5 Benefits to Using Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a digital marketing platform that brings together a variety of tools and solutions, covering everything from email marketing and social media marketing, to mobile marketing, online advertising, and audience-building.

It opens up a whole world of automation for marketers, enabling them to set up and automate predefined user journeys.

What’s more, it allows you to take a genuine single-customer view of your audience, making it much easier to create highly personalised, deeply relevant journeys across all digital channels.

Sounds too good to be true? A lot of Marketing Cloud customers would beg to differ.

Indeed, research shows that companies that roll out Salesforce’s marketing platform enjoy an average 43% increase in return on investment from their marketing campaigns, along with a 44% uptick in lead volumes.

In this article, we’re going to look at the specific ways Salesforce Marketing Cloud can benefit your sales and marketing teams right now.

 

1. Learn from Your Customers

Do you often have to base key marketing decisions on little more than informed guesswork? Salesforce Marketing Cloud has the solution.

Understanding the importance of collecting audience data and presenting it in a meaningful, insightful way, Salesforce has built Marketing Cloud to empower marketers to steer and streamline individual user journeys.

By giving you the ability to get inside the minds of your customers and prospects, it allows you to create more relevant, targeted content that speaks directly to their ambitions, business goals, and pain points.

Significantly, Marketing Cloud doesn’t just tell you the types of actions performed and behaviours displayed by your target audience in the past — it lifts the lid on what they’re likely to do in future, too.

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2. Create More Personalised Experiences

Marketers know that personalisation holds the key to strong campaign performance.

Indeed, nine in ten leading marketers say it makes a significant contribution to business profitability, while one-third of marketers surveyed in 2017 agreed that gaining an improved understanding of the right customers — and engaging them effectively — was the single most important factor in achieving their goals over the following three years.

As hinted at in the previous section, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can be the driving force behind your personalisation efforts.

It allows you to set up specific triggers from prospects that prompt an array of actions — accompanied by tailored messaging — designed to guide them on their path to purchase.

That means the days of sending out random mass emails are gone. Instead, you can listen out for key behaviours that justify a specific response.

For instance, if a prospect abandons their cart during the checkout process, or opens an email, or downloads an ebook, the marketing team can automatically follow up with targeted content and messaging.

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3. Use Customer Satisfaction to Guide Communications

Personalisation isn’t just about understanding a prospect’s goals — timing plays a big part too. It doesn’t matter how strong your marketing communications are if you’re delivering them at the wrong time.

This is particularly relevant when it comes to upselling and cross-selling existing customers.

Say you’ve got a customer who’s locked in difficult negotiations with your accounts team over the terms of their contract, or who’s frustrated at an ongoing issue with their service.

Those people just aren’t going to be receptive to an email outlining their various options for renewal, however well it’s written.

But with Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it becomes a whole lot easier to factor in an account’s current satisfaction levels when planning your marketing activity.

The platform can automatically adjust based on signals displayed by key accounts, such as pausing any communications to a specific prospect or customer until the issue they are encountering gets resolved.

Based on the prospect’s “new” satisfaction level, it can then adjust activity to continue their journey in the most relevant manner.

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4. Take Control of Customer Experiences

Every marketer wants to drive the customer experience to achieve their business goals.

But this whole process becomes far more impactful when it’s based upon real-world customer preferences, as defined by their previous actions and behaviours.

For instance, if a specific customer exclusively buys items that are on sale, wouldn’t it make sense to ensure that they always receive updates about your latest promotions?

Through predictive analytics, Salesforce Marketing Cloud can make this happen for you.

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5. Build a Single Source of Truth for Customer Data

By combining user data, customer profiles, privacy management, and marketing journeys, Marketing Cloud allows you to build a single customer view for all potential touch points.

These unified profiles are based on a common ID that runs through your CRM and other data sources, meaning that key information can be matched up to a single customer or prospect.

Best of all, this information is gathered together in just one platform, creating a single source of truth for your customers — removing confusion over the type of messaging you use, and ensuring that all stakeholders are on the same page.

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