Introduction

Salesforce is the leading Customer relationship management platform in the world. By using different cloud solutions provided by Salesforce, businesses can engage with their customers in a more efficient way.

Salesforce has different cloud platforms for different business requirements. For example, Sales cloud for all the sales-related activities, Service cloud to provide better customer service, etc.

Among all these clouds, Salesforce has a special cloud platform called “Marketing cloud” for creating and managing winning marketing campaigns. Let’s see what is Salesforce Marketing Cloud and its capabilities.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Marketing cloud is an integrated solution with a bunch of different tools to create efficient marketing journeys. These tools make it possible to communicate with customers across digital channels. Here are some of the examples of tools and their usages in the Marketing Cloud.

Journey Builder

Journey builder is a major component in the Marketing cloud platform. By using the powerful drag and drop user interface provided, marketers can create fully automated end-to-end marketing journeys. Marketers can also use different communication channels like email campaigns, SMS alerts, and push notifications. These journeys can have different stages based on customer interactions.

This small video clip from Salesforce will give you a quick overview of the Journey builder tool.

Email Studio

Even though everyone uses emails for our daily communications, emails can be used as a powerful marketing channel. Using the email studio, marketers can create from a simple newsletter to complex email campaigns. Why marketers love Salesforce marketing cloud email studio is, using this powerful tool, not only send customized emails but also they can track customer behaviors like which emails they open, which links they clicked, etc.

Sending personalized emails is also important because they can get more customer attention and more likely to open them and interact with the information given on email campaigns. 

Email studio is also a tool with a user-friendly environment. Marketers can create dynamic email templates by dragging and dropping reusable content blocks.

Please watch this short video clip to learn more about email studio :

Mobile Studio

SMS Marketing is another popular marketing tool nowadays. Push notifications and chat messaging also align with SMS. Salesforce Marketing cloud mobile studio provides tools to send all of the above types of notification to the right people at the right time. 

This tool helps marketers to send dynamic and real-time SMSs. There are different types of SMS messages for different use cases. For example, Outbound messages for promotional campaigns to a predefined audience on-demand or as per scheduled. Text response will help marketers to send text replies for the messages that the user interacts with. This is like a two-way communication.   

Mobile studio also provides tools to create SMS votings, and also capture information from SMS messages when asking certain questions from customers. This information can be stored in data extensions for further usage.

It also supports push notifications to the integrated Android and IOS apps. Using this feature marketers can send targeted and personalized push notifications to the most relevant audience.

This small video clip will give you an idea about the capabilities of Mobile studio

Working with Data

Data is the most important thing on any information related system and this is a common factor for the Marketing cloud as well. Marketers have to deal with a large number of data records on the marketing cloud and to manage those data, the platform should have effective tools. 

Marketing Cloud has powerful data processing capabilities. The Data Extension is something like a database table in the Marketing Cloud. Users can create custom data extensions according to their requirements with custom data fields with different data types.

Query activity is another important feature. Query activity provides powerful SQL query-based data processing capabilities. Users can write custom queries, execute them manually or on a scheduled basis using automation tools, and store filtered data on data extensions. These filtered data then can be used in marketing campaigns.

Cloud Pages

Cloud pages are like dynamic web pages. These pages can be used to publish targeted marketing content to customers across multiple channels.

Cloud pages can be used to create Landing pages, Mobile Push pages, and Microsites.

AMPscript is the scripting language provided to add dynamic content to the cloud pages.

Please watch the below video clip to learn more :

Conclusion

Here we discussed only a few major tools provided by the Salesforce Marketing Cloud. There are many more to investigate. Here are some links to follow if you are willing to learn more.

Salesforce trailhead :

https://trailhead.salesforce.com/en/content/learn/modules/mrkt_cloud_basics

A Good Video :

https://www.salesforce.com/video/305063/

Author: Dinesh Wickramasinghe is a Certified Salesforce Application Architect and holds the post of Associate Tech Lead at CMS