Salesforce Marketing Cloud Features Explained with Benefits

The shifting spheres of advertising now demand a marketing and all-in-one platform. Unfortunately, however, many firms are left with fragmented data across platforms as they continue to use outdated methods and fragmented platforms that hinder their ability to understand their customers.

Now, more than ever, in a digital environment, you need to engage with your customers effectively. One of the potential tools you could hope to abuse is Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, since it’s a leading tech in analyzing, mailing, promoting, and (that’s right) anything else you might need to throw at your customers’ faces to keep them happy.

Figures based on official sources suggest that, on average, marketing ROI increases by nearly 28% after the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is integrated.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud SFMC is Salesforce’s cross-channel engagement platform (also known as digital marketing, marketing automation, analytics, and personalization). The platform is equipped with a variety of SaaS products tailored to various business objectives, a set of add-on functionality products, and additional features that can be added to a user's existing Salesforce.com deployment via the Salesforce AppExchange, extending the main features.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the “unbrella” branding of Salesforce for a suite of products that cover lots of marketing use cases, from multi-channel campaign execution, customer journey, and dynamic content management, to analytics, personalisation, digital advertising, and data management.

To make you capable of making the best of marketing campaigns and to extract the optimum usage of SFMC, this blog will educate you on SFMC basics so that you become the game changer in the market today in terms of decision-making on the marketing front.

What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a marketing automation platform for businesses that enables them to create and execute multi-channel marketing campaigns, collaborate to deliver a consistent customer experience, and leverage the power of Salesforce, built on the data of one integrated CRM platform and connected to the world’s #1 CRM.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive digital marketing suite that enables companies to manage their marketing campaigns and interact with both B2B and B2C audiences.

Just like other popular solutions that originated from the Salesforce suite of programs, well-known for its proficiency in customer relationship management (CRM) and cloud computing, Salesforce Marketing Cloud holds a niche in the social media marketing domain.

Below are the companies that can actually be shortlisted to consider implementing Salesforce Marketing Cloud in the first instance :

• B2C businesses: Fashion studios, restaurants, entertainment businesses, etc. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers a solution that effectively addresses the problem of low customer engagement and repeat business by enabling companies to interact more effectively with their audience, thereby increasing their sales.

• B2B companies: Can be IT services providers, manufacturing companies, and professional service firms. For them, SMC fills a gap in lead generation by helping to transform leads into long-term and repeat business clients, as well as managing ongoing relationships with these clients.

• E-commerce platforms: For services such as online marketplaces, online shops, or subscription-based businesses, Salesforce Marketing Cloud addresses low conversion rates, wasted budgets on abandoned carts, and customer dissatisfaction.

Nonprofits Include Charitable foundations, colleges, and advocacy groups. It is where Salesforce for marketers comes in to address challenges in donor retention, fundraising, and community engagement.

The Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform is designed to automate marketing activities, personalize customer interactions, and provide a 360-degree view of the customer across various channels. Its versatility means that it is appropriate for all types of companies, from large corporations to small businesses, as well as across a wide range of sectors—B2B, B2C (including e-commerce) and not-for-profit.

What is the purpose of Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Salesforce Marketing Cloud includes a variety of features that can help you organize, streamline and monitor marketing efforts. Its capabilities enable users to help companies create and deploy email marketing campaigns, design customer journeys, and communicate with customers across various social media channels. They also promote products to drive new leads, tailor communication to individual customers, personalize the customer experience, collect and analyze data automatically, and plan their marketing strategy.

As shown in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud review above, the world around it is a great place to be in. Explore further, it's some specifics - those are studios for them, being tools allowing them to implement various marketing functionalities:

Email Studio

Email Studio is a powerful email marketing service from Salesforce Marketing Cloud. It helps organizations connect with their audiences in a personalized and data-driven way through email. Email Studio offers several features:

• Segmenting and targeting: Develop targeted customer segments using demographics, behaviour, and purchase history.

• Dynamic content: Automate emails with content that varies according to recipient profile and activities.

• Automated campaigns: Send automated emails based on customer triggers or time lags.

• A/B test: Experiment with multiple versions of an email to see what content, subject lines, and send times result in the best response.

• Advanced analytics: Monitor how email campaigns perform with analytics and reporting.

Mobile Studio

It provides all the tools to interact with customers on their smartphones. It's a building block of mobile marketing in Salesforce Marketing Cloud and comes with features such as:

• SMS and MMS messaging:  Yes, send text messages and multimedia messages worldwide.

• Push notifications: Send push notifications to mobile devices to maintain app engagement.

• Mobile journey mapping: Combine mobile messaging with customer journey maps to optimise the experience.

• Geolocation targeting: Employ location-based targeting for context-aware mobile marketing.

Social Studio

Social Studio provides social media management and engagement tools. A Salesforce Marketing Cloud instance includes the following features:

• Social media posting: Post and publish content on various social media channels.

• Social listening: Stay informed about mentions of your brand, industry trends, and customer feedback on social networks.

• Engage over social: Customers can notify, respond to, and engage with fans directly on social platforms from the studio.

• Collaborative spaces: Let the team work together on social content and campaigns.

Advertising Studio

Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s Advertising Studio is designed to help you do just that — run targeted ads. Key features include:

• Customer integration: Engage and reach customers across digital advertising platforms using Salesforce data.

• Cross-channel advertising: Sync advertising across email, social, mobile, and web.

• ROI monitoring: Track the ROI of online and offline advertising campaigns with detailed analytics.

• Lookalike audiences: Specially advertise to lists that match your current best customers.

Web Studio

Web Studio extends web marketing capabilities through personalization and dynamic content creation. It does in Salesforce marketing:

• Customized web content: Serve web content according to customer data and usage.

• Content management: Quickly produces and manages web content without the need for technical skill.

• Integration with web and other studios: Easily connect web experiences to email, mobile, and social campaigns.

• Live interaction management: Interact with visitors in real-time, monitoring their web activity and behavior.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Features

Marketing Cloud is a single platform comprising several marketing products, divided into three main parts: messaging and automation, data and advertising, and measurement and analytics. Salesforce Marketing Cloud products enable the personalized configuration of independent and tailored use of each product, allowing for the use of one or more products in combination. The use of these products is defined in this documentation.

Creating and Controlling Customer Journey Experiences

• Create tailored multi-step omni-channel customer journeys from a blank canvas with an intuitive drag-and-drop interface!

• Imagine and list all the stages through which a customer passes in the marketing communication process.

• Automatically triggered responses for responses based on the way a customer is interacting with the action triggered.

• Recommend other personalized products to your customers, right from Different sources of data and channels;

• Automate decision-splits and A/B testing through AI to launch a more successful campaign on a bigger scale;

• Analyze the success of journeys through built-in dashboards and measure the success and engagement levels of marketing campaigns across email, mobile, and advertising channels.

Tailored Email Campaigns

EasyToUseCloudBasedDashboard creates autoresponder campaigns and submission campaigns, and allows you to create email campaigns quickly with our drag-and-drop email creator or use free, professionally designed templates.

• Launch, track, and analyse your email marketing campaigns;

• Personalize all campaigns by segment, purchase stage (warmup, post purchase, retention), or any other available customer info with AI;

• Collect all of your email marketing campaigns in one massive pile, whether they're transactional or promotional.

• Monitor your sender score for your email.

Mobile Apps Marketing

• Contact your customers directly through their mobile app to alert them to your special offer.

• Engage customers with in-app messaging and send push notifications.

• Leverage geotargeting or behavioral data, serving highly personalized marketing campaigns to an audience more likely to show an interest in the product or service.

Social Media Engagement

• Control of your company's social platforms from one place.

• Interact with customers on every major social network, including Facebook and Twitter, using Salesforce Marketing Cloud features like:

• Engage on social posts, moderate the community, and provide exceptional customer support.

• Monitor monthly mentions;

• Identify emerging trends;

• Review the customer information you have collected from various social media platforms.

• Streamline your social content planning, publishing, and sentiment analysis;

• Leverage Salesforce Marketing Cloud connections to obtain an integrated and comprehensive approach to your social media marketing.

Advertising Features and Functions

• Expand your business marketing efforts by leveraging the advertising capabilities of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

• Run marketing campaigns on e.g. Google, Meta, Twitter, etc.;

• Extend the reach, optimize targeting, and messaging with first-party customer data;

• Appeal to different groups within the target audience with targeted advertising campaigns.

• Easily add advertisements to your customers’ web experiences.

• Get instant insights for advertising and sync everything for seamless action across channels.

Improved Online User Experiences

• Control customer web experiences through Salesforce Web Studio.

• Build and enhance landing pages and microsites;

• Enjoy one destination for all the content you find on the web. Get organized by collecting everything that matters in one place: from text and images to documents and links, everything is automatically stored.

• Take advantage of customizable templates to create unique web pages;

• Utilize various Salesforce Marketing Cloud staples such as drag-and-drop tools for straightforward web design and A/B testing for website content optimisation;

• Connect your CRM, customer management, and your campaigns with Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrations.

Creative Content Development

• Simplify image, document, and content consolidation with a cross-channel content management system:

• Easily use a drag-and-drop interface to build out the static content for sales emails and web pages;

• Develop various types of content, like emails, images, videos, social media posts and messages;

• Work with your teammates while creating content;

• Consolidate your content into a source-agnostic repository using a content repository (CMS), API, content management application, and a new HTML content editor;

• Leverage asset management, versioning, and collaborative capabilities to curate the best content and versions of it.

Increasing Customer Engagement and Loyalty

• Tailor loyalty programs to suit your business with Loyalty Management Platform–another solution from Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

• Unify member information and gain a 360-degree view of member data and activities. Enable the aggregation of member data for analysis and reporting.

• Create and control loyalty actions such as earning, burning, tiers, and point expiration;

• Implement loyalty rules using a single management system, configure vouchers to offer discounts and bonus points for desired behaviours;

• Redeem and Query vouchers to 3rd party systems to increase your overall ability to manage your Salesforce loyalty program on a global scale.

Next-Generation Analytics Functions

• Consolidate, harmonize, and roll up customer data to produce one customer profile for better targeting and personalization.

• Consume the customer data from disparate sources, whether generated by you or from outside providers;

• Cleanse and normalize data – Cleanse away unnecessary contacts and information and use data mapping and modeling – Find deeper relationships between data to paint a clearer picture about your audience and customer, help cross-sell, up-sell, and market more effectively;

• Examine the data and identify the optimal channel of communication for every customer in your database, and ensure that every customer receives the messages in a form that is best suited to them.

• Segment your target audience based on their interest in: The marketing communication channel, Product or service, Desires, Location, and prospects;

• Consolidate all of the customer information into a single database and know who your customers are with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud's advanced collection of data tools.

• Collect, filter, and model customer data with Salesforce Marketing Cloud features to build rich customer profiles;

• Monitor, analyze, manage customer journey activity, and capture associated data to offer a high degree of personalization;

• Leverage features such as filtering, sorting and grouping to build customized reports whoever you share your insights with;

• Leverage behavioral targeting from customer interactions for real-time personalization.

• Maximize marketing campaigns and prepare for them in advance based on trusted data and insights that matter.

• With Salesforce Marketing Cloud features: Analyze and visualize the performance of marketing campaigns, customer engagement and long-term customer retention among channels and touchpoint:

• Listen to customer behavior and even better quality of personalisation down the road, and the opportunity to forecast, model, and adapt the following marketing activities;

• Reduce the number of duplicate records in the imported contact list. The fewer duplicates in your contact base, the higher the quality of your customer contact base.

• Manage cross-channel spend and improve marketing efficiency by aligning launched and planned campaigns with Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

Combined Solutions for B2B Marketing

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (formerly Pardot) facilitates efficient lead capture, segmentation, and personalized cross-channel journeys. Utilizing AI-based lead scoring and grading facilitates more effective lead nurturing. Its platform enables frictionless interaction across mediums, linking third-party forms, surveys, and SMS apps into marketing programs. It also includes action on lead and account scoring based on behavior, as well as dynamic dashboards for in-depth understanding of customer engagement at various levels. Salesforce Marketing Cloud automation, powered by AI-equipped MTA, provides rich attribution on the impact of marketing and sales activities on the pipeline and performance.

Integrate with Salesforce Clouds

You have more than enough products that can be added and connected, if necessary, to all those of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, and the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is no exception. Take advantage of out-of-the-box Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrations to build seamless journeys in which customers experience uniform messaging and encounters with marketing channels, service centers, sales reps, or loyalty programs. You can collect data from these channels and leverage it to enhance the performance of various marketing actions, improve personalization throughout customers’ journeys, and communicate more effectively with customers.

Benefits Of Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a single platform that enables you to connect with your customers. It allows you to send personalized messages to your target audience across multiple channels. You can reach them through email, websites, mobile devices, social media, and digital ads.

Understand Your Customer Better

With Salesforce Marketing Cloud, companies can collect and analyze customer data in depth. With a deeper understanding, a more proficient marketing strategy comes. For instance, a retail company would be able to monitor customer purchase history and preferences and create a marketing campaign around that.

Personalize With AI

The incorporation of AI, specifically Einstein AI, into Salesforce Marketing Cloud enables the delivery of hyper-personalized, tailored experiences to customers. It can forecast customer behaviors and preferences, allowing marketers to target their efforts accordingly.

Effective and Impactful Analysis

Insights that let marketing take the right direction, Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers robust analytic10Bs, enabling businesses to make critical decisions based on analytics. It includes:

Tracking campaign performance

• Tracking customer engagement metrics

• Predictive analytics

• Customer journey analysis

• Web analytics

• Cross-channel analysis

Targeted Customer Journey

The software enables the construction of value-added customer journey maps, ensuring that each encounter is the proper interaction at the right moment, thereby increasing customer engagement at every stage of their lifecycle.

Security

In Salesforce Marketing Cloud, data protection is a top priority area of trust that you can’t breach. It’s a delicate balance where customers’ data is at the core of everything, the only way to maintain trust, and keep it safe, secure, and compliant with the law. For example, HIPAA and GDPR are federal-level regulations, while local rules apply to specific businesses or target users.

Continuous  Innovation

Salesforce regularly updates its features, enabling businesses to stay current with marketing technology trends. This means that Salesforce Marketing Cloud solutions are always relevant and up-to-date.

Enhanced Customer Engagement.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud offers key features, including personalized communication, which helps engage customers. These features lead to greater customer satisfaction and strengthen brand loyalty.

Comprehensive Analytics. 

Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides tools that enable marketers to analyze data and generate reports. These tools allow marketers to gain valuable insights and refine their strategies.

Boost Sales

Salesforce Marketing Cloud drives all the sales growth with personalized, timely marketing messages. It perfects the process of turning leads into customers, improving your sales strategies.

AI Integration 

Einstein Analytics is a tool in Salesforce Marketing Cloud that enables marketers to gain valuable insights. It enhances their ability to make data-driven decisions in their marketing strategies.

Manage All Marketing Data Seamlessly in One Place

Salesforce Marketing Cloud brings all your marketing data together in one place. Analysis and strategy development are also facilitated by this centralisation, so that marketing work is more cohesive and better coordinated with strategy.

Searching for a reliable Salesforce consulting firm? Get in touch with Codleo and we'll discuss some options!

Salesforce Marketing Cloud Pricing

Salesforce Marketing Cloud connects with your essential marketing tools, so all your data is in one place. That’s a boon for businesses that are looking for a customized optimal solution, as each company will have the opportunity to determine and pick the specifications that are valuable to their unique operation.

Thus, it’s pretty tricky to answer the ‘how much does Salesforce Marketing Cloud cost’ question with a general answer. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud price will be the sum of the chosen products you need. So, let’s talk about Salesforce Marketing Cloud pricing plans for the current products.

How to Get the Most out of Your Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud: A powerful and quality marketing, process optimization, and automation platform.

Better with native integrations inside Salesforce and with third-party apps, with the ability to handle an unbelievable amount of data, and with AI across the board, it provides the capability for businesses and companies to build personalized and effective marketing campaigns to drive stronger user engagement, retention, and profitability.

However, mastering Salesforce Marketing Cloud automation is easier said than done. When you have such an impressive range of products and tools like Tableau, it can be challenging to determine which solution is best suited to your company’s requirements. Here’s how you can proceed in your journey to a deep-dive understanding of Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

• Training and Learning. Time is money, and to know Salesforce, you will have to invest it. Salesforce boasts a fantastic platform, Salesforce Trailhead, that enables you to learn more about Marketing Cloud features & will get you to know what functions you really need, as well as those that could be surplus to requirements. Learn new and updated functionalities with Salesforce Trailhead and other professional training. Learning never stops, allowing your team to get the most out of Marketing Cloud long-term.

• Test Different Strategies. Marketing is a trial-and-error game, and it is not guaranteed that your marketing campaigns will succeed just by using Salesforce Marketing Cloud for the very first time. It may be a while before you discover which methods will work best for your business and which products are a good fit. Engage in their A/B testing of emails, split decisions in Customer Journeys, and cross-platform marketing communication, to know what you like the most.

• Hire a Salesforce Consultant. Trying to bribe your way through the dense underbrush of the Salesforce ecosystem can seem either impossible or just like a waste of time and money. Hiring a Salesforce consultant, on the other hand, provides a strategy so you make the most of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud features. Salesforce consulting companies will take the time to understand your unique business requirements, customize your Salesforce configuration, and recommend the best mix of Salesforce products that will allow you to take advantage of all features to full effect.

Top Business Challenges Salesforce Marketing Cloud Can Help Your Company Overcome

Salesforce Marketing Cloud was designed to address specific business needs and requirements. Here are several problems that this technology can help you solve:

Poor Email Deliverability

Challenges with getting the emails in the recipient’s inbox, where the email does not reach or ends up in spam.

How to fix this: Use tools like those that come with Salesforce Marketing Cloud for email content optimization, sender reputation management, and audience segmentation to optimize deliverability.

Absence of Customization

Failing to do a good job of targeting and personalizing content for each customer results in marketing with minimal effect.

How to fix it: Use Einstein AI for personalized content creation and data-driven personalization to create dynamic communications that can be customized to the individual behaviors and preferences of your customers.

Challenges in Managing Campaigns.

Running and synchronizing marketing operations on multiple channels isn’t an easy task.

How to fix: Leverage Salesforce Marketing Cloud for simplified campaign management and all its native tools to easily strategize, execute, and measure campaigns efficiently in various platforms.

Errors in Measurement and Evaluation

"Companies have a hard time capturing ROI and tracking the overall effectiveness of their marketing efforts, identifying the different touch points, and getting a full understanding of how the customer is engaging."

How to fix this: Take advantage of Salesforce Marketing Cloud’s intelligent analytics and reporting to see exactly how your campaigns and customers are performing.

Lack of Important Customer Perspectives

The problem to be solved: assumptions around customer behavior and preference.

How to fix it: Use the data integration and analysis tools in Salesforce Marketing Cloud to collect complete customer data and obtain insights that lead to action.

Unsatisfactory Customer Experiences

Delivering irrelevant or inconsistent experiences for customers across different marketing channels.

How to fix it: Market with Salesforce to build personalized customer journeys that are unified across all touchpoints.

Poor Communication

It is the challenge of fragmented, uncoordinated communications and getting your message to “stick” with your audience.

How to fix it: Use the integrated communication tools from Salesforce Marketing Cloud to ensure a cohesive and targeted approach across all marketing channels.

Conclusion

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a powerful tool for driving and measuring marketing efforts across multiple touchpoints. Using the AI platform’s capabilities, marketers can personalise and deliver campaigns that, in turn, drive more immersive customer experiences.

If you want to avoid marketing constraints or take advantage of the complete range of benefits provided by SFMC, reach out for our Salesforce consulting services. They will assist you in deciding if this platform is the correct solution for your company.

Codleo Consulting, as a Summit Salesforce Consulting Partner, has assisted over 300 clients across multiple industries.

Our salesforce expertise improved our deal closure rate by 46% and sales productivity by 58%, as also evidenced by 100+ positive reviews on the likes of AppExchange and Clutch. And many other successful stories on our website. Our Salesforce Marketing Cloud support will enable you to customize the Salesforce Marketing Cloud packages for your business requirements.

Book a free consultation call with our Salesforce consultant and find out how Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be tailored to suit your business objectives.