WEBINAR Series

Getting Started With Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Kerry Townsend (Accenture) gives a high-level overview of the elements of the tool you should be focusing on at the beginning of your Salesforce Marketing Cloud journey.
Host
Leonard Linde
Keynote Speaker
Kerry Townsend
Manager, Accenture
Areas We Will Cover
Salesforce Marketing Cloud

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Getting Started With Salesforce Marketing Cloud

Do you want to get started with Marketing Cloud but are unsure about how all the different elements of the tool fit together? This in-depth presentation led by Kerry Townsend (Accenture) gives a high-level overview of the elements of the tool you should be focusing on at the beginning of your journey.

Kerry will take you on a step-by-step tour through Marketing Cloud, taking in the Studios (Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Advertising Studio & Web Studio), the Builders (Journey Builder, Content Builder, & Audience Builder), and explaining how these elements interact.

Of course, learning how to use the tool is only part of being successful with Marketing Cloud. Kerry goes on to explain her 3 ‘Success Fundamentals’ - Communication Strategy, Subscriber Management, & Deliverability - and how these can be applied to ensure successful campaigns that enable businesses to create value and keep customers engaged.

Finally, Kerry provides numerous further resources for attendees to use to deepen their learning.

TRANSCRIPT
  • Introduction [00:01:59]
  • Marketing Cloud Building Blocks - Studios, Builders & Extensions [00:05:03] 
  • Introduction to Studios (Channels) - Email Studio, Mobile Studio, Advertising Studio & Web Studio [00:11:05]
  • Adding Cross-Channel Capabilities with Builders - Journey Builder, Content Builder, & Audience Builder [00:17:33]
  • Trailhead Resources For the Studios & Builders [00:23:42]
  • 5 Things You Should Know Before Getting Started [00:25:18]
  • 3 Success Fundamentals - Communication Strategy, Subscriber Management, & Deliverability [00:31:37]
  • Trailhead Resources For Success Fundamentals [00:41:53] 
  • Q&A [00:43:23]

[00:00:00] Hello? Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. We're out. Here's another X-Force Data Summit presentation with the talented Kerry Townsend, a manager from Accenture over in Great Britain, the UK, and she's going to get us all started with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. So here's Kerry. 

[00:00:36] Thank you, and thank you for joining me in this session today, which is getting started with Salesforce Marketing Cloud. I'm going to start with a little bit about me. So I've been working with Salesforce for over a decade now, predominantly, the core platform. And I moved over to Marketing Cloud four years ago. And the reason I highlight that is because my experience started with service cloud, I took a lot of that knowledge over with me and therefore how I've approached Marketing Cloud has been shaped by that experience.

[00:01:09] I'm also a Trailhead Ranger and I also have a number of certifications including a number of the Marketing Cloud ones. That includes the Email Specialist, the Marketing Cloud Consultant, and more recently, the Admin, which I passed in the last month or so. 

[00:01:24] I am also a user group leader within London. So I am a co-lead with the B2C marketer group in London with my colleague, Jimson Lee, and I'm also one of the co-organizers of London's Calling, which is a community conference that we've been running for the last five years, which has lots of people from the community like me talking about topics to do with Salesforce like this, in an in-person setting once a year, which is a really great event, and you'll find that there are lots of community conferences around the world, which you should definitely check out. 

[00:01:57] So in this session today, I'm going to talk about getting started with Marketing Cloud. And I've broken this down into two key streams, which I see when you start using this particular product.

[00:02:13] Now, the first one is about using the tool, so that is getting to understand all the point and click areas of the tool and what you can do with it, and then it's also getting the training and maybe the certifications. But, that on its own will not make you successful with Marketing Cloud. So that is the best place to start and a great place to start, but it will not get you everything that you need.

[00:02:39] And in this session, I'm also going to cover a couple of fundamental areas, which I think you should also be aware of when you start your Marketing Cloud journey. And these would be what I've described as the success fundamentals. 

[00:02:52] So that's having an understanding of communication strategy. It's also having an understanding of subscriber management. What I mean by that is that people give you consent, to send messages to them, and it's important to understand that that is a responsibility and that to be able to communicate with those people moving forward, then you need to respect that, allow them to update it, and include that in all your communications and also deliverability. 

[00:03:19] So this particularly relates to email, but in this circumstance, you want to make sure that the messages and the emails that you've spent time designing and crafting actually get to the users that you want to see them.

[00:03:34] So it's another important area, which isn't necessarily covered as a fundamental when you get to learn the tool. But if you work in a setting where you're using the tool every day for a company, these are definitely areas that you want to be paying a lot of attention to. 

[00:03:50] So what I'm going to go through in terms of using the tool is I'm going to give you an overview of how to think about the tool and how to approach it. Now, Marketing Cloud is quite a vast tool and it's grown predominantly through acquisition, and it means that there are lots of different areas, and I'm not going to go into all of those at this time. 

[00:04:11] But I am going to pick out some of the key elements that I think you should be aware of. I'm going to describe how they all fit together and this will help you when you start your journey and you consider which areas you start to learn first. And when I started learning Marketing Cloud, this wasn't clear. to me and on my journey, we didn't have things like Trailhead. So I was very much sort of learning as I went.

[00:04:38] And I was also very much using the help material and leaning on the people around me that had used the tool. And I really hope that this session helps to give you an overview of how to consider the tools so that when you start your journey, you know where to step into. 

[00:04:55] So if we move on to understanding sort of the building blocks. All right, so in this section, I'm going to talk about learning the tool. Okay. So in here, this is a very, very simplified diagram of what Marketing Cloud looks like. And first of all, I want to call out what are called studios. So the studios, in this example here, refer very much to the different channels that you might use with Marketing Cloud.

[00:05:23] Now, Marketing Cloud is very much predominantly used as a B2C tool, as a B2B tool, and you'll see here that the studios and the channels that have been called out are very much for mass broadcast. So we've got email, everybody will be familiar with email marketing. 

[00:05:40] You've also got Web Studio, which allows you to create some web page, which you might use as part of your email campaign to allow people to see information or to gather information from them. You've got Mobile Studio which allows you to send mobile messages, and then you've got Advertising Studio, which allows you to touch on sending programmatic marketing, so that's sending advertisements to platforms like Salesforce, Twitter, Instagram. 

[00:06:10] So on a day to day basis, you might be working on a campaign that includes one or many of these different channels. And therefore, on a day to day basis, you would find yourself in these particular studios. But in addition to that, Marketing Cloud has other capabilities, which includes what they describe as builders.

[00:06:30] So builders work across these different channels and they allow you to work with various functions. So if we look at Contact Builder here, that is where you manage all your data. So exactly what it says, it allows you to work with your contacts. So those are the people that you email. 

[00:06:49] And what's important to understand about Marketing Cloud is that the data model here is very individual person-centric. So it's very contact centric and that's why it's called Contact Builder. And that means that all the data that you capture in Marketing Cloud links back to an individual that you might communicate with. 

[00:07:06] We've also got Content Builder. So when we talk about marketing, we know that content is King and that you want to be providing content that your recipients value. And within here you have Content Builder, which allows you to create content, which can be used across all of these different channels. 

[00:07:29] And then if you've looked at anything to do with Marketing Cloud, you will have heard a lot about Journey Builder. So Journey Builder is where you automate some of your campaigns and your messaging. And you can use Journey Builder, and that again spans all the different channels. So you could create a journey within Journey Builder, which sends an email. It might also send an SMS, and if people don't respond on an SMS, it might also serve them an advert.

[00:07:57]. So all of this, it's a very sort of matrix and interlaced tool. And then in terms of that, well, how do you get your data into the system? So some key areas to understand here is that when data is brought into Marketing Cloud, it comes into what's called data extensions. 

[00:08:15] Now, if you are a user of Marketing Cloud on exact target from when it was originally created, you might also use lists, but in this instance, we typically use data extensions because they are more flexible and they hold a lot of data, right? So you can do things much more at scale and they're sort of very much analogist to a database table or an Excel sheet where you keep your data together and then you link it or you run queries to link your data together.

[00:08:48] So Contact Builder and data extensions are very closely linked. Now to get your data into Marketing Cloud, you have a number of different options. If you're working with Salesforce, then you can use Salesforce Connect, which is an application which you install into Salesforce core.

[00:09:11] And then you use the connected app technology to be able to create a tightly coupled relationship between Marketing Cloud and Salesforce. So that would be the Sales Cloud or Service Cloud. And that allows you to pull data in on a schedule and it also means that you can do a level of interaction via Journey Builder, which pushes data back into Sales cloud and Service cloud and you can see the interactions that people have taken from the messages that they've got in Marketing Cloud. You can see that in Salesforce

[00:09:46] Another option is to bring information in through an FTP site. So in the real world, we live in a situation where every piece of data is not always in Salesforce, and you might want to enrich the data that you have in Marketing Cloud for either segmentation or for personalization with information from other sources. 

[00:10:11] And you can do that by bringing the data in through an FTP site, which Marketing Cloud provide, which is again, tightly coupled with the application. And you can bring data in and pull it in potentially on a schedule if that works for you or you can bring it in manually via the FTP site.

[00:10:31] And then the other alternative is through the APIs. So Marketing Cloud has both a SOAP API and a REST API, and they have slightly different capability. And I'm not going to go into that in a great deal of detail here, but if you have another external system and you want to be bringing data in on a schedule or automatically, then you can definitely look to step into using the APIs and all the power that they bring.

[00:11:00] So for this session, I'm going to go into a little bit more detail about the channels. All right? So when you step into the tool, you'll see this toolbar here, and you'll see that all the data has been nicely organized here. So you've got your studios here on one side, and you've got your Builders here on the other.

[00:11:20] Now, in that very cut-down example, I only illustrated that there were four studios. Now, in reality, there are more, but for this sort of beginning intro session, I'm only going to talk about these first four, because these give you a nice intro into what you would initially start to look at. And the chances are if you were beginning to work with Marketing Cloud, it would be one of these studios that you would predominantly spend your time in.

[00:11:47] Typically, I have found that organizations start with email marketing and then they look to build that out as they become more comfortable and more confident with the tool and as they identify their customer's behavior and feel that it is appropriate to bring on other channels.

[00:12:08] So Email Studio has a number of different functions within it. So in here, you'll see just a small screenshot, and what you'll see here is it looks like in many cases, any sort of other mass email editor setup. So you've got components that you can drag here on one side, and then you've got the view of both what the preview of the email will look like plus, you can also have a look and see what the code and the HTML behind that might look like.

[00:12:38] And in here you have a number of areas which are called content blocks, right? And this, you create these contact blocks which are reusable, and then you can drag them into your emails or create templates and therefore keep your branding consistent and have these reusable tools throughout.

[00:12:58] So within Email Studio, you can do things like create emails, you can create email templates, you can manage subscribers. So you can go in and see your subscribers and see whether they've opted in or not. And you can also look at tracking data. And tracking data is where you can see where. Where the people have engaged, how many emails have bounced, whether they've clicked, whether they've opened that level of engagement.

[00:13:25] So next we're going to come onto Mobile Studio. So again, you'll see that the interface starts to look very similar. And within Mobile Studio you have a number of different options in there as well. 

[00:13:39] So this would be a place where you can send SMS messages. So those are individual messages to people whose mobile numbers that you have, but you can also create push notifications. So if within your organization you have a mobile app, you can integrate that mobile app with Marketing Cloud, and you can therefore either send messages into the apps inbox, or you can put push notifications that appear on the screen and you can send those out to users.

[00:14:12] And again, you can either do this individually or you can automate that as part of a campaign. In here would also be where you might set up keywords. So that's when you receive a text message. You might see that there's a five-digit word, which indicates the brand that's being used or you might receive these just from standard numbers within your geographical region.

[00:14:36] Then we have Advertising Studio. So within Advertising Studio, you can create audiences. Now, the joy of Marketing Cloud and connecting it potentially to Salesforce is that you have first-party data. And that data is the, like people's individual email addresses, the preferences that they have in terms of the content or the products that they might want to buy from you, you also have information about what products that they might have bought from you before.

[00:15:04] And based on that you can create more highly segmented audiences, which you can then use across channels like Facebook, and Google and Instagram, and Twitter. Right? And again, this can be incorporated into campaigns so that you can have a sort of cohesive connected approach.

[00:15:23] And then the last one that I'm going to talk about today is Web Studio. Now this is a place where you can actually create landing pages and web pages. It's also a place where you can write scripts which operate on the data within Marketing Cloud. 

[00:15:43] So it's important to highlight at this point that when we talk about any sort of coding or scripting Marketing Cloud, it is different to Salesforce core. So in Marketing Cloud, we use AMPscript and we use the server-side Javascript. Whereas in Salesforce core, you might be more familiar with potentially Lightning components or Apex or even Visual Force. 

[00:16:08] And that's very important to understand, because if you're making a transition from Service Cloud or Sales Cloud through to Marketing Cloud then there are some skills that you will need to relearn and understand. So, both of those, like server-side JavaScript is JavaScript. So if you have familiarity in that language, that's definitely gonna help. And also AMPscript has a very similar construct.

[00:16:35] So all of these things will be relatively simple to pick up, but it's just important to know that there is a difference. So typically what you would use Web Studio for is potentially to write some scripts which are used within the tool, or it might be that you're looking to create a landing page or a form so that when someone goes to an email that they then link out to a particular page in Marketing Cloud where you collect more information and you bring that back into data extensions.

[00:17:08] Now again, this is not a replacement for your website or your content management system, but sometimes it is useful to have a tactical tool where you can bring some pages and create some pages for specific tactical reasons, ie campaigns or something like that, and then they can be integrated into your website.

[00:17:30] So that's the studios. Next, if we move onto builders, and there are more builders than I highlight here, but the three that I've picked out specifically include Journey Builder, Content Builder, and Contact Builder. And those can be very difficult to swap between the two at times because I sometimes say contact when I say content, but once you understand what they’re for, it will be very obvious which one you're talking about.

[00:17:59] So the first one I'm going to talk about is Journey Builder. And in here. Now, again, if you've seen any sort of promotional activities around Marketing Cloud, the chances are you've seen some diagrams or images of journeys which are built in Journey Builder. And as you can see from the screen here, you can see a flow of activities of nodes on the screen. Which in this case, what would happen is a subscriber or a content would move through these different flows.

[00:18:33] And the journey is controlled by these decision points that go through the journey. So the way that Journey Builder works is that you have a number of different options, which are, you can see on one side here, which you can drag and drop onto the journey canvas to create a full journey.

[00:18:51] So you would identify a source of contacts. So that's your audience, right? And you would start with that on the left-hand side. And as you move through the journey all the way to the right, you would see that, you know, various things happen. So that could be, you send them an email and then you wait for a couple of days.

[00:19:13] And then you send them another email. And if they don't open that email, then you might put in a decision point that looks to see whether they've opened it or not, and if they haven't opened it, then you might put in another branch and you might send them a text message because you've established that they are not necessarily engaging on the email channel and therefore you are looking to communicate with them in a different channel, which in this case could be mobile.

[00:19:42] So this allows you to automate both the sending of messages, but it also allows you to potentially create records within Salesforce. So in this particular circumstance, you can also drag nodes onto the canvas, which allows you to update data in Salesforce, which makes this quite a powerful way of automating activities within a tool, which is very much designed to talk to recipients at scale. 

[00:20:17] Okay. So Journey Builder is quite powerful. Key things to understand about this is that when you're creating journeys, we have the concept of a customer journey. So that's the end to end journey. And when you're using the tool, you might have multiple journeys within Marketing Cloud to fulfill that one long customer journey because it makes sense in terms of how you work with the tool to break that into chunks and potentially reusable chunks.

[00:20:50] Next. I'm going to talk about Content Builder. So again, I alluded to this when we looked at Email Studio, and this is where you can create reusable sets of content. So that could be hero images, it could be the header and footer, it could be, different segments for a newsletter. And by building these individual pieces, you can then bring them together in your overall email, and how that's created. 

[00:21:20] And by using these content blocks, you can also use things like dynamic content. So depending on the preference of the particular user, you might choose to serve them different content. And that an example of that would be if they wanted different, if they were interested in different products, you might serve them different contents. Or if they were in a different geographical area. So if they live somewhere else, like in different places, you can make that content very regional.

[00:21:50] So again, this is a very powerful tool. And when you build content blocks they are, so Salesforce Marketing Cloud manages the responsiveness within different email form factors, which makes that in a very sort of straightforward and easy tool, fou, most people to get started with straight away.

[00:22:12] And then this last one that I'm going to talk to you about is, again, Contact Builder. So this is where you manage all things about data. And at the center of this is the, the individual person. So again, if you're using a different database or you're using Salesforce Core, you would find that the data model there very much works off accounts and then contacts and then under accounts, you might also have cases or opportunities. Within Marketing Cloud, everything is contact centric.

[00:22:48] So, it is, the person is at the heart of it. And that's because we identify people by their email address or their mobile phone number. So as you can see in this little diagram here, on this wheel, you'll see that the contact is at the very center, and then you would bring data over into Marketing Cloud, either from Salesforce or through the FTP site, and you link that all together with their contact ID or sometimes also referred to as their subscriber key, which is how we link people, and that can typically be via email or by a unique number that is used.

[00:23:29] So this has been very much a whistle-stop tour of some of the core capabilities within the tool, but in the last few years we'll find that actually the Trailhead has been developed quite significantly.

[00:23:45] So I've highlighted a number of different trails here to give you much more information. So when looking at this, and, I've tried to highlight, I appreciate that, you know, while I'm talking about this, you can't click on these links, but we've broken it down here into the studios. 

[00:23:59] And what you'll find here is that I've highlighted where the information has come from. So in here you'll see that I’ve predominantly on this slide being referring to Trailhead, and if you search for the terms that you see on the screen you'll be able to see some of the trails and modules that I've pulled out that would be useful. Now in here, I've also highlighted something, a video from YouTube, which talks about the Web Studio and Content Builder.

[00:24:28] So these are definitely resources that I would recommend that you start with. And when I first started, we didn't have any Trailhead, so I was sort of trying to navigate the help and learn this at the time. And now we've got to a great stage where actually there's quite a lot of Trailhead content and sometimes it can be a little bit confusing as to where to start.

[00:24:49] So these are the ones that I definitely, definitely recommend that you start with initially. And then equally I've gone through and we've got the same here for Content Builder. So these are some of the ones that I have particularly pulled out in this particular setting. So, I mean, all of this is really valuable content and I encourage you to get involved.

[00:25:16] So a couple of other things that you should know as you move forward and you're thinking about this journey that helps me to really sort of understand how this tool would work is a few points here. 

[00:25:30] So it's grown through acquisition. So everything that you will have seen here, so Email Studio, Mobile Studio were originally two different products, right? And they've been brought together and they work together with things like Journey Builder and Contact Builder. But things to be aware of is when we, an example of how you can still potentially see that in the system is that they have different unique keys.

[00:25:58] And that's just something to be aware of. So my top tip here would be don't, just because you're familiar with, say, Email Studio or Mobile Studio individually, don't necessarily assume that the way that you identify people or the way that you report is exactly the same. It will be close and it will all be available within the interface, but it won't be exactly the same. So take some time to have a look at that.

[00:26:25] It has a different technology architecture to Sales and Service Cloud. So you will be familiar with, you know, how data is managed within there, how security is managed, and within the core Salesforce platform. Marketing Cloud is different, so you will need to make, not to make assumptions and familiarize yourself with the way that the tool works there.

[00:26:48] I also highlight that it's got fewer guard rails. So if you're used to Salesforce core, you'll find now that you've got nice functionality that says, you know, if you want to delete this, you can't delete this because it's used here, or it's used there. And that same functionality is not readily available in Marketing Cloud as of yet.

[00:27:07] So, you know, be considerate about the things that you do when you're making changes and really consider the impact because the system is not necessarily going to prevent you from doing things that you shouldn't. 

[00:27:23] The life cycle management is different. So within this particular tool, there's no concept of having a Developer Org. Now, if I was given, if I had a pound or a dollar for every time someone asked me if there was a Dev Org in Marketing Cloud, I would be very, very rich by now, but there isn't. So we have different ways of getting around that. 

[00:27:46] Sometimes, we might use a part in Marketing Cloud, which is called a business unit. So that is a separate, sort of module, like entity, within Marketing Cloud which we might use to do some testing in, but it's also worth knowing that if we have taken that approach, that there are no commercial tools which allow you to move the functionality from one business unit to another.

[00:28:13] So the key things around that is just factoring in the extra time that it might take to be able to recreate some of those things when you're moving them, either from business units, which might be because you're either taking them from a test environment through to an in production environment or it could be because you've developed some functionality for your, an EMEA business and you'd like to make that available for your US business.

[00:28:40]. It's also important to understand that the end-users are more like admins in Marketing Cloud. So within Salesforce core, we have a very clear split between what end users can do and what admins can do and those are clearly defined in the areas of the system that they get into. 

[00:29:01] Whereas that's not quite so clear with Marketing Cloud. So if you were, say, just sending an email, you could consider that there would be users who just need to know how to do that and they fulfill that task every now, like regularly so they only go in that bit of the system. 

[00:29:17] But if you're, say, developing a new, customer journey and you're maybe bringing on the mobile channel, or you are doing some advertising, then every time you make a subtle change to that, to the template of the campaign you're running, then you need to have someone that has real sort of admin-level understanding to be able to guide you or design that campaign template in such a way that it meets all the needs of both your internal users and the people that you're trying to communicate with.

[00:29:53] And I also wanted to highlight something else, which is called business rules. Now, within Marketing Cloud, there are a selection of things called business rules, and these are effectively hidden settings.

[00:30:05] So this is a legacy from the fact that it has come from an acquisition. And what this means is that in the sort of backend of Marketing Cloud, which support have access to, there are some settings which they can turn on and off. And it is possible that you might be working within your Marketing Cloud environment and you might not be able to do something in that environment and you can't understand why, because the options are not there. And that can be because one of the business rules has not been enabled.

[00:30:41] So in that setting if you see some functionality in Marketing Cloud, and you have seen someone demonstrate it, but it isn't available in your Environment, it is always worth getting in touch with support and asking them if there is any particular reason why you can't see that functionality.

[00:31:00] And that could be because it's not available within your particular environment that you've got, so the level of license you have. But it could also be because the business rules are turned off, and one of those examples is that one of the building business rules is actually Send Email. 

[00:31:18] So in the backend they can change a setting which means that nobody can send any email, and therefore if you are just starting to work with it or you're working with a business unit and you can't work out why you can't send any emails, the chances are it's because a business unit has been turned off. 

[00:31:09] Okay, so coming on to the next section is Success Fundamentals. So you have a reasonable understanding of the different areas of the tool, you've done a lot of the Trailhead, you may have been to a community conference or a user group, and you've seen some people using the tool and you are having the opportunity in your organization to start using Marketing Cloud.

[00:32:00] This is all very exciting, but there are a couple of other things that you really need to be considerate of when you start to work on this journey, and I have boiled these down into three main areas. 

[00:32:11] So that's your Communication Strategy overall. And this is typically, now all of these things are typically viewed from an organization level rather than an individual person. But if you are working with Marketing Cloud, then you want to make sure that your organization as a whole, it's very mindful of these particular topics. 

[00:32:31] So what do I mean by communications strategy? So in here, I mean being very intentional about what content you're sending, what channel sending it on, and when you're sending.

[00:32:47] So when you have an automation tool like Marketing Cloud, it removes a lot of the barriers in terms of the scale and the volume of messages that you can send. But what I want to really highlight is just because you can send messages at a much higher volume and you can send all sorts of content, doesn't necessarily mean that you should.

[00:33:12] And when you consider the campaigns that you're going to be running, you definitely need to think about the overall journey of the customer, which you'll hear a lot of talk about. But also, if I was an individual, how often would I be getting something and what would I be getting?

[00:33:28] So the joy of a tool like Marketing Cloud is you can highly target that content and therefore is much better to send one targeted communication, which someone engages with than lots of communications, which they might interact with one in five. Because that takes a lot of time and energy for you, but it is also is not a great experience for them.

[00:33:53] I also want to illustrate that you should be mindful about channel. So, email marketing is a very well known tool that is used, and the volume of email that you can send to someone before they either opt out or disengage is much higher than say you can with an SMS. And so I think we've all been there in some situation where we've bought something from a company at some point and then you've suddenly started receiving text messages from them.

[00:34:24] And what you can tell is that they suddenly bought an automation tool that they can send messages at scale and they suddenly thought that you should receive this message by text and actually the importance to you of the message is not quite the same. And as soon as you start receiving messages, particularly via text message, which are not urgent or compelling information, then you automatically just opt out and then they've lost you on that channel completely.

[00:34:54] So really from a holistic point of view, consider the communications that you're sending to people, map them all out, and then build in the tool ways to automate that which makes sense, for your particular users. And what is important here is that. All organizations are different, right? So I couldn't give you a blueprint on how to do this because it really needs to be considered for each of your organizations

[00:35:22] The other area is Subscriber Management. And what I want to talk about here is that we live in a world where pretty much most people now know about, that giving or removing consent in terms of communication and in some regions in the world, this is more strict than others. But really, in order to have any sort of meaningful conversation with any of your stakeholders, the best thing to do is to make sure that you have consent to communicate with them.

[00:35:56] So as a minimum, you need to ask whether they are willing to receive messages, particularly commercial messages, more so than operational messages. But whether they are willing to receive commercial messages from you and on what channel. And then beyond that, if you move beyond that, you might want to start asking them about preference.

[00:36:19] And what I mean by that is that you might want to start asking them if they prefer to receive messages via email or via post or via SMS. And you might also want to start asking them what, what frequency that they want to receive messages from you. And by doing that, you give people control and that develops trust and therefore they are more likely to engage with your communications, which is ultimately what you want.

[00:36:47] When doing that within a system landscape, it is important to understand where the system of record is for that information. So for example, Marketing Cloud is the system that you might send emails from, but you might actually decide for various reasons, that actually the master of that information might be in a different system. 

[00:37:10] So that might be in Salesforce. And when you have multiple systems involved, you need to make sure that you are propagating that information through and you are being clear to the person that's receiving it, how regularly that will be updated, how they update that and then make sure, but all the ways that they can update that within your system landscape are being reflected in the source of where you take that.

[00:37:37] And then the last thing that I wanted to talk about was deliverability. So this is about, particularly with email, is about whether the messages that you are sending actually get to the person's inbox in the place that you want them. 

[00:37:53] And within this, we find that Gmail and Microsoft are very protective of the people that use their email and if they, believe that your emails are either not coming from a genuine source or that they have some sort of malicious intent like they're a phishing email or they're a spam email, then they are going to take action and they are going to either remove that completely, they're going to move it into the spam, or they're going to move it into a different folder so it doesn't get directly in front of the person, which is predominantly what you want.

[00:38:30] Marketing cloud as a whole has a couple of tools which will allow you to work with that. So you have something called a sender authentication pack in Marketing Cloud. And again, this is covered in more detail in some of the Trailhead, but what this does is it brands your instance of Marketing Cloud, and it updates the sending information and also the technical sending information from the email to give the ISP, do the internet service providers, confidence that your email is coming from your own domain and it matches that all up together.

[00:39:09] And therefore that helps to make sure that the emails get delivered into the inbox as you would like. It also means that the links in the images also includes your brand domain. 

[00:39:24] Another thing to alert you to is the concept of IP warming. So when you first get Marketing Cloud, the chances are that you are working with an IP address, which has no reputation whatsoever, and therefore the email service providers will be slightly suspicious as to the types of emails that are coming from that recipient and IP address.

[00:39:52] So therefore they will pay attention to what is coming from there. So you can't be in a situation where you've sent emails on day one, and then you send a million emails on day two because they'll become very suspicious. Then you will receive a very bad reputation from them.

[00:40:15] So to work around that, what we do is that you build up your email sending over time, and you break it into sort of chunks of emails that you send out and you target the sort of campaigns that you know that your subscriber base will interact with, and then the email service providers can see that you are sending valued content and that people are engaging with it and they want that content. 

[00:40:42] And therefore you will get a better reputation and that will improve where you're placed within the inbox. So those are, setting up the central authentication pack and doing IP warming, are things that you definitely have to do at the beginning of your Marketing Cloud journey. 

[00:41:02] And then over time, you need to monitor that deliverability, and there are a number of actions that you can take to check where that is and do some troubleshooting and some remediation if indeed that is required. And there are a number of good quality resources, which I'll also provide links to which tell you a little bit more about how to do that.

[00:40:24] But all of these three fundamentals all drive to the point that what you're trying to do here is build trust with the people that you are communicating with, and the higher the level of trust you have with them in terms of the communication and the value, the more likely they are to interact with you as a brand, the more likely they are to purchase your products or your services or effectively engage with you in the way that you want them to.

[00:41:50] So if I just now highlight some of the resources that are available. So in terms of communication strategy, there is a Trai head on that, and also subscriber management. So if you're not already familiar, it is worth becoming familiar with the privacy laws in both the EU and the U S. and there's also a really good trail on deliverability, which we'll go into a lot more detail about the central authentication pack, IP warming, which are areas that I just touched on.

[00:42:18] And then also Trailhead live. So that's trailhead.salesforce.com/live. You'll find that this month, well, last month, which was March 2020, Al Iverson, who is the director of deliverability, had provided some resources which talk about deliverability. So those are two half-hour sessions that go into a lot more detail and have a lot of great resources in them.

[00:42:44] And then, in addition, I talked about the sender authentication pack. So there are a few extra resources on here for me to share. And then also IP warming, there is a help document. So that's a PDF that breaks that down for you individually, that gives you some information on that. 

[00:43:04] So I hope that in this session you have found something useful and learned something. So that's it for me. You can find me on Twitter if you have any comments or suggestions, but thank you for spending your time with me this afternoon. 

[00:43:20] Thank you, Carrie. That was a really helpful introduction to Marketing Cloud. I just want to mention the concept of email warming and some of the other issues that you touched on. Siva Devaki is giving a presentation in this conference where he talks about that in a little more detail, which might be of interest. I've got a couple of questions for you. It sure seems like Marketing Cloud has a lot of little pieces that all grew through acquisition, as you said, is there a roadmap where this all makes sense in a couple of years? Like Pardot is fit in and Marketing Cloud is fit in and all those pieces are a little more integrated?

[00:43:58] . Yes. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there. So it is, so it is much more, we are much closer to that now. And to be fair, it is pretty close. So I think in terms of Marketing Cloud and Pardot, I think those will always be two separate tools and they have separate uses and focuses.

[00:44:28] So Pardot itself is actually built on the core platform and it sits and couples very closely with sales, and that is definitely a tool that you might want to use if you're using one-to-one selling. It does have email capability and it also has built-in lead scoring capability, which really allows you to understand where an individual is in their journey with you as an organization.

[00:44:57] So we do see that people use Pardot in a B2C setting as well. And equally, you see that people use Marketing Cloud in a B2B setting but as a general rule, they typically fit B2B and B2C.

[00:45:13] Now, Marketing Cloud, I really have just touched the surface on that. So there are a number of other capabilities that are included in that tool and they are all brought together under a banner when you log in and you will have seen on that menu bar that I showed that there were a couple of areas which I just didn't highlight because there again, it's quite vast.

[00:45:39] So there's things like Social Studio, which is another area which is all your social channels. You've got Interaction Studio, which is real-time monitoring on say, a website, which then surfaces people back into journeys. You've also got areas in there, which was Analytics Builder, which allows you to do much more of the reporting.

[00:46:02] So we are very close in terms of how these tools all work together and they do nicely complement each other. I think when I talk about understanding that it's come from acquisition, it's just when you get into the level of detail of architectural design for the solution, that's when you need, that's when it's helpful to be mindful of how they work under the hood, how they work together.

[00:46:35] But if you were using a tool and your primary job was creating emails, you wouldn't need to worry about that at all. Content Builder, Email, Studio, Journey Builder, all fits together. You would never know the difference.

[00:46:53] That makes sense. The other thing that struck me is when you're connecting back to Sales Cloud or Service Cloud especially, let's just take Sales Cloud for an example, where you know you're going to be marketing to leads, right? Some of the emails aren't going to be deliverable. Some of those contacts might opt out of everything pretty quickly, and you want to transmit that data back to Sales Cloud, is that easy to do and something you do all the time, or is it a little more clunky or what's that look like?

[00:47:22] That is a great question. And it has come up on more than one occasion. So the way that I view that, so typically because, well Marketing Cloud again is more B2C, so typically it's a tool that you use to contact the people that you already have a relationship with, but is at scale. So you wouldn't necessarily use, well, okay, there are some contexts when you would use Marketing Cloud for lead generation, but typically you use a tool like Pardot more for lead generation.

[00:48:05] And as you highlight, you want to qualify people to a certain point before you even put them into your Salesforce database, because otherwise, it's just taking up storage for a space to capture people. Now how you might do that in Marketing Cloud is that you might bring people directly into just Marketing Cloud and you might keep them in data extensions within that tool.

[00:48:32] And that doesn't have the sort of UI interface that Salesforce would have where an agent would interrogate that data, but you might keep that data there and then you might create a journey and once they behave in a certain way, you then might use Journey Builder to create them as a lead.

[00:48:53] So that already indicates that they've had some interaction with you, which suggests that they either received an email, so you've got a valid email address, or they might have received a mobile message. And therefore they don't actually get created in your Salesforce environment until there's been a level of qualification.

[00:49:11] So Journey Builder has the ability to natively go and create an object instance in Salesforce, a lead object instance. It's not, it's not a big hassle. Well, that's nice. 

[00:49:21] And that is a nice piece of capability. And also, we might see something like cases. So that's a common use case. Something happens, and as a result of that, you want to create a case for an agent to go and follow up and have more of a one to one conversation with someone. 

[00:49:41] Well, that's all interesting stuff. Thank you again for presenting at the conference and I hope the rest of your day goes well.

[00:49:51] Wonderful. Thank you. It's a pleasure. Thank you very much.

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