Salesforce Marketing Cloud For Dummies

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

check Understanding email marketing

check Learning about customer journeys

check 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