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Marketing Cloud from Salesforce (abbreviated as SFMC) is a unique platform from Salesforce to facilitate marketing automation and customer engagements. This is a licensed platform that is made up of four different versions. Each of these versions has unique functionality levels and multiple additional components, which can further help increase the functionality. Businesses have used it successfully to integrate their functioning and generate revenue for their overall better performances.
Looking back at the history of the marketing cloud, SFMC was not developed from scratch by Salesforce, but it had been acquired through the acquisition of Exact Target back in 2013. Efforts have been made to make it more meaningful since then, and you can still come across the usage of Exact Target while referencing SFMC.
The Salesforce marketing cloud is a standalone marketing platform that supports many facets of marketing, including dynamic customer journey, multi-channel campaigns, pre-and post-campaign analytics, audience building, audience segmentation, social media engagement, advertising, and data management services, etc. In addition, Salesforce marketing cloud uses different components known as ‘Builders’ and ‘Studios.’
- Builders –These are used to manage the Salesforce data, content, and customer journeys on the SFMC platform. The ‘Studios often use these,’ but it need not have to be so always. Analytics builder is an example of Builders.
- Studios –These are meant to engage and manage the channels of communications. In Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it includes Social Studio, Email Studio, Mobile Studio, etc.
Uses of SFMC
Marketing Cloud is a highly featured platform that has many capabilities across marketing domains. Some of the significant advantages of Salesforce Marketing Cloud are:
- Customer engagement in real-time
- Marketing and mail automation
- Advertising
- Listening to customers
- Social media engagement
- Mobile and SMS messaging as well as put notifications
- Marketing analytics
Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s customer journey will help you to illustrate the critical capabilities as we discussed above. In SFMC, you can also use the journey builder to create automated multichannel Journeys by using its various capabilities to offer the customers a more personalized user experience.
Data-driven communication
SFMC tools can help you deliver messages to different contacts based on individuals’ current and historical data. It can also trigger new messages based on the customer data in real-time and data related to user interactions. The journey can also have different branches, and the decisions may go on to these other branches based on the level. Providers like Flosum can also help to manage data-driven communication planning.
Contact data
This data in the Marketing Cloud is based on contact information. These are associated with the contact and determine which branch of the journey to take up at the given point in time. For example, contact could be in the communication journey for the prospects, but it can convert to a customer journey in the meantime. The change in the contact data in the Salesforce marketing cloud may also automatically remove them from the prospect journey and place them into the customer journey.
Journey data
This is the data about how the contact interacts with the SFMC journey. For example, how an email opens or the click-through etc. One example of this is the welcome journey. After purchasing a product, the customers may receive different emails as welcome mail, product registration mail, product usage tips, etc. SFMC can detect who has opened an e-mail and interacting with each in this mail series etc. This will enable you to send the customer down the branch to recent and initiate another mail after a set time if someone does not open the mail. It can also send down a component to receive the next mail in the series if someone opens and interact with a given mail.
Multi-channel messaging
Salesforce marketing cloud journey can also allow you to construct the Journeys, which consists of mail and SMS messaging. It can also include direct emailing by using the App Exchange apps. There are different use cases for multichannel messaging as below.
Support and service communication – You can use email to communicate the customers’ content and support. You can use SMS to share timely information like a change in the support or service case for service personnel on their way etc.
Post-purchase communication – Youcan also use SMS and emails to share post-purchase communications. For example, you may create a journey with the shipment status mails. You can set the journey after the point of something being delivered. Then, at each of the checkpoints, SFMC can send an email to the customer to inform them of the updated status of the package in transit. Once the package is delivered, SFMC can then send the product registration email, followed by customer survey mail.
Financial communication
You may use emails and SMS to communicate the financial status related to credit for a loan etc. For example, emails can help remind the customers of the upcoming payments of loans if not been made yet. An SMS message can also be helpful on the actual due date to ensure that the customers do not miss their payments to face late payment penalties.
Salesforce marketing cloud also offers a wealth of data about other Communications it executes. This will help the users with reporting, insights, and analytics. Marketing cloud data opens the existing contact, which is received from various integrated systems. This will include Salesforce marketing cloud integration with Google Analytics 360 to track the customer journey more closely. You can also put this data and arrange it for various purposes like analyzing the campaign performances, audience building, segmentation of the audience, etc. All these make use of the data management tools of SFMC.
Salesforce marketing cloud also has many benefits in terms of its data management capabilities, integration capabilities, third-party applications for add-on functionalities, artificial intelligence applications, etc. All these will increase the overall engagement of consumers with the brand. It will also provide a highly personalized experience to avoid any chances of disengagement.
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