Salesforce Marketing Cloud – How It Works

It is highly regarded and used by thousands of marketers around the world. You may have heard of Salesforce Marketing Cloud before. But what exactly is it, and how does it work in practice? As a Salesforce partner, we are often asked various questions about its features and use cases. Here, one of our certified consultants, Hanna Alricson, answers some of the most common questions.

First and foremost, what is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a platform within Salesforce that enables companies to engage with their current and potential customers across various channels. Using integrated solutions, you can, for example, create and schedule email campaigns, push notifications, digital ads, social media posts, and analytics. You can also perform more advanced activities, such as tailoring and automating campaigns based on customer behavior and needs, demographics, or communication preferences.

What can you do in Marketing Cloud?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a wide range of smart tools designed to help you engage with, analyze, and personalize communications with your customers. Here are a few of our favorites:

1. Journey Builder is one of the most powerful tools in Marketing Cloud. Here, you can design and automate flows for various types of personalized customer journeys. Depending on the choices a customer makes—such as clicking on an ad or filling out a form—a customized customer journey is created. Journey Builder continuously evaluates the company’s contacts to determine when they should be moved to the next activity.

2. Email Studio is used to create, design, and analyze various types of email campaigns. These campaigns can range from promotional emails and informational messages to newsletters and automated order confirmations.

3. Mobile Studio handles communication with customers via text messages, push notifications, and in-app messages. Here, you can schedule and design your messages.

4. Social Studio is available to businesses that want to manage all their social media channels on a single platform. Here, you can create, schedule, engage with, and analyze your followers and channels.

5. Advertising Studio allows you to coordinate your digital campaigns across different channels. In another tool called Audience Studio, you can create your various target audiences. You can later use these target audiences in Advertising Studio to create targeted and personalized ads.

In addition to these, there are several other tools used to automate and create various types of processes and workflows. There are also some really powerful tools for integrating Salesforce Marketing Cloud with various data sources. For example, to import data from Sales Cloud or Service Cloud, or from another system where you store your customer information.

What are the benefits of Marketing Cloud?

The advantage of Marketing Cloud is that you can create relevant and personalized customer journeys across different channels and devices—enabling you to deliver messages to the right person at the right time. Together with Salesforce CRM, which consists of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Connect Cloud, you can also establish a cohesive dialogue with the customer throughout every stage of the relationship.

What types of businesses can use Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Most companies can benefit from Marketing Cloud, but keep in mind that the platform requires a fair amount of expertise on your part as a customer, and above all, you’ll need to invest quite a bit of time in learning how to use it, even with a competent partner to assist you. Just like Salesforce CRM, you can purchase a starter package with Marketing Cloud and add more functionality and contacts when you feel ready to expand.

We’ve decided on Salesforce Marketing Cloud—what’s next?

You can either handle the implementation yourself or enlist the help of a partner. Releye has been working with CRM for 20 years and is, of course, here to support you if you’d like some help. As you begin to define or update your strategy, consider how Marketing Cloud can enable you to:

• Get to know your customers better.
• Combine first-party marketing data and supplement it with data from second- and third-party sources.
• Adapt intelligently.
• Stay in touch with your customers throughout their journey.

Learn more about Salesforce here