Salesforce offers different types of cloud and Marketing Cloud is one of them. Marketing Cloud is a platform that has multiple tools designed for an organization to interact with its customers or potential customers across different channels. Marketing Cloud provides various automations that make interacting with people more streamlined, improving accessibility and rapidly increasing efficiency. Salesforce Marketing Cloud makes it easy to send personalized messages and emails to all potential prospects. Marketing Cloud offers a wide range of tools that can be used for different types of customer engagement processes. Email Studio is one of those tools.
What is Email Studio
Email services have been around for a long time. People working in the marketing discipline still use email services to contact potential customers, despite the social media revolution. Email helps track the recipient’s activities such as which email they open, which link they click, and which offers they redeem. Furthermore, sending emails is a tried and tested method of increasing customer engagement. Marketing Cloud introduces Email Studio in which you can create emails, automations and segments to target audiences to become customers and all this without a single snippet of code.
There are various modules in Email Studio. It provides an exhaustive path that you can use to build an email to reach the masses. Email Studio also introduced this unique way of testing your email or campaign in which you can track which version of your content performs well in the audience. There are a lot of features of Email Studio, which we are discussing here. In this blog, we’ll explore the content builder and subscriber behavior.
Content Creator
Before you send an email or build automation on it, you must have some piece of content so that you can use it to create an efficient and engaging email targeting the right audience. Content Creator lets you import data from your system into this marketing cloud environment so you can start building your own template or create some dynamic data for emails so that relevant data reaches the right person. Content Creator offers four features to choose from.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud serves to provide some of the default templates that are used to create targeting emails. If you have some knowledge of HTML then you can also create your own template. There is an option where you can paste your code for the customized template. These are built into some of the default templates provided by Marketing Cloud. Choose one of these and start creating your own email. The next line is the content block. The content block contains all the customization options you might need when creating your email message.
- One of the most powerful tools in content blocks is creating dynamic content.
- Dynamic content ensures that the targeting email you create actually reaches the right audience as it lets you declare your own rules for filtering data according to your customer’s specialty or other fields that you have defined earlier. would have done.
- Other features provided by Content Blocks such as free form, smart capture, can create social follow, social share etc.
The last option in Content Creator is Upload. The name itself explains its working. It allows you to upload images and other necessary data from your system to the Salesforce Marketing Cloud environment.
Subscribers
The person who has opted to receive any communication email or SMS from you is called a Subscriber. You must have a valid email id of that person to send a communication request. You can also send SMS if you have valid phone numbers. Customers are the audience we target to advertise the product we are promoting.
Therefore, customers have become an integral part of the marketing process. There are simple ways to collect multiple customers but the means to collect this data must be ethically correct. For example, we receive enough advertising or promotional emails in our inbox promoting tourism and travel or a product. You might not remember when you shared your email ID with them, but they might get your data from a coupon you filled out somewhere earlier. Hence, we become their customer, and hence, we start receiving promotional emails. There are different ways to add customers to our campaign.
- Add members using the Import Wizard.
- Using Automation Import Activity.
- Create customers manually.
- Capture subscriber information through smart capture form.
In the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, we can create a set of customers who call Data Extensions. Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides various options for creating groups of customers.
What is A/B Testing
A/B testing is also known as split testing. It works as a process of comparing two versions of the same web page showing different segments of website visitors at the same time and getting the most conversions. Similarly, in A/B testing for Email Studio, we send two versions of your Marketing Cloud Email Studio communications from your customer lists to two different test audiences.
This test helps us to track which version of the said segment gets the highest click-through rate and then send the same version to all the remaining customers. A/B testing is useful for testing the live version on the audience to know the actual feedback and to rectify any changes before losing any business or receiving any negative feedback from the said audience.
Advantages of A/B Testing
- One of the most important measures we track in our version is the bounce rate. Using A/B testing, you can test multiple types of your email and choose the best possible version. This can result in grabbing more audience and business for your product than you are rooting for.
- A/B testing can help you make some minor changes to your email instead of changing the entire content. It can bring maximum output from your content with minimum conversion and increased ROI.
A/B testing provided by Salesforce Marketing Cloud is by far the most effective way to see the performance of your content on your target audience.
Interactions
Interactions in Email Studio are the communication and data processes that are used to build and support your relationships with customers. There are two parts of the Interactions:
- Activities
As defined, Activity is a discrete unit of an application. Actions that can be taken under Activity:
- Data Extract Activity can help you create multiple zipped files for your use in marketing cloud applications. It is also used to convert XML files to be comma-delimited, tab-delimited, or pipe-delimited for importing into our environment.
- Import File Activity is mainly used to update an existing data extension using an external file. Any activity uses this import definition every time to keep the subscriber data extension up to date.
- In Marketing Cloud, you can easily encrypt or decrypt a file found in Marketing Cloud’s advanced FTP directory. With this functionality, you can move your files to a secure folder, a selected FTP location, or any location you want it to.
- Messages
A message is a communication between our data extraction, groups, or with a person or group of individuals on our list. Here in Marketing Cloud Email Studio, email messaging and SMS messaging systems are supported. Basically, any given message has two components:
- Content is what you want people to see in your message.
- Interaction is the essential information you need to convey your message to the audience.
Messages can be sent in two ways:
- User Initiated
A user-initiated message is one that you have sent to a few identified customers, which can be personalized such as a happy birthday to your existing customer or a monthly newsletter via the application interface.
- Inspired
A trigger is sent responding to a client action. For example, sending a confirmation email to a customer after purchasing a product is defined as a trigger message.
To Keep Track
Tracking is an aggregate collection of data that allows you to view:
- Important elements like email open
- Clicks
- Deliverable Messages
- Other Metrics Online
You can also capture how many emails are forwarded and how many new subscribers each forward generates. You can create a subscriber list to monitor subscriber and list performance from tracking data. Marketing Cloud stores your tracking data for the duration of your contract. The tracking feature uses a 1×1 pixel transparent GIF image to track the information. Unless you use an HTML-paste template, the pixel is automatically inserted into every email.
Conclusion
The Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides a very efficient way to reach people to spread the word about your product or any service you provide. Email Studio is an efficient tool that lets you create your personalized emails to optimize customer relationship drives. In the next section, we’ll look at the remainder of Email Studio. Email Marketing Studio is something that you can definitely opt for if you want an integrated system for your organization’s marketing platform in which it is very easy to perform various complex tasks, whether it is to reach your target audience, your business. To analyze the performance of or track the effectiveness of your posted content among the masses.
