Marketing teams are often tasked with achieving more with less. I have seen small marketing operations teams try to both make a BIG revenue impact across multiple marketing channels, digital or otherwise, while simultaneously engage customers at relevant touchpoints. This is quite a bit to accomplish, and teams often face this challenge with limited resources and technology.
One area, in particular, has grown significantly in the past decade – the email marketing channel. As a direct link to customers, marketing teams have an opportunity to tailor messages for each customer segment. Staying current and top of mind with customers along the spectrum of relevant events in their lives — such as birthdays and anniversaries — is of paramount importance to retention, future acquisition, and growth.
Unfortunately, this level of customer segmentation and content customization isn’t simple for most small marketing teams. There are too many manual steps involved.
Enter Marketing Cloud Automation
That’s why automation is so critical for marketing. Small teams can leverage the power of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to automate email delivery at relevant touchpoints without having to construct audiences and send email daily. In my white paper on Marketing Cloud Automations, I’ll be sharing how to leverage CRM data in the Marketing Cloud to achieve your goals.
In the next few weeks, I will share a made-up but relevant stylized example to explain how we could achieve this. For the sake of simplicity, I’m going to use birthdays as the life event in question, something everyone can understand and readily identify with.
Automation Requirements
Our requirements will be as follows:
- Send email daily at a scheduled time to customers whose birthday is today
- Source the customer list from the Sales Cloud automatically & daily prior to sending the email. You shouldn’t need marketing team intervention to assemble the audience.
- Send an email to the customer from the owner of the contact in the Sales Cloud. For example, as a customer, I’d receive the email from the specific point of contact I’ve been working with.
- Personalize the email content with the customer (name, etc.) and the owner of the contact in Sales Cloud (name, email, professional details, etc.)
- Ideally, contact owner details to be appended to the audience just-in-time prior to sending email without marketing team intervention
- Filter audience based on additional attributes just-in-time prior to sending email
- See email tracking data on the relevant contact in Sales Cloud
Next Steps
I’ll divide the solution of marketing cloud automation into three parts:
- Assembling the Audience
- Packaging Email Content
- Automating Imports, Sends and Tracking Success
Each week for the next four weeks, I’ll be posting a new part of the white paper. Make sure to come visit the Soliant blog next week to get the next chapter on assembling your audience!
Download the Full White Paper
Can’t wait until I release the next part of the white paper next week? You can download the full white paper on marketing cloud automation here:
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