Marketing Cloud is a powerful and complex tool, but there are a few things that make it stand out as a premier solution for digital marketing. Here’s a closer look at what you need to know.
The Top 4 Features of Marketing Cloud
1: Marketing Cloud Connect
Creating a powerful connection between other Salesforce Clouds and your digital marketing practice can be done simply with Marketing Cloud Connect. Connect is an installed package and connected app that allows you to connect a Marketing Cloud org to a Salesforce org (production or sandbox), as well as combine the capabilities of Marketing Cloud with tools for data management, segmentation and campaigns within Salesforce.
This connection allows for more personalization in the customer journey and, ultimately, a more consistent customer experience across all interactions. You can also benefit in Salesforce by being able to utilize the tools of Marketing Cloud directly within Sales or Service Cloud.
2: Journey Builder
Journeys can be an effective way to create responsive and automated campaigns across multiple channels. Using Journey Builder allows you to engage with customers during the many stages of their experience with your brand.
Getting started with Journey Builder can look complex at first. But the time spent to implement journeys and automate repeatable processes will save you time in the long run, allowing you to spend less time doing manual one-off sends. It also affords the ability to be responsive to customers’ interactions during journeys, adding personalization to fit their wants and needs.
Examples that lend themselves very well to Journey Builder are things like Welcome or Lead Nurturing Journeys. Marketing Cloud also has a few pre-defined templates that can be used to expedite the Journey development process. These templates have setup guidance, content recommendations and links to help with documentation, which is a great way to start using Journeys and learn how they work before diving into more complex campaigns.
3: Email Studio
Email Studio functionality within Marketing Cloud allows you to design, personalize and track amazing email campaigns. Within Email Studio, you can view the Content, Subscribers, Interactions, Tracking and Admin tabs. You can also create reusable content blocks, pulling in dynamic content for more relevant, personalized messages. Along with being able to access Email Studio from the top navigation, you have the ability to edit emails from within Journeys, which saves time and effort.
4: Contact Builder
Contact Builder is the way to access the contact data contained within your account and look at the relationships between that data. In fact, it’s made up of a few tools that make it possible to better manage the data, including:
– Contacts Configuration
– Data Designer
– Data Extensions
– Data Sources
With these tools, you can manage, centralize, organize and link data from Marketing Cloud and external sources (think ERP, CRM, POS). That means you can leverage all of this data to provide a single view of the customer and their interactions with your brand. And ultimately, this allows for more personalization with your customers and more favorable experiences, too.
Have any questions about Salesforce Marketing Cloud? Or want to learn more about how these features work for companies like yours? Let us know. We’ll be happy to help.
