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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Salesforce Marketing Cloud: Take your digital marketing on a journey! Everything seems to be moving to the cloud these days--and digital marketing is no exception! Salesforce Marketing Cloud For Dummies guides you through the use of Salesforce's exciting suite of cloud-based digital marketing solutions, which have the power to help you plan, personalize, and optimize your customers' journey. Written by a leader of the Salesforce training and development team, Salesforce Marketing Cloud users will find essential information on using the suite of tools and tips and tricks that only an insider would be able to share. With easy-to-follow instructions, this guide helps you discover how to incorporate your data sets into the tools to create models, campaigns, and customer maps that enable you to create a positive experience for your customers. As Salesforce.com's multi-channel digital marketing platform, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud focuses on helping you manage one-on-one customer journeys. Leveraging a variety of features, this suite of tools offers email marketing, mobile marketing, social media marketing, content and messaging, predictive intelligence, and more. Your ability to navigate these features and functions will determine your digital marketing campaign's success, so it's critical that you make the most of this tool! * Navigate and manage the Salesforce Marketing Cloud * Define and understand your customers' journeys--and how you fit into them * Engage your customers across devices, ensuring consistent communication * Use predictive data to optimize engagement Salesforce Marketing Cloud For Dummies helps you make the most of your investment in the digital marketing world!
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Salesforce® Marketing Cloud For Dummies®
Published by: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030-5774, www.wiley.com
Copyright © 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey
Published simultaneously in Canada
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017954557
ISBN 978-1-119-12209-8 (pbk); ISBN 978-1-119-12210-4 (ebk); ISBN 978-1-119-12211-1 (ebk)
Salesforce® Marketing Cloud For Dummies®
To view this book's Cheat Sheet, simply go to www.dummies.com and search for “Salesforce Marketing Cloud For Dummies Cheat Sheet” in the Search box.
Table of Contents
Cover
Introduction
About This Book
Foolish Assumptions
Icons Used in This Book
Beyond the Book
Where to Go from Here
Part 1: Getting Started
Chapter 1: Introducing the One-to-One Customer Journey
The Dawn of the Customer Journey
The Importance of the Customer Journey
Defining the Customer Journey
Fulfilling the Customer Journey with Marketing Cloud
Chapter 2: Navigating Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Exploring Marketing Cloud
Accessing Your Apps
Chapter 3: Administering Marketing Cloud
Managing Marketing Cloud Users
Providing Access for Users
Securing Marketing Cloud
Sender and Delivery Profiles and Send Classifications
IP Warm
Chapter 4: Dashboard Tools
Using the Calendar
Managing Campaigns
Part 2: Utilizing Data
Chapter 5: Identifying and Preparing Your Data
Defining Your Data Set
Mapping Your Data to Your Objectives
Chapter 6: Establishing Your Data Model
Understanding Marketing Cloud Data Models
Getting Data into Marketing Cloud
Contact Builder
Part 3: Marketing Cloud Builders
Chapter 7: Content Builder
Using Content Builder
Images and More
Templates
Messages
Approvals
Chapter 8: Audience Builder and Contact Builder
Contact Builder
Audience Builder
Chapter 9: Analytics and Personalization Builder
Discovering Discover
Using Standard Reporting
Viewing Web and Mobile Analytics
Using Predictive Intelligence
Chapter 10: Journey Builder
Automation Studio versus Journey Builder
Understanding Automation Studio
Creating Activities
Creating an Automation
Error Reporting
Part 4: Marketing Cloud Studios
Chapter 11: Email Studio
Understanding Email Marketing in Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Creating Email Content
Preparing an Email to Send
Sending an Email
Tracking Your Email
Advanced Tactics in Email
Chapter 12: Mobile Studio
Deciding Whether You're Ready for Mobile Marketing
Understanding Mobile Terminology
Configuring Your Account for Mobile
MobileConnect
MobilePush
GroupConnect
Respectful Mobile Marketing Checklist
Chapter 13: Social Media Studio
Deciding to Go Social
Social Studio Concepts
Supported Social Media Networks
Getting Started with Social Studio
Social Media Marketing in Social Studio
Social Media Best Practices
Chapter 14: Advertising Studio
Advertising Studio Editions
Lead Capture Edition
Professional Edition
Chapter 15: Web Studio
Supported Online Content
Creating Content in CloudPages
Publishing Content
Analyzing Content Performance
Part 5: Mapping the Customer Journey
Chapter 16: Designing a Customer Journey
Understanding Journeys
Parts of a Journey
Considerations before Starting
Beginning to Map a Customer Journey
Journey Preparation Checklist
Chapter 17: Creating Your Customer Journeys
Revisiting the Basics of a Customer Journey
The Journey Builder Dashboard
Journey Canvas
Journey Entry Sources
Understanding Activities
Part 6: The Part of Tens
Chapter 18: Ten Customer Journeys for Beginners
Welcome Series
Abandoned Cart
Birthday
Browse Retargeting
Customer Anniversary
Loyalty Series
App Download
Post-Purchase
Re-engagement
Newsletter Series
Chapter 19: Ten Secrets to a Successful Implementation
Set Realistic Function Expectations
Set Realistic Time Expectations
Design for the Data
Purchase Support
Take Care with Your IP Warm
Work Closely with Your Implementation Partner
Establish Standards
Document Everything
Inform All Key People
Allow Time for Training
Chapter 20: Ten Bad Habits of Digital Marketers
Not Testing Enough
Testing Too Many Variables
Assuming That Flashy Features Equal Better Results
Hyper-Targeting
Forsaking Proven Channels
Buying the “It Just Works” Myth
Over-Messaging
Forgetting That Content Is King
Not Staying Current
Not Asking for Help
About the Authors
Connect with Dummies
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Introduction
Ever since that first corporate website found its way onto the Internet, the marketing universe has been expanding and changing. One after another, things such as text-message marketing campaigns, social media marketing, and mobile apps have come on the scene. Suddenly, even email marketing — which was in its infancy only a generation ago — is now just the tip of the iceberg of what today's marketers need to know how to do.
Fortunately, sophisticated tools, such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, have evolved at the same time to help you manage all these marketing channels. Marketing Cloud makes an online marketer into a superhero. But, of course, it has its own learning curve. That's where this book comes in: We want to show you around a product that we adore, help you get started, and sprinkle in a few insider tips that we've picked up over time.
About This Book
This book is born of love. We both had the pleasure to be actively involved in the early development of the software that is now known as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and the experience led to career opportunities and new friendships. Rarely do you have the opportunity to work with such talented people, all of whom are dedicated to their clients' success.
Now we're thrilled to have the chance to share our knowledge — and dare we say wisdom — about Salesforce Marketing Cloud and online marketing in general. We've been accumulating experience for close to a decade. With the help of Salesforce Marketing Cloud For Dummies, we can transfer what you need to know so you can hit the ground running on your own Marketing Cloud adventure.
Like all the titles in the Dummies series, this book provides tools for people who are confident enough to say, “I don't know what I'm doing (yet).” We give you no-nonsense answers to how to think about your audiences and data, as well as practical step-by-step procedures to get your marketing messages out the door.
You can read this book from cover to cover, or jump directly to an individual chapter about the functionality you're currently working on. Marketing Cloud contains many apps, so keep this book nearby for a quick refresher when you need to get back into a part of the tool that you haven't used in a while.
Foolish Assumptions
You can tell from the title that we wrote this book for people who are new to using Salesforce Marketing Cloud, including Basic, Pro, Corporate, and Enterprise Editions. However, almost anyone interested in learning more about online marketing can find useful information within. Any time you write instructions, though, you have to make a few assumptions. In your case, we assume the following:
You're familiar with how to operate a computer, a keyboard, and a mouse.
You've used enough software to recognize conventions such as opening menus, clicking buttons, and pausing your mouse pointer on something to make a tooltip appear.
You know the definitions of words such as
email, URL,
and
social media.
If any of these assumptions leave you scratching your head, we recommend visiting your local library, where a librarian can point you in the right direction.
Icons Used in This Book
You'll see the following icons as you read the chapters of this book. This section describes what they mean.
The Tip icon indicates a tidbit of information that may not be necessary to the procedure you're working on but may make things easier.
Remember icons refer to information that we talked about before but that's especially important to recall at this point in the chapter.
Technical Stuff gives you a peek at how the Marketing Cloud application works behind the scenes. You can skip over this information and still use the product just fine, but reading and understanding it will help you know what to expect from Marketing Cloud.
The Warning icon means watch out! It tells you when doing something wrong could damage your data or put your sensitive information at risk.
Beyond the Book
Salesforce Marketing Cloud has a large online documentation site. You can click a link right inside Marketing Cloud to get to the documentation. (An Internet search will probably get you there as well.) You'll find a lot of the same information in the documentation that you see in this book, but there are definite benefits to reading the book. We have the freedom, for example, to point out things that don't work as you might expect them to and suggest shortcuts.
We've provided a few handy cheat sheets: a glossary of terms, a sample pre-sending checklist, and a diagram to help you when you're mapping out your customer journeys — it'll make more sense when you get there! To get to the cheat sheet, go to www.dummies.com, and then type Salesforce Marketing Cloud For Dummies cheat sheet in the Search box. This is also where you'll find any significant updates or changes that occur between editions of this book.
Where to Go from Here
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is more like a platform than an application. That is to say, Marketing Cloud has a few bits of its own functionality, but the real power of your account is in the apps you can open in the Marketing Cloud platform.
The first part of this book is about getting around the Marketing Cloud platform itself and using the tools available there. If this is the first time you've used Marketing Cloud, you'll definitely want to start here.
The second part of this book is about subscriber data: understanding what you already know about your customers, figuring out what you need to learn about your customers to execute the best campaigns, and setting up Marketing Cloud to hold and use that data. Don't miss this part if you're an admin or in charge of designing the over-arching journey your customers take while interacting with your brand. Having said that, we'll also say that anyone at any level of the organization can get a better foundation in where your data comes from and how you use it by reading the chapters in this part.
Most of the rest of the chapters dive deep in to the day-to-day operation of each of the apps. If you're just getting started using one of the apps, your next stop is the table of contents to find the chapter about the app you're learning about.
Whichever page you turn to next, we hope that it is the first page in an epic story of you and Salesforce Marketing Cloud. May your story find your customer delighted, your company thriving, and you enjoying accolades for your sophisticated and well-managed online marketing campaigns.
Part 1
Getting Started
IN THIS PART …
Take a walk through the history of online marketing to get to the technology we have today.
Understand how the power of data lets online marketers create specific messages tailored to each customer.
Envision how you can automate repetitive tasks to free yourself for creative problem solving.
Meet Salesforce Marketing Cloud: online marketing platform and home to at least a dozen useful apps.
Tour Marketing Cloud's administrative screens.
Chapter 1
Introducing the One-to-One Customer Journey
IN THIS CHAPTER
Understanding email marketing
Learning about customer journeys
Understanding how Salesforce Marketing Cloud fits into customer journeys
Email marketing has grown into a direct marketing powerhouse. Because you have access to so much data about the people you're sending emails to, you can create automation that tailors your messages to each customer's unique needs and circumstances. Email marketing not only delivers marketers unparalleled value but also ensures that customers actually want to read the messages they receive from you.
No other marketing channel is so customizable at such an affordable price. You can personalize the content of your email even more than the content in a direct mailer, plus your email doesn't require printing or postage, isn't subject to the mail delivery schedule, and doesn't use paper. At the same time, your email marketing campaigns can be as broad reaching as a television commercial because, after you've set up your marketing campaigns, each additional email might add only a fraction of a second to send.
Add to this the capability to get feedback on your campaigns through testing and then to use that feedback to optimize the campaigns going forward, and there is no question why email marketing continues to drive so much business.
Over time, Salesforce Marketing Cloud has added communication channels to supplement your email marketing campaigns. Now you can use Marketing Cloud as the central place to manage all the components of your online marketing campaigns, including web pages, text messages, and your Facebook page.
The Dawn of the Customer Journey
We're at a tipping point in digital marketing, where data, tools, and predictive analytics are coming together to drive a concept known as the customer journey. Before we can dive into the depths of modern-day customer journeys, however, we need to take you on a journey of our own. We're going to go back to where it began — email marketing — to understand email marketing as a channel and how we got from there to where we are today.
Early email marketing
The technology to send email messages emerged in the early 1970s, but only government and educational institutions really had access to it. In the mid-1980s, commercial networks began opening up the potential of this messaging channel to private citizens — mostly early adopters who loved technology for its own sake. Email as a common messaging medium, with practical applications for average citizens, didn't really take off until the 1990s.
At that time, major commercial networks, such as CompuServe and AOL, started connecting to the Internet and allowing messages to pass among competing systems. These messages were mostly text based and basic, as shown in Figure 1-1.
FIGURE 1-1: Early email was basic.
It's impossible to say who sent the first email that contained a marketing message or when they sent it, but it was probably pretty early. Even when the technology is unsophisticated and certainly not built with marketing purposes in mind, innovative marketers always find a way to use new tools to get an edge! Early email marketers borrowed strategies from direct mail to send electronic versions of what they would have sent to your mailbox.
Today, companies develop tools specifically for designing, automating, and delivering your email marketing, and marketing strategies and best practices exist that are specific to this channel. The tools that deliver these messages are available from companies called email service providers (ESPs). Salesforce Marketing Cloud is one such tool.
Email marketing is a highly effective method of delivering one-to-one marketing messages (messages to just one customer at a time, such as a thank-you message after an order) or one-to-many marketing messages (messages to an entire list of customers, such as a monthly newsletter). However, some marketers have misused email and given it a bad reputation. The term spam refers to unwanted marketing messages. Spam is the digital equivalent of all the junk mail you receive in your physical mailbox, but it causes even more irritation: In the early days of email, consumers oftentimes had to pay by the minute for their online time, and having to waste that time to read and delete unwanted messages made them angry.
The backlash grew further when mobile devices became popular for reading email. Again, consumers were paying a price for precious online time and sifting through unwanted messages felt expensive.
The great irony is that email marketing offers the power to provide highly customized messages that customers want to receive. The fact that email marketing developed a bad reputation for creating too many unwanted messages says more about the techniques used by marketers than the technology itself.
To combat this reputation — and to get more value out of email marketing efforts — online marketers began to develop best practices to ensure that subscribers could control their own email marketing experience and not develop so much resentment. For example, it's a best practice to offer a link in every email that a customer can click to unsubscribe from your email list.
As evidence of how important this particular best practice is, unsubscribe links are now required in marketing messages by law. Among other things, the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003 requires that subscribers can opt-out of your email lists. Brands that ignore the wishes of their subscribers may find themselves in court.
From batch and blast to the highly personalized message
Email marketing's early bad reputation wasn't built by scammers — or at least not only by scammers. Since email marketing was a new medium, guidelines on how or what to send didn't exist, nor were there any experts or thought leaders to consult with. It was the Wild West, and online marketers just tried whatever idea occurred to them to see if it worked.
Because there were no email-marketing experts, companies commonly called on their direct-mail marketing experts to design their email-marketing campaigns. The result was a campaign methodology called batch and blast.
The concept is simple — you get as many email addresses as you can, however you can, and send them all the same message at the same time. The message you send is generic so that it will apply to everyone. If you put too much specialized information in a message, you risk damaging your relationship with message recipients who don't care about your specialized information.
Fortunately, for us modern-day online marketers, data has become more plentiful and tools can take advantage of that data to create personalized messages. For example, an early improvement was to add a subscriber's first name to a message. Figure 1-2 shows how this kind of personalization appears in an email in Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
FIGURE 1-2: An example of email personalization.
Personalization is a relatively simple feature to implement in emails, but it's not remotely the limit of what you can do. By using the data you have about your subscribers, you can build different, personalized email content for each subscriber. This can include specialized content for the subscriber's particular interests, local weather conditions based on ZIP code, or a list of items the subscriber has ordered recently past, as shown in Figure 1-3.
FIGURE 1-3: A highly customized email example, based on an online order.
Delivering this kind of highly customized email is no longer optional for most businesses: Customers have come to expect the brands that they engage with to understand and act on their preferences. Keep this in mind for your messaging efforts, so you can delight your customers.
From two channels to too many to count
For the longest time, online marketers had only two digital channels from which to choose: websites and email. The explosion of mobile devices and social media apps, however, has resulted in more channels than you can count — and the number keeps growing. Today's online marketer has many choices about how to communicate with subscribers.
With each channel comes a different approach to marketing. After you decide that you're interested in promoting your brand through a particular channel, you may need to rethink your goal. For example, a normal goal is to lift sales, but on Instagram (a social networking app for sharing videos and photos), a better goal may be to reinforce your branding or to introduce a new product. Building awareness about your offering can be just as important as grabbing an immediate lift to sales.
Even with so many channels and all they can offer, email is still the core of your online marketing efforts. Email is the number-one channel for reaching your customers, educating them about your products, and developing a relationship with them.
From brand-centric to customer-centric
A major shift has been occurring in the marketing landscape over the last ten years. Although it has happened faster for some companies than others, everyone is waking up to this reality: Customers are now in control of your message.
You put a brand message out into the world, but you no longer have control over how it's consumed, what happens to it, and ultimately where it appears. The days of dictating one-way proclamations from on high are over.
Case studies abound of online marketing campaigns getting out of the brand's control:
Companies asking Twitter users to add a
hashtag
(a series of characters starting with # that makes it easier to search for related tweets) to the posts they share, only to find the hashtag appended to complaints about the brand
Companies encouraging customers to share photos of themselves using their products on Instagram, only to see countless photos of broken products
Customers creating parody Facebook pages dedicated to chronicling a company's poor customer service
This sea change can be terrifying to traditional marketers who learned to keep control of the message at all costs, but there is a bright side. The fact that customers want to tell you what they think means that they're engaged, and you can improve your offering to meet their changing demands. Embrace your customers, value their feedback, and demonstrate that you're listening, and they will reward you beyond your dreams.
The customer journey revolution
As online marketers understood the great level of control that customers have, they began to develop a new concept: the customer journey. A customer journey is a tool to craft a total customer experience with your brand.
For a long time, marketers treated the customer experience as a simple linear progression. Customers
Realize they need something
Possibly research what products are available to meet that need
Make a purchase, and the experience is over
Obviously, this was an oversimplification even then, but marketers truly did not care nearly as much about customers as they did about prospective customers.
In the digital age, though, marketers understand that a customer has an ongoing relationship with your brand that may not be linear. For example, some customer might need to engage with your customer support or warranty teams, and those interactions affect their perception of your brand.
Today's consumers have countless online platforms that they can use to influence others' opinion of your brand. You can't afford to neglect your customers, even after the purchase is complete. You need to craft customer journeys to keep your customers delighted throughout your entire relationship with them.
The Importance of the Customer Journey
Without customers, you have no business, but you can do better than just selling to faceless customers. The marketer's job is to design the interactions that keep customers delighted with your brand. As we discuss in this section, delighted customers lead to business success.
Marketers in today's businesses
Excepting executive administration, marketing is the one discipline that can touch every part of a business. Various kinds of marketers in your company might do any of the following things, and more:
Identify profitable markets to pursue with product offerings.
Interview prospects to understand what the market needs from products.
Set standards for the user experience of the product.
Craft the promotional messages that create the market's perception of the brand.
Create guidelines for how customer-facing teams, such as sales and customer support, talk about the product.
Identify opportunities to sell current clients additional products.
Being steeped in the market, the market's needs, and how the product fulfills those needs gives marketers a unique perspective on how to talk to prospects and customers. Marketers have a good understanding of how to target messages to particular populations to get them to take action.
In the modern business world, marketers have vast amounts of data available. Advances in technology have made it so that you can electronically store data about even very, very large groups of clients. You can pull data together from disparate sources, as well. You might already have a list of email addresses from your email newsletter sign-up sheet, for example, but you can cross-reference that list against the information in your point-of-sale (POS) system to bring other details about the customers together with those email addresses.
The downside of having so much information about customers is that customers now have an expectation that you will use that information to provide higher quality service. As a marketer, you need to be able to pivot quickly, and you might find yourself overwhelmed by all the options you have.
Decisive moments for customers
Marketing wisdom says that customers will make a purchase during specific points in time. The trick for you is to figure out those points in time and make sure that your brand is top-of-mind when they arrive.
Early in the prospects' research process is a great time to collect their contact information. For example, you can set up a form on your website where prospects enter their email address and other information to receive a white paper or discount offer. Sending that white paper or discount is the perfect opportunity to invite the prospect to begin receiving your free newsletter. Ongoing communications, such as newsletters or happy birthday messages, help you keep your brand fresh in the prospect's mind.
After the prospect makes a purchase and becomes a customer, your post-purchase offers can provide an opportunity to upsell. You can suggest purchasing an add-on product, a warranty, or an enhanced service plan. Even if you have nothing else to sell, you can get valuable information by soliciting feedback from your purchasers that you can use as customer testimonials or to improve your internal processes.
Grow the top line
Whereas the bottom line is the profit (or loss) that your business experiences after you account for all expenses, the top line is the total revenue. A business can become more profitable by growing the top line or by reducing the expenses that you have to subtract from it. Generally, marketers focus on the top line.
To grow the top line, you need customers making purchases. Getting new customers is expensive because you're starting from square one with people who might never have even heard of your brand. Before you can hope for new customers to make a purchase, you need to educate them about the following:
The problem your product solves
Why your product solves that problem better than the competition
What your company stands for
Your existing customers, however, already know most of these things, which is why it's much cheaper to retain existing customers than to get new ones.
One way that you can retain existing customers is to show that you know them and care about their preferences by tailoring products or offers to them. You need to leverage data to deliver tailored messages, and make the customer experience seamless across all channels and throughout the sales process.
Another way to retain existing customers is to get them talking. You want to create content that encourages them to engage with you. Engagement can take many forms, including things such as the following:
Clicking links in emails
Responding to surveys
Downloading information from your website
Making purchases
Reviewing products
Sharing your information on social networks
Data-based insights
The data you collect as you engage your customers and prospective customers can be as valuable as strictly making a sale. You can leverage the data that you collect from your digital campaigns to do the following:
Understand your audience.
As you communicate different kinds of messages over different channels, you'll see what gets the best response from your audience and results in the best top-line growth.
Create personas.
Personas
are composite characters that marketers create based on information about the actual client base. A persona is a profile of a typical client, complete with demographic information, hobbies, and even a stock photo. Marketers share the personas with other teams in the company to help everyone empathize with the client base as they make decisions.
Test content.
You may have heard of the
wisdom of the crowd,
or the idea that the aggregate opinion of a large group of people is better than the opinion of any individual member of the group. By engaging your customer base, you can compare the performance of, say, two photographs, and see which one drives more engagement. The wisdom-of-the-crowd idea says that you'll get a more accurate idea of which photo is better this way than by asking individuals in a focus group.
Test product or service mixes and offerings.
Similarly, engaging a wide variety of customers and prospective customers opens up the opportunity to see what mix of products gets the best response, while at the same time making your customer base feel recognized.
Operating in real-time
Real-time operations means different things to different people. In general, we expect real time to mean actions that occur as soon as the required data becomes available. Even that simple definition can encompass a broad range of activities.
For example, on the simple end, using API code to trigger sending a welcoming email message as soon as a new subscriber joins your list is a kind of real-time activity. Alternately, an example of a complex real-time operation might be to use a feed of data from your online shopping cart to send a series of targeted emails to subscribers who put items in the cart but never finished the purchase.
To operate in true real-time mode, the data that triggers the activities is critical. You have to plan for it to be reliable, secure, and tightly integrated with your marketing system so that the activities begin immediately after you receive the data.
Depending on the nature of your real-time messaging, you may also need to consider business rules to control the totality of your messaging to each subscriber. You don't want disparate automated processes sending any one subscriber emails that are incorrect, inconsistent, or just too numerous. The last thing you want is for a glitch to result in you being labeled as a spammer.
Mastering the metrics that matter
One of the big challenges you'll face in getting your online marketing efforts off the ground is understanding your goals and the metrics you can collect to see if you are meeting those goals.
The goals that you will pursue depend on your particular business, but they should be more thoughtful than just “get a lot of people to open the email.” Good, business-oriented metrics include things such as the following:
Increasing sales (back to growing the top line)
Convincing people to download your white papers because this increases engagement more than simply opening an email
Getting people to share your content on social media because the customers who share amplify your brand message
Receiving survey responses with information that you can use to improve your offering
The journey is the reward
When we say that the journey is the reward, we mean this metaphorically because it is the process of engaging your customer base that creates brand advocates, improves your product offering, and grows your top line.
We also mean it literally, because all this work leads you to understand and define your customer journeys. The process of defining your journey ensures that you're delivering the right content to the right people at the right time.
Mapping out your customer journey can tie all of this together.
Defining the Customer Journey
The very process of understanding the importance of the customer journey and the customer journey itself gives you a mental picture of who your clients are that is useful in doing your job. However, to get the most technical use out of this understanding, you need to write it down.
After you've defined the parts of your customer journey, you're on your way to representing it in Salesforce Marketing Cloud and taking advantage of the powerful automation and personalization tools available there.
Start with the basics
If you're new to online marketing, this process might seem overwhelming. Just remember that you have to walk before you can run. It's all right to start with the simple components of your customer journey and add sophistication later.
A good first step is to establish a basic set of emails. Start sending them to your customer and prospective customer and see how people respond. Simple engagement metrics are enough to start fine-tuning the text and pictures in your emails and get a sense for how the process works.
The sticky note exercise
When you're ready to dive in to defining your journey, you can start with a sticky note exercise.
In this exercise, you brainstorm all the possible potential touch points between your company and your customers or prospective customers. As you think of touch points, you write each one on a sticky note and stick it to the wall or whiteboard.
You may think of even more touch points as you begin putting your sticky notes in order on the wall, and that's fine. An iterative process helps you flush out what your customer journey looks like.
Dividing your overarching customer journey into smaller journeys can provide bite-size pieces to ponder. This section discusses possible types of smaller journeys and the kinds of marketing campaigns you might run for customers currently on that part of the journey.
Onboarding/welcome campaigns
The onboarding campaign, also called a welcome campaign, is a series of communications that you have with new clients right after they make a purchase or sign up for a communication from you. The following example illustrates the steps that might be in an onboarding campaign:
Start with a simple welcome to your brand.
Lead in to how to get the most out of the product the customer just purchased.
Remind the customers why they purchased the product and make sure they are using it to its potential.
Suggest upgrades or complimentary products.
Engagement campaigns
After you have welcomed new clients and get past the honeymoon phase, you want to keep them engaged. Engaging with existing customers makes them feel cared about and helps keep them as customers in the future. The following example steps might appear in an engagement campaign:
Remind the customers of the breadth of your product offering.
Suggest other ways to use items that the customer purchased.
Encourage social engagement; for example, suggest that customers share photos of using your product on Instagram, if that channel is important to your brand.
Run a contest that offers prizes for engagement.
Reengagement campaigns
If you have been lax in engaging your existing customers, or if those customers have just fallen off the radar, a reengagement campaign brings them back into the fold. Example steps include the following:
Include a “Click here if you want to keep hearing from us” link. Even if the customer does not click, you will have gained important information about the customer's preferences.
Send a coupon code and track the usage of that code to see whether the customer engages again.
Ad hoc campaigns
Marketing does not own every single communication between your company and your customer. Different departments of your business communicate with your customer base for various reasons, such as customer support.
The campaigns for these kinds of journeys are not as clear to define or as easy to automate. Nevertheless, you should still make sure that all departments are using your brand appropriately in their communications and that they are honoring the customers' expectations in both service and communication.
Mapping it out
Your customer touch-point sticky notes and campaigns map out what your customer journeys look like. After you transfer this knowledge to Marketing Cloud, customers will be able to move through and between the customer journeys you've defined.
Fulfilling the Customer Journey with Marketing Cloud
In the spirit of beginning with the end in mind, we discussed how to understand and envision customer journeys extensively here, but we won't get to the technical instructions on how to create them until Chapters 16 and 17. (We do discuss Journey Builder in Chapter 10 and how it's different from Automation Studio, which is another tool you can use to create less sophisticated portions of your customer journeys.)
You can implement various bits and pieces of your campaigns individually with all the apps available in Marketing Cloud, as discussed in the remaining chapters in this book. However, to bring the components together into seamless customer journeys, you need to use the Journey Builder app.
In the meantime, you also need to prepare some other components, as described in the following sections.
Data
We dedicate all of Chapter 5 to identifying the data that you need for your journeys. Then we dedicate all of Chapter 6 to creating structures in Marketing Cloud to contain your data.
As you will understand when you get there, you have choices about how to structure the customer data you store. You can use the more simplistic list model, or you can implement relational database tables called data extensions. Journey Builder requires that you use the data extension model, so keep that in mind when you get to that point in your process.
Channels
Your customer journey can include messages through only email or through additional channels as well. You have to decide how you want to reach your customers.
Marketing Cloud supports messaging through the following channels:
Email (see
Chapter 11
)
SMS messages (see
Chapter 12
)
Social networks (see
Chapter 13
)
Advertisements (see
Chapter 14
)
Web pages (see
Chapter 15
)
Using the Marketing Cloud API, you could also use additional channels not listed here. The Marketing Cloud API is a set of tools that developers can use to access Marketing Cloud functionality using code. The API is outside the scope of this book.
Automation
Using Journey Builder to manage your customer journeys automates them. Automation is critical for setting a program that runs in perpetuity or for a short duration at a scheduled time.
Automation frees you to do other things and keeps data flowing, but it's a drastic mental shift for marketers accustomed to controlling the sending of messages by hand. Prepare yourself psychologically to automating your processes!
Preparing to use Marketing Cloud
You're just about ready to open Salesforce Marketing Cloud and begin using its powerful tools. In addition to this book, you should take advantage of the excellent training resources that Marketing Cloud offers as well as the online help system, which is available via a link in the Marketing Cloud interface.
Getting access to Marketing Cloud
All that's left is to get your user credentials, log in to Marketing Cloud, and get started. If you don't already have your user credentials, contact your Salesforce representative for help. When you're ready, log in and let's take a tour.
Chapter 2
Navigating Salesforce Marketing Cloud
IN THIS CHAPTER
Touring the dashboard
Customizing your work experience
Moving among tools and apps
Joining the Marketing Cloud community
Salesforce Marketing Cloud starts with the dashboard. The dashboard contains its own overarching tools — such as a calendar of your planned marketing activities and a real-time snapshot of your campaign performance — and is also how to access your apps. Apps are the meat of Marketing Cloud's functionality. Marketing Cloud contains a variety of powerful apps you can use for your online marketing campaigns.
You can license all or just a few of the Marketing Cloud apps, depending on your online marketing tool needs. Regardless of whether you have licensed a particular app, though, you can see all Marketing Cloud apps in the dashboard. (If you try to open an app that you haven't licensed, a message appears to explain that the app is not available.) Salesforce wants you to know that the tool you need could be just a click away!
In this chapter, you take a whirlwind tour of all the dashboard tools and the apps. This journey sets the stage for later chapters, where you dig into the specifics of how to use the tools and apps.
Exploring Marketing Cloud
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud dashboard, shown in Figure 2-1, is the first thing you see when you log in to your Marketing Cloud account. From the dashboard you can access the following:
The dashboard tools, which are available to every Marketing Cloud account. Links to the dashboard tools appear in the toolbar.
The apps, which are available in your Marketing Cloud account if you licensed them. Links to the apps appear in the app switcher. The app switcher is visible when you first log in to your Marketing Cloud account. It disappears when you choose a tool or an app. You can get back to it at any time by hovering your mouse pointer over the Salesforce Marketing Cloud icon on the left side of the toolbar.
FIGURE 2-1: On the dashboard, tools and apps are a click away.
Dashboard components
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud dashboard comprises the following two elements:
The toolbar, which remains at the top of the screen no matter where you go within Marketing Cloud
The canvas (the large area below the toolbar), which changes as you move through Marketing Cloud to show you the app or tool you select from the toolbar
Toolbar
The toolbar, shown in Figure 2-2, is a dark gray bar near the top of the screen.
FIGURE 2-2: The toolbar is the lighthouse you use to orient yourself in Marketing Cloud.
It contains the following elements:
Salesforce Marketing Cloud logo: Use the logo to return to the dashboard and also to access the app switcher. Click to return to the dashboard; pause your mouse pointer on this logo to see the app switcher.
The app switcher is too powerful and important to squeeze everything about it into a single bullet. See the “Accessing Your Apps” section, later in this chapter, for details about this essential tool.
Dashboard tools:
The dashboard tools are Calendar, Pulse, Campaigns, and Playbooks. For a detailed description of the dashboard tools, see
Chapter 4
.
Feedback button: Use this button to display a form for sending feedback about Salesforce Marketing Cloud, such as ideas for new features, to the product team.
This form is not the place to report support issues. Because the form goes to the product team instead of the support team, submitting a support request here just creates delays. Instead, use the Salesforce Help & Training link.
Account menu:
After the Feedback button you see the account menu, which is the name of your account or business unit followed by a down arrow. Clicking this menu displays a list of all the business units to which you have access. See “Accessing business units,” later in this chapter, for information about business units.
User menu:
