Salesforce Email Marketing Best Practices in 2024

Digital marketing advanced, technologies upgraded business operations, but one thing remains the same: customer relationships thrive through communication.

Here’s the rub: making your emails stand out in a client’s message-packed inbox. Salesforce email marketing is your 2024 must-have for addressing this challenge effectively.

Email marketing continues to grow, with global revenue expected to reach $17.9 billion by 2027. As more companies boost their email marketing budgets, Salesforce email marketing is a powerful tool that elevates your campaigns and maximizes their impact.

Curious to see for yourself? Our top consultants are ready to help implement the best Salesforce email marketing practices. No matter the request, our Salesforce consulting services have you covered.

Want to take a detour first? Let’s dive into the best practices that will drive real results.

How to Use Salesforce for Email Marketing?

Salesforce email marketing leverages cloud infrastructure, actionable first-party data, and automation to create a seamless and effective email marketing experience.

Salesforce offers a robust platform for email marketing, but its native capabilities have limitations that might require third-party tools for optimal results.

Salesforce’s Flows is a powerful automation tool that allows you to configure criteria for sending automatic emails to contacts and leads. However, even with the highest subscription plan, Salesforce has a daily limit of 5,000 emails. Despite this limitation, Flows can significantly enhance your ability to engage with leads and boost conversion rates.

With Flows, you can set up complex automation sequences, including drip campaigns. By configuring specific parameters, you can automate a series of emails tailored to your leads’ interactions and behaviors.

While developing these flows requires some expertise, Salesforce provides the necessary capabilities to implement effective drip campaigns and other automated marketing strategies.

How to Send Emails with Salesforce Marketing Campaign

When building the next campaign, it’s always the key to use a step-by-step approach. Turn to our guide when using Salesforce for email marketing:

• Create your campaign record
• Define the criteria for your audience
• Add the audience to the campaign
• Design your email template
• Create your email content
• Send your email to your audience
• Track your statistics in the campaign layout

Step #1: Setting Up a Campaign Record

Begin by creating a campaign record. This record will serve as the foundation for your email marketing salesforce campaign, where you’ll track all relevant activities, from audience selection to performance metrics.

To do this:

1. 1. Navigate to the “Campaigns” tab in Salesforce,
   2. Click “New.”

Enter the campaign details, such as name, type, and start date, ensuring everything aligns with your overall marketing strategy.

Step #2: Defining Target Audience

The next step is to define who you want to target. With Salesforce for email marketing, you can create specific criteria to segment your audience:

• Age,
• Demographics,
• Past interactions,
• Purchase history, and more.

Use Salesforce’s powerful filtering options to narrow down your audience. This way you’ll target the right people every time.

Step #3: Importing Audience to the Campaign

Once you’ve defined your audience, the next step is to add them to your campaign. When using Salesforce for email marketing, just import your selected contacts or leads directly into the campaign record:

1. Go to campaign record
2. Click on the “Add Contacts” or “Add Leads” button
3.  Select the appropriate group

The final step is crucial to ensure your emails are sent to the correct recipients.

Step #4: Designing an Email Template

Now it’s time to design your email template. Salesforce offers a new drag-and-drop tool that simplifies the process of creating visually appealing emails. Choose from pre-designed templates or start from scratch, customizing the layout, colors, and images to match your brand.

Salesforce email marketing tool is particularly user-friendly. So, you can build your email without any coding knowledge.

Step #5: Crafting an Email Content

With your template in place, start creating the content. Craft a compelling subject line and body text that resonates with your audience. Remember to personalize your emails. Making each recipient feel like the message is meant just for them can significantly boost engagement.

Here are some effective personalization approaches:

• Use the recipient’s name: Addressing recipients by their name adds a personal touch.
• Mention past interactions: Reference previous purchases or interactions to make the content more relevant.
• Choose timing: Send emails at times when recipients are most likely to engage.

Once your content is ready, attach it to the Salesforce email marketing template and link it to your campaign record.

Step #6: Sending an Email

After everything is set up, it’s time to send your email. Review all the details, including the audience, content, and timing. When you’re satisfied, click “Send” to launch your Salesforce email marketing campaign.

Salesforce will distribute your email to the selected audience, ensuring it reaches their inboxes.

If you’re managing large lists, Ascendix Search can make it easier to segment and target your audience within Salesforce.

Step #7: Analyzing Campaign Performance Metrics

Finally, monitor the success of your campaign by tracking statistics within the campaign layout. When working with Salesforce for email marketing you get access to detailed analytics, including open rates, click-through rates, and conversion metrics.

Use this data to assess the effectiveness of your campaign and make any necessary adjustments for future campaigns.

 

How to Use Salesforce Flow for Email Marketing

Managing and automating email marketing campaigns can be tricky without the right tools. Salesforce Flow provides a solution to these challenges by automating complex workflows and streamlining various aspects of your email marketing.

Here’s how you can utilize Salesforce Flow to optimize your email campaigns:

• Navigate to Setup > Process Tools > Flows or use the App Launcher to find Flows.
• Create a New Flow: Name your flow and select its type
• Configure the Flow: Add elements such as assignments, decisions, and loops.
• Add Email Actions: Specify email templates, subjects, and recipients.
• Personalize Emails: Use merge fields to dynamically populate recipient-specific information.
• Test and Activate: Thoroughly test the flow using test data before activation.
• Schedule or Trigger the Flow: Schedule the flow to run at specific times or trigger it based on certain events.

Further, you can enhance your Salesforce Flows with the power of Salesforce Einstein. This AI-driven tool enables the creation of personalized and highly effective email campaigns by offering data-driven content recommendations and predictive analytics.

By integrating Salesforce Einstein, you can leverage advanced AI capabilities to tailor your communications, resulting in improved engagement and better campaign outcomes.

How AI Can Boost Salesforce Email Marketing

Despite new marketing avenues, email continues to be effective, especially with the integration of AI.

According to Statista, 51% of email marketers find AI-supported email marketing more effective than traditional methods.

AI in email marketing utilizes machine learning algorithms to personalize content, optimize send times, and segment audiences. Predictive AI provides insights based on historical data, while generative AI creates new, relevant content tailored to user needs.

AI-powered email marketing automates, optimizes, and personalizes campaigns to boost engagement and satisfaction. By integrating technology with communication, this approach allows marketers to send highly targeted messages efficiently, significantly enhancing engagement and outcomes.

Here’s a comprehensive look at how AI can enhance your email marketing strategy:

• Send Times Optimization: By tracking the performance of each email and analyzing engagement patterns, AI can recommend an optimized sending frequency that maximizes recipient engagement and minimizes unsubscribed.
• Customer Segmentation: Utilize machine learning models to dynamically segment your audience based on complex behavioral data. AI can analyze patterns in customer interactions, purchase history, and preferences to create precise segments. This enables tailored messaging and personalized offers, enhancing engagement and conversion rates by ensuring each customer receives the most relevant content.
• AI-Driven Content Creation: AI tools like ChatGPT can provide content ideas based on prompts and help generate personalized email content tailored to each recipient’s preferences and behavior. For example, by inputting details about your business, ChatGPT can suggest tailored content topics, helping to overcome writer’s block and stimulate creativity.
• Email Validation: AI can analyze your email list, comparing metrics to identify valuable addresses. These tools can also track engagement and interaction, ranking the quality of email addresses and even curating an optimal email list.
• Subject Line Optimization: Leverage AI to predict and generate the most effective subject lines to improve open rates. Additionally, AI can perform A/B testing to compare different subject lines, ensuring that the most engaging options are used. This continuous optimization process leads to higher open rates and more successful email campaigns.
• A/B Testing at Scale: AI tools help automate and analyze A/B tests, quickly identifying the most effective variations. AI can handle multiple test versions simultaneously, providing real-time insights into performance metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. This efficient process allows for rapid optimization and scaling of successful email strategies.
• Performance Analytics: AI can provide insights and suggestions based on campaign performance data, helping you refine strategies. By analyzing open rates, click-through rates, and conversion metrics, AI identifies trends and patterns, enabling continuous optimization of your email campaigns. This ensures more effective targeting, higher engagement, and improved ROI over time.
• Smart Product Recommendation: Tailor emails with personalized suggestions based on browsing and purchase history. By leveraging AI algorithms, you can offer relevant products that match customer preferences, enhancing their shopping experience. This approach not only boosts engagement but also drives higher conversion rates and increases customer loyalty, maximizing overall sales.
• Dynamic Content Generation: Automatically updating email content based on real-time data and interactions. This ensures that recipients receive the most relevant and timely information, enhancing their engagement. For example, content can change based on a recipient’s location, past purchases, or recent interactions with your website, providing a personalized experience that drives better results.

While AI can automate many tasks, using AI Tools for email marketing, is connected with certain challenges:

• Data Privacy and Security: Ensuring compliance with data privacy regulations is crucial.
• Technical Expertise: Implementing AI requires skilled personnel to optimize tools and platforms.
• Solid Data Foundation: AI relies on high-quality data to generate accurate insights and personalization.

That’s why human oversight is crucial to ensure the content remains relevant and appropriate.

Salesforce Email Marketing Best Practices: 13 Steps to Make Smart Emails

Despite the growing prominence of social media, email continues to be a vital communication tool. Developing effective email marketing campaigns requires a solid understanding of best practices, among which are the following:

1. Segmentation

Segmenting your email list is crucial for delivering relevant content to specific groups within your audience.

By dividing your list based on demographics, purchase history, behavior, or engagement levels, you can tailor your messages to meet the unique needs and interests of each segment.

This targeted approach increases engagement rates and enhances the effectiveness of your Salesforce email marketing campaigns.

2. Personalization

Personalization goes beyond just addressing the recipient by their first name. It involves leveraging data to create tailored content that resonates with individual preferences, past behaviors, and purchase history.

This type of email can significantly improve open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, as they make the recipient feel valued and understood.

Utilize Salesforce for email marketing to enhance your personalization strategies.

3. Compelling Headline

Your subject line should be concise and informative, ideally around 40 characters, to encourage recipients to open the email.

Key elements include clarity, urgency, personalization, curiosity, and relevance. Best practices involve A/B testing, avoiding spam triggers, and ensuring consistency with email content.

Using emojis sparingly can also help your subject line stand out. Examples include: “Exclusive Offer: 20% Off All Winter Wear” and “Hurry! Sale Ends Tonight“.

4. Clear Call-to-Action (CTA)

Make it easy for recipients to know what to do next. A clear and compelling CTA is crucial in guiding your recipients toward the desired action, whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for a webinar, or downloading a resource.

Ensure your CTA stands out visually and is easy to understand, making it simple for recipients to know what to do next.

5. Consistent Branding

Consistency in branding helps reinforce your brand identity and build trust with your audience.

Ensure that your emails reflect your brand’s voice, colors, fonts, and imagery. Consistent branding makes your emails instantly recognizable and strengthens your overall brand presence in email marketing Salesforce strategies.

6. Compliance

Compliance with email marketing laws such as GDPR and CAN-SPAM is crucial for protecting your brand’s reputation and avoiding legal issues.

Ensure you have explicit consent from recipients, provide a clear option to unsubscribe, and include necessary information in your emails.

Staying compliant not only builds trust but also helps maintain a clean email list.

7. Right Timing

Pay attention to timing when sending emails to maximize open rates. Avoid late-night sends and consider the recipients’ time zones.

Studies suggest that emails sent between 10:00 a.m. and 11:00 a.m., or 8:00 p.m. to midnight, perform well.

Additionally, mid-week days, especially Tuesday and Thursday, often yield better engagement.

Monitoring and analyzing past campaign data can help identify the optimal times specific to your audience.

By strategically scheduling your emails, you can enhance visibility and increase the likelihood of recipient engagement, leading to higher open and conversion rates.

8. Effective Landing Page

Ensure a seamless user experience by directing traffic from your emails to a dedicated landing page. This page should be specifically designed to align with the content and call-to-action of the email.

It should have a clear, concise headline, compelling visuals, and a strong call-to-action that guides visitors toward the desired action, whether it’s making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter, or downloading a resource.

Additionally, an effective landing page enables precise tracking of user interactions, allowing you to analyze performance metrics and optimize future campaigns.

Ensuring consistency between the email and landing page can significantly enhance user engagement and conversion rates.

9. Mobile Optimization

With most emails being opened on mobile devices, ensuring their emails are mobile-friendly is essential.

This involves using responsive design, concise content, and clear, tappable buttons. Mobile optimization ensures that your email looks good and functions well on any device, improving the user experience and engagement rates.

10. Automated Workflows

Automation allows you to set up email workflows that trigger based on specific actions or events, such as a welcome series for new subscribers or abandoned cart reminders.

Automated workflows ensure that your emails are timely, relevant, and personalized, helping to nurture leads and maintain engagement without manual intervention.

Salesforce and email marketing automation can significantly enhance your efficiency.

11. A/B Testing

A/B testing, or split testing, involves sending two versions of an email to a small segment of your audience to determine which performs better.

You can test various elements such as subject lines, CTAs, images, and content layouts.

Regular A/B testing helps you understand what resonates best with your audience and continuously improves your email marketing Salesforce campaigns’ effectiveness.

12. Regular Analytics Review

Regularly reviewing your email campaign analytics is essential for understanding what works and what doesn’t. Track key metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates.

Use these insights to adjust your strategies, optimize your content, and improve future campaigns’ performance.

13. Re-engagement Campaigns

Re-engagement campaigns aim to reconnect with subscribers who haven’t interacted with your emails for a while.

Use targeted content, special offers, or surveys to understand their preferences and encourage them to re-engage.

Re-engagement campaigns can help revitalize your email list and improve overall engagement rates.

Top 4 Email Marketing Tools and Integrations for Salesforce

Salesforce CRM excels when customized with third-party software, popular add-ons, or full-fledged solutions. Adding marketing automation tools to Salesforce enhances its capabilities, providing a robust platform for managing the entire customer journey.

ActiveCampaign

 

• Starting Price: 15$/month

ActiveCampaign is a robust marketing and customer experience automation tool designed to drive business growth through optimized customer interactions. When integrated with Salesforce, it creates a seamless connection between sales and marketing efforts, offering a unified view of customer engagements.

This integration automates workflows across both platforms, enhancing efficiency and providing a comprehensive understanding of customer behavior to improve strategic decision-making.

Pros:

1. ActiveCampaign has a simple interface and is easy to understand.
2. It has 4 different payment plans that start at $15/month. However, to integrate with Salesforce you would need a premium subscription that costs $145/month.
3. This email marketing automation app offers A/B sequence testing. So, instead of just testing 2 emails, A and B, you can do a full sequence.
4. In recent years, ActiveCampaign has built a number of innovative Machine Learning-based features, including predictive sending, predictive content, and predictive win-probability scoring of leads to help you automate even more of your marketing & sales process.
5. Its drag-and-drop tool helps create quick and simple emails but also allows you to create sophisticated emails.

Cons:

1. The initial setup and configuration of the integration can be complex and might require technical expertise or support.
2. The combined cost of using both ActiveCampaign and Salesforce can be high, especially for small businesses.
3. Users may require training to effectively leverage the full capabilities of the integrated platforms.
4. Any issues with data synchronization can affect both marketing and sales activities, causing disruptions.
5. Advanced customization might be necessary to tailor the integration precisely to business needs, which can be time-consuming.

MailChimp

 

• Starting Price: Free

This integration enables the seamless connection between Salesforce CRM and Mailchimp’s email marketing platform, streamlining workflows between your CRM and email marketing activities.

It facilitates easier management of customer data, execution of targeted email campaigns, and analysis of customer engagement.

Mailchimp allows you to create audiences for your contacts and leads, ensuring these audiences are automatically updated without manual intervention. Additionally, you can create campaigns directly in Salesforce and leverage Salesforce triggers to enhance campaign workflows.

Pros:

1. The new integration is a significant improvement over the previous version, offering enhanced capabilities and ease of use.
2. The contact/lead audience automation saves considerable time that would otherwise be spent manually updating the audience.

Cons:

1. The tool does not support all customizations. While it is not the most expensive option on the market, it is also not the cheapest, which limits the extent of customizations you can implement
2. Data synchronization issues may occur. While automatic data sync and audience creation are time-saving features, they can lead to problems depending on the complexity of your data.
3. Initial installation and configuration can be time-consuming and may require additional costs for a specialized team to assist.

Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (AKA Pardot)

 

• Starting Price: $1,250 /month for up to 10,000 contacts

Formerly known as Pardot, this app offers a comprehensive range of features, making it a versatile email marketing tool. It includes form and website form handler capabilities, supports drip campaigns as well as one-time emails, and provides robust reporting functionalities.

Best of all, it is owned by Salesforce, ensuring seamless integration with your existing Salesforce ecosystem.

Pros:

1. Easily sync contacts and leads between Salesforce and Pardot. Seamless data flow is expected since Pardot is a Salesforce app.
2. You can manage campaigns directly within Salesforce.
3. The drip campaign configuration is highly capable and extensive, allowing you to create activities in Salesforce based on actions taken by prospects in the campaign.
4. You can create your own forms or use the existing layout from your website.
5. Advanced marketing analytics with higher subscriptions: With Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (MCAE), you have access to Analytics Studio within Salesforce, providing an excellent dashboard for monitoring all aspects of your marketing campaigns.
6. Create simple emails using the Salesforce Email Builder and utilize them in MCAE.
7. Simplify your marketing efforts by separating assets by product or region. Business Units make it easy to organize and find specific assets related to a particular product or territory.

Cons:

1. Pardot can be quite expensive, with costs accumulating from subscriptions to additional mailable prospects.
2. You will likely need a dedicated team or consultant for initial configuration and training, which can be a significant expense for your company

We offer full Salesforce and Pardot consulting and integration services to ensure a smooth setup of your email marketing tools.

Our expert team is here to assist with everything from initial setup to fine-tuning customizations. Get the most out of Salesforce and Pardot with Ascendix, we’re here to help!

Salesforce Marketing Cloud

 

• Starting Price: $1,250 Org / Month

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a comprehensive marketing automation platform designed to manage and optimize customer journeys across multiple channels, including email, social media, mobile, and web.

It offers a wide range of tools for executing, managing, and analyzing multi-channel marketing campaigns. Here are some of the pros and cons of using Salesforce Marketing Cloud:

Pros:

• You can manage all your email, social, mobile, web, and advertising marketing activities from a single, central platform.
• Marketing Cloud helps Create highly customized and automated customer journeys across multiple channels.
• Its advanced segmentation capabilities allow you to target specific customer groups based on a wide range of criteria.
• SF Marketing Cloud serves personalized content dynamically based on customer behavior and preferences.
• Its seamless integration with Salesforce CRM provides a 360-degree view of the customer.
• Real-time data synchronization ensures that marketing activities are coordinated with sales and customer service efforts.

• This marketing automation tool offers powerful data analysis and visualization tools, allowing you to gauge campaign performance and ROI. It also provides unified marketing intelligence, enabling you to make data-driven decisions.
• Users can leverage artificial intelligence for predictive analytics, next-best actions, and more personalized customer experiences.
• Marketing Cloud is suitable for large enterprises with complex marketing needs.
• It offers access to a wide range of third-party add-ons and integrations to further extend functionality.

Cost:

• Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be expensive, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses. Additional costs for add-ons and extended capabilities can accumulate.
• Some users have reported performance issues when managing very large datasets or running complex queries, although these can usually be mitigated.
• The extensive features and capabilities result in a significant learning curve for new users.
• Initial setup and configuration can be time-consuming and may require professional assistance. Additionally, effective use of the platform often requires dedicated, skilled personnel experienced with Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
• Continuous maintenance and optimization are necessary to keep the system running smoothly and effectively.
• While the platform is highly flexible, customizing it to fit specific needs can be complex and may require coding or extensive consultation.
•  Integrating with other systems, especially non-Salesforce products, can be challenging and may require additional development work.
• Like any cloud service, Salesforce Marketing Cloud is subject to occasional downtime or performance issues, which can impact business operations.

 

How Ascendix Can Help with Salesforce Email Marketing

As a certified Crest Salesforce consulting partner, Ascendix Technologies has supported over 300 clients across various industries.

Ready to take your email marketing to the next level? We’ve got you covered. From seamless Salesforce and Pardot integrations to tailored consulting services, we make sure your email marketing tools work for you, not the other way around.

Our experts don’t just talk strategy; we deliver results that align with your goals.

Book a free consulting call with us to explore how Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud can be customized to enhance your email marketing efforts.