Salesforce Marketing Cloud Journey Builder for Personalization — AppShark

Today brands have to strive to remain relevant yet unique across all channels of communication, ensure consistency in customer interaction to avoid confusing potential buyers. In this context; the need to integrate offline and online providing a seamless Omnichannel experience cannot be emphasized more than it already is. Marketing, sales, and service can no more be viewed as an independent function particularly when favorable customer journeys continue to gain importance. Marketing automation platforms such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud focuses on bringing about such 1-to-1 customer journeys through all connected devices across channels. Let us first understand the importance of Omnichannel marketing and its impact on customer experiences, which in turn impacts overall sales.

How to Decide if Salesforce Marketing Cloud is right for your business needs?

Omnichannel marketing and seamless customer experiences

Marketing always sits center stage and is accountable for its efforts no matter the circumstance. No matter the circumstances, the onus of being able to take the right action and communicate with precision lies on the marketing team.

“Among marketing’s greatest challenges is foreseeing how the customer wants, needs, expectations, and purchasing decisions will evolve,” says Augie Ray, VP Analyst, Gartner

Online presence on multiple channels coupled with consistent efforts on branding, design, messaging and payment methods across is essential to provide an integrated and seamless omnichannel experience. Omnichannel marketing brings together both online and offline channel activities thus creating a seamless engagement with audiences. Communication efforts across different channels such as email, SMS, chatbots, push notifications, call center or any other physical point of contact needs to be concerted for highest customer satisfaction that lead to increasing sales and revenues.

The need for an omnichannel engagement strategy is no more an option for businesses to adapt to a new post pandemic normal which continues to be competitive.

• Integrating offline and online channels help maintain continuity in communication.
• Businesses can now strive to reach out to bigger audiences.
• Customers have a choice of switching between channels while they deliver experiences compliant with consent regulations.
• Marketing automation activities are a lot more efficient since a more data-centric strategy will be in place. We will discuss this in more detail in just a little bit.
• It will provide a more measurable and traceable strategy to improve the cost-efficiency.

As easy as it might seem to channel efforts in the Omnichannel direction; being able to track and sustain business growth, as a result, remains to be a challenge. A unified customer-centric platform that offers multiple possibilities centered on the critical role of marketing is the need of the hour. Allow us to re-emphasize at this juncture that a customer is fully in charge of what, when, where, and how to interact with a brand. Understanding the volatile customer behavior while working on new marketing strategies that appeal is rather herculean. This is exactly where Marketing Cloud and the Salesforce CRM step in.

Why use Marketing Cloud?

Effective marketing channels build a positive bond between customer journeys and business outcomes. Staying above customer relationships and behavior enable and drive the sales team to cross-sell and up-sell multiple offerings. Imagine the power of being able to send the right advertisement to a customer at the right moment. Consider being able to view customer feedback instantly on a product in social networks. A step ahead, what if you want to reach out to all your customers via an email or an SMS to try and evaluate the impact of ad campaigns?

Marketing Cloud is a product offered by Salesforce that enables all this and more. It is a cloud platform meant for marketing teams that strives to create a 1:1 bond with individual customers thereby increasing brand value. With Marketing cloud, marketing teams can create customer journeys that can be nurtured at every stage across multiple channels using one platform. It helps marketers deliver the right message at the right time to the right audience through a structured campaign timeline for the lifetime of the customer relationship.

Marketing Cloud also offers integrated solutions such as Customer Journey Management, Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Social Studio, web personalization, advertising, content management and creation, and data analysis. These tools can work together and help businesses achieve beyond just primary objectives; it helps teams run customer journeys through a tight sieve to identify glitches and rectify them.

Benefits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud in Customer Journey Building

1.Personalized customer journeys from the get-go

Every interaction is personalized with the power of Marketing Cloud that moves customers through their unique journeys based on their tastes and preferences. Personalizing these touch-points and enhancing them can be accomplished with the functionality and data of Marketing Cloud as you progress.

2.Insights on customer behavior

Marketing Cloud integrates relevant customer data with the marketing processes to help optimize them. There is complete clarity on what works and what doesn’t thereby yielding more information on customers with greater visualization.

3.Capturing and engaging with customers across all important touchpoints

With Marketing Cloud, users can leverage a full 360-degree view of every customer through the power of the platform. This thus helps them connect the dots across important customer touchpoints helping the business establish itself as a customer-centric brand.

4.Create targeted CTAs (calls-to-action)

Marketing Cloud helps eliminate a blanket approach to marketing, it helps users send targeted CTAs that are unique to every customer, based on their behavior, and profile attributes, preferences, and interests. An added advantage is that these CTAs can be channeled via various mediums such as mobile, social, and email.

5.Data analytics at the center of all marketing efforts

All information on customers and marketing campaigns is available on the platform available for access anytime. This is made possible as Marketing Cloud is hosted on the cloud, and there are no hassles of needing to buy additional servers to host company data, thus making the marketing process a lot more efficient and organized.

6.Cross-channel and cross-functional marketing campaigns fuel the opportunity pipeline

With Marketing Cloud users can connect disparate interactions from various channels and help create more intelligent communication and interactions with target audiences in real-time. This means content can be created and delivered to customers in mediums they care about most thus making the brand relevant at all times.

Leveraging the features of Salesforce Marketing Cloud, its additional modules, and the potential of integrating it with third-party applications is best carried out by a services provider who has the right experience and expertise with the Salesforce environment. With the growing emphasis on sales and revenue generation becoming a multi-channel effort, it only makes sense that a fitting partner is engaged for implementation of the first step- Marketing Cloud.

About AppShark

AppShark is both a Salesforce Gold Consulting Partner and a Product Development Partner based in Dallas, Texas. Our implementation process which includes customization, set up, and configuration — has been perfected through the many years served in the Salesforce industry. We also provide software integration services including strategy, development, and management to enable a continual flow of information from the cloud, premise to premise, or from cloud to premise platforms.

Originally published at https://www.appshark.com on January 15, 2021.