Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a cloud-based marketing platform that offers comprehensive solutions for customer journeys across email, websites, apps, and ads. It is the most trusted platform for marketers to automate their end-to-end marketing efforts.
From lead generation to campaign handling, monitoring efforts, and measurement, marketers can perform each task with clear visibility using Salesforce Marketing Cloud. This article provides a comprehensive discussion of the benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and its uses and components.
What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud comprised of?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is an umbrella of solutions that make marketers’ lives easier. Each solution has its benefits and uniqueness in rendering personalized and ROI-driven marketing.
Essentially, Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) comprises the following components:
Journey Builder:
Lets you provide a seamless customer experience across marketing, sales, and service through automated marketing across email, mobile, ads, website, and IoT.
Audience Builder:
Helps build a single view of the source of customers and capture the targeted audience and build relationships like never before.
Personalization Builder:
Deliver personalized marketing experiences with Einstein’s predictive intelligence capabilities. Leave customer profile pairing to AI while you focus on earning customer trust.
Content Builder:
Gives more power to your content. You can centralize it yet make it accessible with more capabilities, better security, and connectivity.
Analytics Builder:
Gain more insights about your customer journey. Improve campaign performance through insightful reporting and predictive analytics.
Marketing Cloud Connect:
Empower all customer-facing teams for enhanced interactions and deliver one seamless experience. Your marketing, sales, and service teams can do more with the data availability.
How popular is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
According to Enlyft statistics, businesses with 50-200 employees and 1M-10M dollars in revenue use SFMC. In addition:
- The Computer Software industry uses SFMC most with a 15% share in the user base.
- Next on the list are IT & Services, Retail, Marketing, and Advertising with 8%, 6%, and 6% shares, respectively.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Uses
Where the customer has the last word, Marketing Cloud comes into the picture. It provides a single location for cross-channel content allowing businesses to deliver personalized, holistic marketing services to customers.
Email, web, social, ads, or app – whichever channel the business intends to leverage, Marketing Cloud provides the solution. In other words, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the one-size fits all solution for any business in this digital era.
Marketers can view the diverse touch points of customers across any channel using the Marketing cloud. Irrespective of the stage the customer is in the buying cycle, the marketing team gets alerts that allow them to provide effective content and marketing services that lead to a higher conversion rate.
At every stage of the customer journey, marketers can plan interactions that align with customer preferences and business goals. Let us understand what Salesforce Marketing Cloud uses across various channels of customer communication:
Email:
Email marketing is one of the proven ways to sell business offerings. According to a study by the DMA, for every $1 spent, email has an average $38 return on investment (ROI).
- Driven by Predictive Intelligence, Marketing Cloud comes equipped with multiple features that help marketers build hyper-personalized campaigns.
- Creation of compelling emails is easier in SFMC, thanks to its rich drag-and-drop options.
- Additionally, dynamic content blocks allow personalized campaigns that are on another level. The insights from predictive analytics aid marketers to create relevant messages that suit any stage of the customer journey.
Mobile:
Given the ever-increasing rate of mobile adoption, the number of users that make purchase decisions on mobile is exploding year after year. A study by Forbes indicates that 60% of eCommerce sales happen on mobiles.
Salesforce finds that users read text messages within 3 minutes of receiving them. Such statistics explain why a mobile is an indispensable tool for marketers.
- SFMC comes loaded with features that help to tailor marketing campaigns. Marketers can create any campaign type using ready-to-use SMS and MMS templates.
- The drag-and-drop interface is another added benefit of Marketing Cloud. It allows the creation of custom-branded messages with little effort.
- Some awesome features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud that allow marketers to achieve more ROI on their campaigns include geotargeting, triggering messages based on customer actions, and group messaging apps.
Apps:
Amidst the fierce competition to attract customer attention, businesses are turning to apps to win the game. According to CleverTap, 68% of mobile app companies have a long-term, fully documented mobile app launch strategy.
With the features like Push notifications, and the ability to capture the customer’s location and preferences seamlessly, apps are turning out to be the choicest option for marketing.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud connects marketers and customers more effectively than ever.
Sending personalized, geo-based emails, targeted ads, push notifications and SMS messages becomes faster.
SFMC allows the setting of campaign intervals based on the user response. Additional benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud include features to reward loyal customers with offers and provide them with the best-in-class support.
Plus, the insights into app download, onboarding, purchases, and decision-making helps marketers to share content that caters to the user needs at the respective stage.
Social Media:
The potential of social media in driving business, building trust, and establishing a voice for businesses is immense. Irrespective of size and industry, every business is leveraging as many social media channels as possible.
Marketers can strategically boost their reach, reputation, and revenue by integrating their social selling with Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
One of the many benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud is its seamless integration with all major social media channels including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and Google+.
By leveraging SFMC, marketers can also offer early access to prelaunch product tests, as Marketing Cloud is one of the select few Facebook Strategic Preferred Marketing Developers.
Running LinkedIn campaigns is cost-effective and straightforward using SFMC. The reason being Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a LinkedIn Sponsored Updates partner.
In other words, marketers can run multiple campaigns, targeting their audience based on demographics, track metrics, and gain insights from intuitive dashboards.
The benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud extend to Pinterest and Twitter too. Being a recognized partner, marketers can run campaigns on these platforms and benefit from the all-comprehensive dashboard that SFMC offers for these social media sites.
Websites:
Websites are indispensable marketing tools in this digital era. The role of a website in convincing users about business capabilities is notable. State-of-art websites come loaded with dynamic pages, microsites, social tabs, and more.
Here is where Salesforce Marketing Cloud benefits in building advanced websites. The platform offers many features driven by Predictive Intelligence that provide 1-to-1 experiences with personalized content and customized recommendations based on customer history and preferences.
Digital ads:
Ads supplement organic marketing efforts, which is why marketers leverage them to witness instant results.
The two features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud – Social.com and Active Audiences – assist marketers to design effective ad campaigns.
- Social.com allows better reach for the targeted audiences on any channel including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
- Active Audiences comes loaded with tools that aid in running ad campaigns on Facebook and Twitter exclusively. Marketers can gain insights into purchase history, web browsing, and email engagement and run targeted ads through Active Audiences.
And there’s more to Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
The Content Management tools in SFMC allow asset handling and streamline workflows and approvals. Working with metadata of the content including tags, owners, and campaigns associated with is faster on SFMC.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Benefits
With so many features and components, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a distinctive platform for marketing needs. Below we focus on Salesforce Marketing Cloud benefits and explain how each helps the sales and marketing teams:
Personalize the entire customer journey
When it comes to lead conversion and customer engagement, personalization is the key. SFMC allows marketers to personalize every touch point of the customer. Every interaction with the brand becomes memorable for the customer resulting in brand reputation, trust, and loyalty.
The marketing process becomes simpler than ever
SFMC offers a holistic solution for all marketing needs. From website to emails, ads to social media, and app to content creation, every marketing effort becomes more transparent and insightful resulting in faster results in lesser time.
Increased Lead Generation
Two main areas where SFMC makes its mark on lead generation are its ability to help marketers with targeting the audience and personalizing the content. As a result, every campaign whether on social, email, or ads becomes effective and results in a higher conversion rate.
Build a single source of truth for customer data
With increasing customer touchpoints resulting in a huge amount of customer data, sales, and marketing teams require a single source of truth to stay on the same page. Here is where SFMC helps. It builds a unified view of the customer base. Using a common customer ID, all teams involved in the customer journey can provide the relevant services to the customer based on their stage in their journey.
Effective Data Management
SFMC captures every interaction of the customer in the form of a data point. The Contact data and Journey data provide the details of customer journey phases. The result is timely, effective, and personalized communication with customers every single time. With all data points together on a centralized platform, the campaign performance analysis becomes more streamlined and connected.
Excellent integration with third-party applications
One of the proven benefits of Salesforce is its ease of integration with third-party applications. SFMC offers integration ease with App Exchange applications as well as many third-party tools. Marketers can seamlessly integrate with the tool of their choice and enhance functionality and return on investment.
Comes equipped with the power of data analytics
SFMC being a cloud-based software does not require any additional infrastructure. Entire customer data is securely stored in the cloud. All stakeholders involved in the customer journey can access the data from anywhere through secure logins.
Kickstart your SFMC journey with Kasmo
Kasmo is a pioneer in offering Salesforce solutions. Our pool of Salesforce-certified experts ensures that you attain the maximum return on investment from SFMC. To know more about how to benefit from Salesforce Marketing Cloud, book a free appointment with our team.
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