What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud?

Firstly, Salesforce is an established company that is headquartered in San Francisco and offers CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools and software via a SaaS (Software as a Service) model. The company has adopted Cloud Computing through the years, enabling anyone and everyone to benefit from rich CRM tools via a nominal subscription fee.

Moving on, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, formerly known as Exact Target, assists digital marketers to deliver the right message to the potential audience at optimal timings. The Search Customer Experiences defines Salesforce Marketing Cloud as a customer relationship management (CRM) platform for marketers that allows them to create and manage marketing relationships and campaigns with customers.

The Marketing Cloud incorporates integrated solutions for customer journey management, email, mobile, social media, web personalization, advertising, content creation, content management, and data analysis.

Advantages of Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

The essential advantages of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud are as follows:

Right Customer, Right Message, Right Time:

A CRM solution like Salesforce Marketing Cloud can give a much-required customer-centric view of the business. Furthermore, it can also provide a 360-degree view of every customer who is dealing in the industry. All this starts with data that can be taken out from multiple sources or spread out across platforms, and that can be tied to specific prospects, leads, or customers. With its powerful data management platform (DMP) Audience Studio, financial marketers and leaders can further capture, store, and most importantly, unify the data to gain deep insights into their target audience.

Personalized and Automated Marketing:

With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud's full suite of Marketing Automation tools like Pardot, financial services firms are increasing the flow of prospects and high-quality leads, which further boosts lead conversion and strengthens relationships among customers. Even better, they can also automate the entire process, so they have more opportunities to develop a deeper understanding of their customers’ needs, maximize their marketing investment and thus get more support for their marketing skills.

With automation of all the common marketing and sales tasks, financial organizations can focus on what matters: creating personalized and engaging customer experiences at every touchpoint to enhance the buyer’s journey and supercharge their revenues and profits.

Cross-Channel, Cross-Functional Marketing

In the modern world’s ultra-dynamic financial business landscape, cross-channel, cross-functional marketing and sales campaigns are critical. Another Salesforce Marketing Cloud tool, Journey Builder, helps enable financial services organizations to create targeted marketing campaigns further while connecting the dots across essential customer touchpoints, including email, mobile, advertising, the web, direct mail, sales, commerce, and service.

Furthermore, they can make dynamic adjustments to campaigns based on customers' current and predicted behaviors, attributes, and interests. This is done to resonate best with them and increase engagement and level of satisfaction.

Drive Regulatory Compliance for Greater Transparency and Trust

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is a step towards protecting EU consumers’ privacy in the right direction. Salesforce Marketing Cloud makes it possible for financial services organizations to remain compliant with GDPR even as they use robust data to understand and serve their customers better.

Furthermore, Salesforce Marketing Cloud enables these firms to perfectly balance compliance with customer-centricity so that they maintain control over their data and use it in ways that build trust, transparency, and long-standing accountability across all their sales and marketing touchpoints.

Features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud Implementation:

The essential features of the implementation of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud are as follows:

Customization:

Salesforce offers the power to customize one’s online marketing tools according to the market base and as the customer or business likes. By using these customization tools, a personal touch can be added to each customer’s requirements without any hassle.

One can also use integrated apps to gain knowledge of the various needs of its customers. The power to customize the platform for better understanding helps in utilizing it better for management and has good functionality of the business’ motives to increase the profits.

Security:

Salesforce Cloud Marketing platform provides trust and protection against the misuse of data. By further analyzing the data, one can protect the business from any harm being done by any business rival. Also, it helps in the encryption of data between the company and its client.

Moreover, Salesforce enables a secure platform to use and protect its clients from any unfair loots. Also, the better the security, the more accustomed the client is towards the businesses and thus will stick with them for the long term. Therefore, security is the most crucial role in customer and company management, and one can get it at its best only on Salesforce.

Sales:

With the features mentioned above of the implementation of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, sales will also boost. The increase in sales varies directly proportionally towards the understanding and security that the businesses will provide to their customer.

It has specially designed platforms and apps, which could help businesses connect with their clients through just one touch. With this ease, sales will become an easier task than ever. Moreover, by using data analytics that Salesforce provides at an affordable price, it will be easier to focus on big data to increase sales significantly.

Engagement Making and Customer Satisfaction:

With all the above features and more like Innovation, Decision making, etc., along with the efforts and hard work put into the businesses, it is guaranteed that clients' happiness will prevail. Without any doubt, with customer satisfaction, the company will also be satisfied with their working.

In other words, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud aims to prosper and makes others thrive also. Furthermore, this is the ultimate goal and benefit that the platform wants to reach with its implementation. This is done through sharing its platform and connecting it to businesses situated across different parts of the world.

Best Practices To Implement Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

Deliverability:

This measurable Key Performance Indicator metric is an instant measurement of the company's outreach campaigns' reach, and so on. With the higher delivery percentage, the higher performance of the campaign can be achieved. Therefore, it is vital to ensure that the businesses’ contact list consists of clean data that is up to date and free from as many errors as possible. 

Personalizing emails:

The organization’s valorous data points on each contact currently. This data should be further appropriately utilized and used to customize emails with the objective that the messages depict an enhanced user experience. Conventional emails should be a tradition of times gone by. Instead, they should reflect a more personalized client experience that should be pushed ahead. Personalizing emails fills in as a vehicle to catch the attention of the client and supports expanded commitment.

Responsive Design:

Modern times have seen the widespread of the mobile device like no other device has. It has now become a part of our daily existence. Therefore, it is given that all messaging as part of the marketing outreach has to be mobile-friendly (for all types, models, and brands of the device). Since people are spending more time on the phone and reading on-the-go, there is a requirement to ensure that the marketing cloud is genuinely responsive and mobile-friendly.

Tracking the Success:

It is analyzing and reviewing marketing programs or campaigns after each campaign has been an integral part of the marketing cloud's overall success, the business’ brand, and the hard work that is put in. It is, therefore, essential that a review of all KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) is undertaken. This will further enable the company to review what it has worked on and what has not. Thus, the best practices are to ensure better success that can be carried out to ensure that all goes as per the plan.

Conclusion:

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a fantastic marketing automation platform. While being out of the box, it is a clear record that can further be intended to meet an association’s particular needs. From storing complex information structures in Data Extensions to creating custom Journey Builder activities, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can deal with pretty much every use case possible.

It is one of the market leaders in the advertising cloud domain alongside different clouds like Adobe marketing cloud, Oracle marketing cloud, and IBM marketing cloud. Marketing Cloud has a total market share of 24%, second just to Adobe marketing cloud.

Thus, while seeing its advantages and features, it can be very clearly concluded why one should choose Salesforce Marketing Cloud over its alternatives.