Plan a Successful New Year With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud

The holidays are a special time. This is the season for gift-giving, holiday parties and ringing in a new year. It’s also the perfect time to make resolutions not only for yourself, but also your business. Why not make 2017 the year your organization becomes laser-focused on customer experience? And why not use the Salesforce Marketing Cloud to help you do it?

It is all about personalized experience.

Let’s say you have a favorite fruit stand in your neighborhood. You started shopping at this particular vendor because they have the best quality of fruit. You’ve gotten to know the vendor personally. The vendor knows that you have a child who is allergic to citrus. But he also knows that you absolutely love tangerines. Every time you shop there, this vendor gives you a free tangerine to enjoy on the way home. That’s called personalized service. And that’s why you keep coming back. It’s a personal relationship rather than just a shopping experience.

Whether you are selling in a brick-and-mortar or online store, your goal for the new year should be to develop personal rather than just transactional relationships with every one of your customers. If you want to turn one-time clients into lifelong customers, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is at your service.

The Marketing Cloud helps identify the exact content customers expect, when they want to see that content, and in what format they prefer it delivered. You can use the Email Studio tool to send out coupons or discounts, congratulate partners, and provide relevant content to build a trusted relationship. You can also send out push notifications via mobile devices.

CASE STUDY: Here’s a basic example of a how we helped a client using the Salesforce Marketing Cloud enhance its overall customer experience:

The client is the largest employee-owned paint company in the United States. With 144 retail stores and over 1,500 employees, it is the leading innovator in the paint industry.

The organization was using ExactTarget and was looking for a way to create automatic email campaigns from Salesforce. It was incredibly important that the millions of messages reach customer inboxes and mobile devices quickly.

Here’s what we did:

• Created a tool which allowed an automated email distribution for Leads, Accounts and Opportunities straight from the Salesforce instance.

• Developed a manual distribution feature for specific mailings.

• Transferred results from ExactTarget to Salesforce and showcased them in dashboards displaying the total number of clicks, opens, and bounces.

Thanks to this new triggered automatic email distribution, the client saved 20% on their overall marketing costs.

Important Note: Before implementing the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, it is a good idea to clean and organize your data.

Marketing Automation With Pardot

Trying to monitor all your marketing activities over various channels is time-consuming and inefficient. As part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, the Pardot automated marketing solution centralizes all of your marketing efforts and automatically syncs this information with Salesforce. Some of the features include:

• A suite of centralized marketing and communication tools
• The ability to automate routine marketing tasks
• Real-time display of website visitors, visit duration and most popular content
• Real-time sales alerts

CASE STUDY: Here’s how we helped a client integrate Pardot with Salesforce.

The client is a non-profit college offering low-cost competency-based college degrees. They have been using Pardot for 2 years as their marketing automation platform. During these two years, more than 40,000 leads were generated and retained in its database. However, Pardot needed to be integrated and optimized for Salesforce.

Here’s what we did:

• Analyzed the existing Pardot configuration, licenses usage optimization and synchronization by mapping Salesforce custom fields to Pardot custom fields, updating lead and contact page layouts, and mapping users.

• Assisted the Marketing department by creating forms, landing pages, lists, and layouts for lead generation and segmentation.

• Developed documentation for naming conventions and internal rules for Pardot configuration.

• Resolved issues with duplicates in the Pardot database.

The project was completed on-time and under-budget. Pardot and Salesforce are now optimized to work together, simplifying the client’s overall business processes.

Social Media Monitoring with Radian6

Social media is here to stay and is actually more popular and more widely-used than email. These online conversations contain extremely valuable information that should be collected and analyzed. Searching for related hashtags or keywords in social networks,  Radian6 monitors what clients are saying about your products or services. This part of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud helps you stay up-to-date on trending topics and respond immediately to your customers or potential customers.

It’s high time to rock your business!

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In conclusion, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud has everything you need to make 2017 the year of YOUR customer. If you have questions or need help implementing the Marketing Cloud, let us know. We have a team of highly-knowledgeable Salesforce developers that can provide you with best practices and tips as well as a customized solution for your business.