Skip to content

Marketing automation with Salesforce Marketing Cloud

B2C business is characterized by activity in many marketing channels. Optimizing a website for SEO, online advertising campaigns, or e-mail marketing are just examples of activities aimed at selling a product. This involves many difficulties, such as:

Inefficient campaign management

How to manage when we use different tools for each campaign? How to answer the question of which of them gives the best results? A large amount of data in different places causes problems with drawing correct conclusions, calculating indicators such as ROI, and making the right business decisions.

Lack of customer segmentation and campaign personalization

In both B2B and B2C marketing, campaign personalization is extremely important. It involves adapting the marketing message depending on the needs of the receiver. This type of action allows you to achieve higher conversions. Unfortunately, most tools don’t allow you to collect data about potential customers that can be used to personalize your campaigns. Not using this potential often ends up in delivering the same marketing communication to all customers, regardless of their engagement with your brand.

Marketing automation tools allow us to deal with these problems. Salesforce Marketing Cloud gives us access to both campaign management dashboards and performance statistics for each campaign, regardless of the source.

Email marketing in Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud makes it very easy to run marketing campaigns thanks to the drag and drop method.

The E-mail Studio tool, which is part of the Marketing Cloud platform, offers ready-made graphic message templates that can be freely edited. In addition, an intuitive panel allows you to easily edit text, paste images or links.

One of the most useful features of Email Studio is message personalization. With the user information available in Salesforce, we have the ability to automatically paste data (such as name and surname) into an email. In case we want to target a message to two different groups of customers, we can personalize it with dynamic material. 

For example, imagine that a company sells shoes and prepares material for a newsletter. By personalizing the message, the company can send a picture of women’s shoes to the female part of the mailing list. Similarly, men will receive a message with a photo of men’s shoes. This solution will positively influence the campaign’s CTR (click-through rate) without the need to create two separate emails. And these are just some of the possibilities for personalizing your messages!

Mobile Studio, meaning effective SMS campaigns

Let’s go back to our example with the company that sells shoes. Let’s assume that this company has a stationary store. There are hundreds of people in its neighborhood every day. How about sending an SMS message to passers-by with a discount on a specific pair of shoes? 

With marketing automation tools, it is possible! Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows you to create personalized SMS messages or in-app notifications based on the location of a given recipient. This allows us to target recipients directly through notifications on their phone or smartwatch.

Managing social media campaigns with marketing automation

With tools such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we get the ability to plan, monitor, and analyze the results of campaigns on social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. This is possible thanks to Salesforce’s agreement with the largest social networks. This gives us the ability to:

  • schedule posts directly using Salesforce Marketing Cloud;
  • Manage your ads and their performance directly from your Salesforce dashboard;
  • Monitor online trends, product reviews, and competitor content.

Building customer pathways – case study

Let’s go back again to our example with the company selling shoes. This time, let’s imagine that it does business over the Internet. Due to the nature of this industry, it often happens that a user adds a product to the shopping cart, but ultimately does not make a purchase.

How can you convince such a user to buy? After all, if the potential customer added the product to the cart, he was almost decided to buy it. With the answer comes Journey Builder available in Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It allows you to segment your customers and communicate with them automatically in case they abandon their shopping cart.

Going back to the example – we can divide the users who abandoned the cart in this store, depending on the value of planned purchases. This will create a separate path for cheap and more valuable shopping carts. Then, after one day of waiting (maybe the customer will come back to the website and make a purchase?), Salesforce Marketing Cloud will automatically send him an email or SMS message, for example with a discount code for a product that the customer had in his cart. The next message can be conditioned on whether the person opened the previous message. If the message was not opened and the cart value is high, Salesforce can notify sales or customer service to contact the person individually.

This is just an example of a simple customer path. The Journey Builder tool has so many possibilities that you are only limited by your imagination.

In conclusion, marketing automation tools will help you make optimal business decisions. Moreover, they will help you save a lot of time and increase the effectiveness of your marketing efforts.

If you are interested in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud solution, contact us, and we will tell you more about the possibilities of this tool!

We also encourage you to follow us on LinkedIn.

Article by Bartosz Kwapiszewski.