successful for its customers.

Now, let us go through them out one by one:

• Integrate and connect everything: Create a seamless customer experience that is powered by data by using a unified CRM platform to know and connect with each customer.
• Personalize every customer’s journey: Every customer, be it B2C or B2B, is given a tailored experience with intelligence across each commerce solution, marketing channel, and sales touchpoint.
• Get automatic updates: Pre-inform customers every time an update is available. This is done several times a year, and all issues are fixed in time.
• Extend your marketing within custom apps: Increase your marketing with SFMC and get the tools to engage customers across their entire journey. Measure your success using an ecosystem of apps to rise up to any kind of challenge; this will bring about a good hike in your marketing front.
• Market with trust and security: Salesforce provides proper trust and security to its customers with its marketing cloud.

• Spotify
• Macy’s
• Toyota
• S. Bank
• Amazon Web Services
• T-Mobile US

Conclusion

From this salesforce marketing cloud tutorial, we hope you have gotten a comprehensive understanding of Salesforce Marketing Cloud along with the products offered by it. In the next section of this Salesforce tutorial, you will learn about Salesforce CRM.