In the digitalized landscape, marketers grapple with a myriad of challenges, from information overload and spam inundation to heightened competition and the imperative to safeguard customer data. The quest for sustained customer interest and engagement in products is more challenging than ever.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud steps into this dynamic arena as a strategic ally. This article delves into the intricacies and challenges of modern marketing and explores how Salesforce Marketing Cloud features empower organizations to rise above the digital noise, deliver targeted personalized experiences to the customers, and build enduring customer relationships.
What is Salesforce Marketing Cloud Used For?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a marketing automation platform that is used by businesses to create, automate, and launch multi-channel marketing campaigns, seamlessly integrating with the Salesforce ecosystem to enhance customer engagement and drive results.
What does Salesforce Marketing Cloud Do?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud products are the combination of multiple tools for marketing management, optimization, and analysis. Salesforce Marketing Cloud features list includes tools to help businesses launch email marketing campaigns, create customer journeys, engage with customers through social media, advertise the product to get new leads, tailor the communications and personalize the customer experiences, automate the data collection and analysis, and plan marketing strategy.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Features
Marketing Cloud stands as a singular platform encompassing multiple marketing products, organized into three primary sections: messaging and automation, data and advertising, and measurement and analytics. Salesforce Marketing Cloud products, whether used independently or in tailored combinations, serve to support and accomplish your specific digital marketing targets.
Customer Journeys Creation and Management
- Design personalized, multi-step, cross-channel customer journeys from start to finish using drag-and-drop tool;
- Visualize and automate all the stages your customer passes in marketing communication;
- Automate triggered responses based on customer interactions to initiate relevant actions;
- Suggest additional personalized products for your customers using data from different sources and channels;
- Automate the decision-splits and A/B testing with the power of AI to launch a more successful campaign on a bigger scale;
- Evaluate the performance of journeys using the integrated dashboards while analyzing the performance and engagement of marketing campaigns in email, mobile, and advertising.
Tailored Email Campaigns
- Create email campaigns from scratch using a library of ready-made email templates or make your own custom emails with the help of drag-and-drop features;
- Launch, manage, and analyze your email marketing campaigns;
- Use AI to personalize all the campaigns according to the target audience segment, stage of purchase (warmup, post-purchase, retention), or other available customer information;
- Keep all your email marketing campaigns in one place, whether they’re transactional or promotional;
- Keep track of your email sender score.
Mobile Apps Marketing
- Reach out to your customers through a mobile app to remind them of your unique offer;
- Connect with your customers through integrated in-app engagement and send push notifications;
- Using geotargeting or behavioral data, send highly personalized marketing campaigns, targeted for a specific audience that is most likely to be interested in the product or service.
Social Media Engagement
- Manage your business social media accounts through the single platform;
- Engage with customers across all major social networks, including Facebook and Twitter, using essential Salesforce Marketing Cloud features;
- Respond to social posts, manage community, and deliver exceptional customer support.
- Monitor monthly mentions;
- Identify emerging trends;
- Analyze customer data available on the social media platforms;
- Streamline your social media content planning, publishing, audience sentiment analysis;
- Use Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrations to get a well-rounded and extended social media marketing strategy.
Advertising Capabilities
- Diversify your business marketing activities with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud capabilities in advertising;
- Launch promotional campaigns on platforms like Google, Meta, Twitter, and others;
- Broaden the outreach, utilizing first-party customer data to refine targeting and messaging;
- Connect with segments of your target audience through tailored advertising campaigns;
- Integrate advertising into customer journeys with ease;
- Access real-time analytics for measuring advertising effectiveness and seamless coordination across multiple channels.
Optimized Web Experiences
- Manage web experiences of the customers via Salesforce Web Studio;
- Create and optimize landing pages and microsites;
- Get a centralized hub for organizing all web content, from forms to coupons;
- Use customizable templates for crafting unique web pages;
- Employ a range of traditional Salesforce Marketing Cloud benefits like drag-and-drop tools for easy web design, and A/B testing capabilities to optimize web content;
- Unite your CRM, customer management, and marketing activities using Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrations.
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Unique Content Creation
- Streamline the consolidation of images, documents, and content with a cross-channel content management tool;
- Use convenient drag-and-drop interface to create dynamic content for emails and web pages;
- Create diverse content types, from emails and images to videos and social media posts and messages;
- Collaborate with your team during the process of content creation;
- Unify your content across different channels with content repository (CMS), API, a content management application, and a new HTML content editor;
- Use asset management, versioning, and collaboration features to gather best content and track the changes in versions of it.
Customer Loyalty Increase
- Configure your loyalty programs to fit your needs with Loyalty Management Platform – one of Salesforce Marketing Cloud solutions;
- Streamline the aggregation of member data and get a comprehensive 360-degree view of member details and activities;
- Launch and manage loyalty processes, including accruals, redemptions, tier processing, and point expiration;
- Deploy loyalty rules through a unified management system, setting up vouchers for discounts and rewarding members for eligible behaviors;
- Track redemptions and query vouchers from third-party systems to enhance the overall efficiency of loyalty program management within Salesforce.
Advanced Analytics Capabilities
- Gather and unify customer information and create a single customer profile for more targeted and personalized marketing;
- Ingest the customer data from various sources, whether collected on your own, or from third parties;
- Clean and transform the datasets from irrelevant contacts or information, and map and model the data to identify connections between data, in order to get a holistic view of your audience and customers;
- Analyze data and assess the preferable communication channel for every single customer in your database, so that all your customers receive the messages in the most suitable form for them;
- Segment your target audience depending on their preferences in marketing communication channel, product or service type, desires, location, or prospectives;
- Collect the customer data in one database and identify who your customer is using enhanced data collection Salesforce Marketing Cloud features;
- Gather, filter, and model the customer data with Salesforce Marketing Cloud capabilities to create high-quality customer profiles;
- Track, view, and manage customer experiences, and collect the relevant data to provide high level of personalization;
- Utilize filtering, sorting, and grouping features to create personalized reports and share insights between different teams;
- Use behavioral targeting based on customer interactions to provide real-time personalization;
- Optimize marketing campaigns and plan them ahead in accordance with reliable data and relevant insights;
- Analyze and visualize the performance of marketing campaigns, customer engagement, and long-term customer retention across different channels and touchpoint with Salesforce Marketing Cloud features;
- Understand customer behavior and get higher quality of personalization in the future and possibility to project, plan, and adjust the upcoming marketing activities;
- Mitigate any duplicate contacts in your imported data, meaning higher quality of the customer contacts database;
- Control cross-channel spending and increase marketing efficiency by streamlining launched and planned campaigns with Salesforce Marketing Cloud capabilities.
Combined Features for B2B Marketing
Marketing Cloud Account Engagement (aka Pardot) supports efficient lead capture, segmentation, and personalized cross-channel journeys. Leveraging AI-powered lead scoring and grading facilitates effective lead nurturing. The system allows seamless engagement across various channels, connecting third-party forms, surveys, and SMS apps directly to marketing programs. It also provides insights into lead and account scoring based on behavior, while dynamic dashboards offer comprehensive insights into customer engagement at different levels. Salesforce Marketing Cloud automation, represented by AI-powered Multi-Touch Attribution provides valuable insights into marketing and sales activities’ impact on the pipeline and performance.
Integrate with Salesforce Clouds
All Salesforce Marketing Cloud products can be easily integrated and connected as required, and Salesforce Marketing Cloud is not an exclusion. You can leverage native Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrations to create cohesive journeys, so that customers have consistent and unified experience with marketing channels, service centers, sales representatives, or loyalty programs. The platform allows you to gather data from these channels and use it for marketing activities, increasing personalization in customer journeys, and communicating with customers more efficiently.
How Can Salesforce Marketing Cloud Solve the Challenges of Modern Marketing?
| Problem | Salesforce Solution |
| The constant exposure to digital channels leads to digital fatigue. The customer cannot identify the product among the diversity of all the channels. | Utilize Marketing Cloud Automation Studio to schedule and automate repetitive tasks, reducing manual workload.
Personalize communication using Marketing Cloud Personalization Builder to enhance engagement and resonate with the audience. |
| The amount of information available via various sources has caused immense information overload. It is hard to gather and unify all the information about a single customer, such as preferences, contact data, previous purchases, etc. | Implement AI-driven analytics and predictive insights, powered by Salesforce AI Einstein, implemented in Salesforce Marketing Cloud to automatically sift through data and highlight key trends and actionable insights. Leverage tools like Marketing Cloud Analytics Builder for clear visualizations and reporting. |
| The digital era has lowered market entry barriers, leading to increased competition. Numerous competitors are now for the attention of the same audience, making it harder for unique offerings to stand out. | Leverage Marketing Cloud's Journey Builder to create targeted and personalized customer journeys. Utilize AI-driven tools like Einstein to analyze customer behavior and preferences, ensuring tailored interactions that stand out among your competitors. |
| With the rise of data-driven and personalized marketing, the concern of data privacy has arisen. Ensuring compliance while still extracting valuable insights can be a delicate balance. | Ensure compliance with data privacy regulations using Salesforce Trust website to track the performance, updates, and compliancy. Implement consent management features and utilize Marketing Cloud's built-in security measures to protect customer data. |
| In their quest for personalized and relevant content for users, search engines and social media algorithms constantly change, posing a challenge for effective marketing. Businesses must adapt quickly to these shifts that may impact the visibility of their content. | Stay ahead of algorithm changes by continuously monitoring performance metrics with Marketing Cloud Analytics Builder. Use automated AI-powered A/B testing within Journey Builder to adapt strategies based on real-time insights. |
| Digital consumers often have shorter attention spans, meaning businesses must capture their attention swiftly. Crafting compelling and concise content becomes crucial in this scenario. | Design engaging content with Marketing Cloud Content Builder, incorporating dynamic and personalized elements. Use the data from other Salesforce Clouds integrations to enable maximum personalization. |
| While AI and automation offer efficiency, finding the right balance between automation and personalization is a major challenge. Overreliance on automation leads to a loss of personal touch in marketing, while high personalization is highly time- and effort-consuming. | Combine Marketing Cloud Automation for automation with Einstein Personalization Builder for AI-driven personalization. This ensures a balance between efficiency and maintaining a personalized touch in marketing efforts. |
| The abundance of data doesn't always result in clear insights. It is hard to measure the return on investment for marketing campaigns amidst numerous data points and channels, which requires a lot of effort. Moreover, information gaps can lead to incorrect trend analysis and conclusions. | With Data Cloud for Marketing, Analytics builder and Audience builder, strengthened with Einstein AI, gain insights into the effectiveness of all marketing channels used by your business. These tools are a great choice for comprehensive reporting and analysis, leading to optimized marketing campaigns, and therefore higher customer engagement and retention. |
| Building and maintaining credibility, long-term relationships with your clients, and trust in an era where misinformation is prevalent can be challenging. Marketing messages must be authentic, personalized, and trustworthy amid a sea of information. | Utilize Marketing Cloud's Journey Builder and Content Builder to create authentic and transparent communication with customers. Implement personalized and relevant messaging to build trust and use Salesforce Marketing Cloud features in tracking to make sure the customers trust the brand and communication. |
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Products and Business Challenges They Can Solve
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integrations
Salesforce is famous for its integration capabilities and the possibility to conveniently manage your business from a single platform. Some of the integrations are inbuilt (like Google Analytics 360), and some other require Marketing Cloud Connect in order to be installed. Marketing Cloud Connect enables the user to integrate Salesforce Clouds (like Sales Cloud) and other third-party apps into Marketing Cloud. Usually, the integration can be performed only if the user has specific types of accounts in both apps.
For instance, if you want to integrate Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Sales Cloud, your Marketing Cloud account must be Core Edition, Advanced Edition, Agency Edition, Enterprise 1.0 Lock and Publish, Enterprise 2.0 Edition, Reseller Edition, or a Marketing Cloud sandbox, and your Sales Cloud account must be one of the following versions: Salesforce Unlimited, Enterprise, or Performance Editions, or a Developer Edition sandbox.
This task may require some technical knowledge and experience in Salesforce products, as well as expertise in Salesforce account types, editions, products, and cloud solutions. Hiring a Salesforce consultant can make the process of integration smoother and save time, effort, and finances. Ascendix team has extensive expertise in Salesforce consulting, and decades of experience in CRM consulting, so we can help make your the business operations and strategic planning easier.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrations may involve third-party apps or be some of the Salesforce ecosystem clouds.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integrations
- Sales Cloud. Salesforce Sales Cloud integration allows seamless alignment between marketing and sales teams. The marketing team can access real-time customer data, including leads and opportunities, to create targeted campaigns. Integration ensures a unified view of customer interactions, enhancing lead nurturing and conversion strategies.
- Service Cloud. Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration with Service Cloud enables you to respond to customer inquiries and feedback in real-time. This integration ensures consistent messaging across marketing and customer service channels, fostering customer satisfaction and loyalty. Service data can be used to tailor campaigns based on customer support interactions.
- Commerce Cloud. Integration with Salesforce Commerce Cloud enables personalizing campaigns based on customer purchasing behavior and preferences. This integration facilitates a seamless customer journey from marketing efforts to the online shopping experience, enhancing cross-selling and upselling opportunities.
- Experience Cloud (former Community Cloud). Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration with Experience Cloud allows you to engage with customers in online communities. Salesforce Marketing Cloud capabilities let you create targeted content and campaigns for target audience, fostering a sense of belonging and encouraging user-generated content that can be leveraged in broader marketing efforts.
- Data Cloud. Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrations with Salesforce Data Cloud enriches customer profiles with third-party data, providing valuable insights into demographics and behaviors. This integration enhances audience segmentation, with Salesforce Marketing Cloud capabilities allowing to create more targeted and personalized campaigns based on a deeper understanding of their audience. The access to a vast repository of data contributes to a more comprehensive view of customers, meaning refined strategies for optimal engagement.
- Tableau (former Analytics Cloud). Salesforce Marketing Cloud integration with Tableau enhances data visualization and reporting capabilities. It lets you create interactive dashboards and reports to analyze campaign performance, customer engagement, and other key metrics, facilitating informed decision-making and strategy optimization.
- MuleSoft (former Integration Cloud). MuleSoft with Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrations ensures seamless connectivity with external data sources. Data from various applications and systems can be used to enrich customer profiles, enabling more personalized and data-driven marketing campaigns.
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Benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud
Built upon the world’s leading CRM platform, Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps businesses enhance marketing activities, fully understand their customers, employ high-level personalization, build variations of customer journeys, and engage with customers easily.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Benefits
As in the single integrated customer engagement platform, Salesforce Marketing Cloud features enable the delivery of personalized messages to the target audience at scale across diverse channels, encompassing email, web, mobile, social, and digital advertising.
- Multi-Channel Marketing Automation. Salesforce Marketing Cloud capabilities involve streamlining and automating multi-channel marketing campaigns, ensuring consistent and targeted messaging across various platforms.
- Journey Automation with Trigger Responses. Implemented Salesforce Marketing Cloud automation tool called Journey Builder creates personalized customer journeys, triggering responses at critical stages of the customer lifecycle.
- Advanced Personalization Tools. Salesforce Marketing Cloud features include robust tools for personalizing marketing materials, enabling tailored content delivery to specific audience segments.
- Scalability and Adaptability. With multiple Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrations, the platform can scale to meet the evolving needs of businesses, catering to diverse industries with customizable features. Marketing Cloud integrates effortlessly with Salesforce Sales Cloud, the leading CRM, other Clouds of the ecosystem, and also third-party apps.
- Comprehensive Analytics. Salesforce Marketing Cloud solutions provide in-depth analytics and reporting tools, empowering marketers to derive actionable insights and refine their strategies.
- AI Integration. Leverages Einstein Analytics, one of Salesforce Marketing Cloud products, to provide actionable insights, enhancing data-driven decision-making within marketing strategies.
- Centralized Data Management. Salesforce Marketing Cloud features a data analytics tool that gathers and consolidates data from diverse sources into a unified platform, providing a comprehensive view of customer interactions.
- Enhanced Customer Engagement. Personalized communication, increased customer engagement, satisfaction, and brand loyalty are among the most important Salesforce Marketing Cloud capabilities.
- Continuous Innovation. Salesforce regularly introduces new features and updates, ensuring that businesses stay at the forefront of marketing technology trends, meaning Salesforce Marketing Cloud solutions are always relevant and up to date.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Pricing
Salesforce Marketing Cloud unites a wide range of essential marketing products for promotion, lead generation, customer retention and analytics. This is convenient for businesses that seek a tailored optimal solution, as every business has the chance to decide and choose the features valuable for them specifically.
Therefore, it is quite hard to answer the question ‘how much does Salesforce Marketing Cloud cost’ unanimously. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud cost will consist of the combination of your required products. Let’s discuss Salesforce Marketing Cloud pricing plans for existing products.
Marketing Cloud Products Pricing Comparison
| Salesforce Marketing Cloud Tool | Features | Pricing |
| Marketing Cloud Engagement |
- Email Marketing
- Content Creation
- Robust analytics
- Journey Orchestration
- Mobile Messaging
- AI-Powered Insights
- Multiple Business Units
- Global platform
| From $1,250 to $4,200 USD/org/month
Enterprise package must be requested directly |
| Marketing Cloud Personalization |
- Web, App and Email Personalization
- Segmentation, Rule Based Decisioning, A/B/N Testing and Reporting
- Product and Content Recommendations
- AI-Driven Next-Best Actions and Offers
| From $108,000 to $300,000 USD/org/year |
| Marketing Cloud Customer Data |
- Data Ingestion and Harmonization
- Identity Resolution
Insights and Predictions
- Data Storage
| $108,000 USD/org/year |
| Loyalty Management |
- Member Administration
- Reward and Benefit Management
- Tableau CRM
- Base App
- Currency and Tier Management
- Loyalty Events
- Dynamic Promotions Management
- Partner Administration
- 30 Loyalty Users
| From $20,000 to $45,000 USD/org/month |
| Marketing Cloud Intelligence |
- Marketing Data Unification, Visualization, and Activation
- Marketplace
Data Integration Engine
- Harmonization Center
- Data Visualization & AI Insights
| From $3,000 to $10,000 USD/org/month
Plus package must be requested directly |
| Marketing Cloud Account Engagement |
- Lead Generation
- Cross-Channel Journeys
- Account Based Engagement
- AI-Generated Insights
- Engagement History Analysis
- Full-Funnel Multi-touch Attribution
- Account-Based Marketing Dashboard
- Enhanced Marketing Analytics
| From $1,250 to $15,000 USD/org/month |
| Marketing Cloud Advanced Cross Channel |
- Marketing Cloud Advertising for launching advertising campaigns, nurture programs, and automatically refresh audiences to power advertising campaigns
- Distributed Marketing and Marketing Cloud Connect for creating and circulating on-brand content though the whole CRM system
- Einstein for Marketing for tailored messages and content, advanced personalization, and strategic engagement recommendations
| From $2,200 USD/org/month for Marketing Cloud Advertising
Marketing Cloud Connect must be requested
From $75 to $220 for Einstein and Analytics integration
|
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Products Pricing Range for Existing Products and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Integrations
Ways to Make Your Salesforce Marketing Cloud Most Effective
Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a robust platform offering high-quality marketing, process optimization, and automation.
With its seamless integrations withing Salesforce ecosystem and third-party apps, the ability to process vast amounts of data, and AI integrations across all facets, it empowers businesses to create targeted and impactful marketing campaigns which increase user engagement, retention, and bring profit.
However, Salesforce Marketing Cloud automation can be difficult to master. With its astounding variety of products and tools, it is hard to decide which solution will be a perfect match for your business needs. Here’s how you can take a step towards better understanding of Salesforce Marketing Cloud capabilities.
- Training and Learning. Knowledge is power, and to get to know Salesforce, you will need to dedicate some time and effort. Salesforce has an amazing platform Salesforce Trailhead, which allows you to find out more about Salesforce Marketing Cloud features and will familiarize you with what functions you really need, and which might be abundant. Stay informed about the latest features and updates through Salesforce Trailhead and other professional training resources. Continuous learning ensures your team maximizes the potential of Marketing Cloud for ongoing success.
- Test Different Strategies. Marketing is all about trial and error, and using Salesforce Marketing Cloud does not automatically mean your marketing campaigns will thrive and flourish from the very first moment. It might take some time to figure out what strategies work for your business and what products are the most useful. Perform A/B testing of emails, split decisions in Customer Journeys, and cross-platform marketing communication, to get the understanding of what works best for you.
- Hire a Salesforce Consultant. Navigating the convoluted thickets of Salesforce ecosystem all alone may seem impossible, or simply a waste of time and money. Engaging a Salesforce consultant, instead, brings expertise to help you benefit the most from Salesforce Marketing Cloud capabilities. Salesforce consultants will analyze your business needs, optimize your setup, and propose the best suitable combination of Salesforce products, ensuring you leverage all features for maximum impact.
Ascendix for Salesforce
As a certified Crest Salesforce consulting partner, Ascendix Technologies has successfully helped more than 300 clients from diverse industries.
Our Salesforce proficiency has boosted deal closure rates by 26% and enhanced sales productivity by 38%, as proved by over 100 positive reviews on platforms like AppExchange and Clutch.co, as well as multiple success stories featured on our website. Our Salesforce Marketing Cloud help will let you tailor the Salesforce Marketing Cloud solutions for your business needs.
Schedule a free Salesforce consulting call with us and discover how Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud solutions can be customized to address your specific needs.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud FAQs
What are the features of Marketing Cloud?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud features include cross-channel marketing management, email communication automation, advertising and promotion instruments, content and customer journey creation, social media management, and data collection and analysis tools for optimization and management of the campaigns.
What does Salesforce Marketing Cloud include?
Among a wide range of Salesforce Marketing Cloud products are tools for multi-channel marketing management, communication with customers, and data collection and analysis. Some of the most well-known examples include Data Cloud for Marketing, Marketing Cloud Personalization, Marketing Cloud Engagement, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Loyalty Management, Marketing Analytics, and Marketing AI.
What are the key components of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud?
Salesforce Marketing Cloud solutions are Data Cloud for Marketing, Marketing Cloud Personalization, Marketing Cloud Engagement, Marketing Cloud Account Engagement, Loyalty Management, Marketing Analytics, and Marketing AI. Except for them, the platform offers multiple Salesforce Marketing Cloud integrations, like the connector with Sales, Service, or Experience Clouds.
Yana Yarotska , Content Writer
Yana is a professional in Salesforce consultancy services. She shares valuable insights about Salesforce products and services, helping businesses choose the best solution for their operations.
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