How to Optimise the Customer Journey with Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Learn more about Salesforce Marketing Cloud and discover how it contributes to increasing personalised customer engagement
Published May 15, 2019
Last updated November 14, 2021
Marketing automation is a puzzling topic. Many myths are spreading around when it comes to dealing with marketing automation.
For example — it will eliminate our jobs.
This shows how twisted the opinion on automation technology can get.
However, we know, it only adds value by supporting our vision.
Also, we need this support because the customers we serve today are empowered with the new technology, which means we need to be too.
The crucial part of evolving our customer journey approach is marketing automation.
However, it will not bring any value if we don’t combine it with our human intelligence. That is the point. It’s not a quick fix or a set and forget tool.
It needs marketers to work. It feeds off our efforts and creativity.
So, how do we become empowered marketers that build the future of consumer behaviour?
It’s straightforward. All we need to do is to embrace the advances in technology, learn about them and eventually put them into practice.
This is the core reason why we create the content we do — to deliver you the tools you need for your future marketing endeavours.
About Salesforce Marketing Cloud
In the enterprise marketing automation market, there are few significant contenders in the quality of offering of the marketing automation for the B2C sector.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud was named a Leader in “The Forrester Wave™: Enterprise Marketing Software Suites, Q2 2021” report.
The Marketing Cloud Suite from Salesforce is built to provide the tools needed to optimise intelligent and personalised journeys at scale.
Even though Salesforce provides Pardot marketing automation as well, the difference between the two is that Pardot focuses on the B2B market. Its primary purpose is building leads and pipelines for sales reps.
On the other hand, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an enterprise marketing suite, sort of a hub for all your marketing needs.
Key Features and Benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform contains automation built around email, SMS, push notifications, social, ads, and web technology.
They are all tied together and easily connected with the rest of the Salesforce Customer Success Platforms (Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Communities).
It has been very successful in serving the enterprise sector due to its variety of features, continuous platform updates and the power of Einstein Artificial Intelligence.
Some of the big players using it include Uber, Phillips, FitBit and Amazon.
The platform includes tools that optimise every step of the customer journey. Take a walk with us through the main functions and see how they can help you bring the customer to the centre of your operations.
Journey Builder
The Journey Builder application is a visual representation of your customer journey map that supports the journey orchestration.
It’s a drag and drop interface, with a choice of activities to use when executing campaigns across email, advertising, website and mobile.
Journey Builder also brings measuring engagement into the mix, making it simple for the marketer to track and optimise the journeys in real-time.
If you want to learn about best practices when it comes to Journey Builder, Salesforce MC provides Journey Templates to add more guidance into the matter.
Email Studio
Email Studio is an email marketing automation tool with a drag-and-drop component to help you build emails using an intuitive interface.
It also allows easy integrations with your other data sources and departments for a consistent customer journey.
Furthermore, Email Studio makes content personalisation effortless.
With the helping hand of Einstein AI, it allows email marketers to predict consumer behaviour and recommend the right product at the right time.
Considering that email is the channel that goes through every stage of the customer journey, Salesforce made sure to provide leading email technology in its marketing suite.
It will allow you to craft an omnichannel experience starting right from here.
Salesforce Audience Studio
Formerly known as Salesforce Data Management Platform, now Audience Studio is a data unifying solution that can connect to your sales, service and communities platforms, plus any other 2nd party data sources.
It will give you access to rich data and make your advertising smarter.
Salesforce Audience Studio is built to gather your data in one source and capitalise on it.
With Einstein AI, you can use it to analyse attribute combinations, extend the reach of your campaigns with look-alike modelling and uncover the patterns in your customer journeys across all channels.
Salesforce Data Studio
Salesforce Data Studio is a data-sharing platform that allows companies to purchase or share their data in a trusted environment.
The Data Studio comes as a part of the data management platform and gives you that extra advantage in your customer journey optimisation.
You can exploit this third-party data to refine your audience, build your perfect target profile and reach more people, all with precision and clarity.
Want to know implement, improve or scale your Salesforce Marketing Cloud solution?
Social Studio
Social Studio is a platform that covers publishing, listening, engaging and analysing content for social media.
It’s all about connecting to your customers in their territory while keeping an eye on the conversations that involve your brand.
Powered with Einstein AI, Social Studio goes beyond just tracking the sentiment and brings you the insight that is hidden in the customer social media posts.
As an example, Einstein can tell if a customer publishes an image of your product and that your brand is the topic of the conversation, even if they don’t apply hashtags.
Advertising Studio
Advertising Studio is an all in one platform that allows you to advertise directly on Google Search, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and YouTube.
It covers the customer acquisition and re-engagement stage of the journey. Once integrated with Salesforce Audience Studio, Advertising Studio allows you to reach your entire audience.
More importantly, it helps you reach new prospects from the look-a-likes of your best customers.
Pair it with Journey Builder, and now you can coordinate your campaigns with other channels for the best ROI.
Interaction Studio
Interaction Studio allows you to capture every interaction your customers have with your brand in real-time across multiple channels.
The significant shift that Interaction Studio brings to you is – listening to your customers.
You can use it to pick up on your customer’s interactions with your brands and gain insight into their real needs.
Additionally, it can link off-line activities together with online behaviour.
This empowers you to build their entire engagement profile and provide experiences that matter the most to them, at the time they prefer it and in the channel of their choosing.
Mobile Studio
Mobile Studio is a mobile messaging solution that allows you to send SMS, Push notifications or chat messages.
It gives you a chance to level up your game with the help of geo-fencing and beacons to provide a better customer experience.
The studio also offers pre-built templates that make it easy to optimise for the right message at the right time. This platform will fuel your customer engagement.
Once you partner Mobile Studio with Journey Builder, you can manage and personalise each interaction across every available channel.
As illustrated above, Salesforce Marketing Cloud covers the key points that we as marketers require in our quest of pleasing today’s customers.
All the while securing our dream goes on into the future as well.
In 2018, Salesforce reported how 80% of customers care about the experience they have with the company as much as its product or service.
Do you think this number will go up in the future?
We certainly do.
The ability for a company to engage with customers across touchpoints (Journey Builder & Interaction Studio) fueled by rich data capabilities (Audience Studio & Data Studio) and combined with powerful advertising potential (Advertising Studio) is of crucial importance for an enterprise.
Not to mention how the Salesforce Software offering is ever-evolving. The 2020 additions to the Salesforce family include technologies such as Tableau (data visualisation software) and Slack Technologies (team communication tool). Prior to that, Salesforce Marketing Cloud was enriched with a marketing analytics platform called Datorama. Datorama is used by marketers to unify their data and optimise their marketing activity.
Datorama is all about measuring your ROI and visualisation of AI-powered insights. Their motto is – click and no code, making it simple for marketers to gain insight into their campaign performance and if necessary, adjust the direction in real-time.
Today, companies and brands around the world share their challenges, solutions and success stories and with them pave the way to the future use of marketing technology.
For example, take Ticketmaster. We have all heard of them.
How Ticketmaster is using Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Ticketmaster is one of the top 5 global e-commerce giants selling over 500 million tickets around the world and attracting a billion visitors to its site every year.
The company is a great example of personalisation at scale using Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
As they shared on Dreamforce 2018:
“Speaking to a father that wants to take his daughter to a concert is very different than if you are talking to a young millennial.”
By leveraging the insights and partnering with leading technology providers like Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Ticketmaster has a chance to deliver that unforgettable journey for every fan that crosses their path.
For them, the journey that takes place after the purchase of the ticket is as important as the journey before.
For instance, if you were going to a concert in a town nearby, you would want to know if there is any parking available. Or possibly, if there are any places to eat nearby. Additionally, if you have arrived at the venue, you would like to know which gate to go to, to avoid long waiting in line.
Ticketmaster has thought of that.
By sending email and push notifications, Ticketmaster updates you in real-time on all the information you need to enjoy the event. While you are filled with excitement and eager to make that lasting memory, you can rest assured Ticketmaster has got your back.
How Scotts is using Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Scotts is a company that provides Lawn Care Products in the US and Canada.
Their target audience? Lawn owners.
In the lawn care market, Scotts is dominating. The reason is – customer journey empowered by Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
In the awareness stage, Scotts uses email marketing automation to teach customers what products to use, when to use them, and how to use them.
Firstly, they have created different journeys for different geographic regions, as your lawn would need different care, depending on where you live.
Secondly, they use their mobile app, which, when downloaded, pops up a questionnaire to gather more information about the consumer. They use the insight to build a profile and predict future challenges you, as a consumer, might have with your lawn care depending on where you live.
So finally, they tap into SMS messages. For the customers who are email subscribers, Scotts sends an invite to opt-in for localised text alerts.
In these alerts, you get product recommendations for the best time to use the product to get the best results.
For those of you who doubt the effectiveness of text messages, here is a reminder: SMS has a 97% open rate, compared to email, which has 15%.
By providing helpful guidance to their customers, Scotts is successfully achieving the customer experience we all crave today.
Being in the right place at the right time with the right message isn’t easy.
As marketers, we need all the help we can get, and Salesforce provides just that.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud continues to evolve by gathering insights on how we use the platform. They stay on the leading edge, ready to implement new shortcuts into the mix.
With the features that the platform provides for us today, the sky’s the limit.
The only thing that is holding us back is our imagination.
So, to utilise the platform make sure you follow the latest developments, best practices and case studies in your market and build on those. We can not think of a better way than going right to the source – Salesforce.
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We are an omnichannel strategy consulting firm and would love to see you succeed in your omnichannel marketing initiatives.
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