The Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a part of their Digital Marketing suite of products (formerly known as Marketing Automation). The cloud version provides you with everything you need to operate a complete inbound marketing and sales process from scratch.

This tool integrates with various other CRM platforms such as Salesforce CRM and Google Analytics to provide you with all the data you need in one place. You can use the tool to create email campaigns, run A/B tests, and track the metrics of those email campaigns. This article will provide you with a complete overview of what the Marketing Cloud can do for you.

Features

• Email Campaigns
• Marketing Automation
• Dynamic Content
• Content curation
• A/B Testing
• Data collection
• Analytics
• Webhooks
• Scheduling
• Automation
• Charts
• Reports
• Goals & Metrics

Getting Started

Before you begin using the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you will need to have a working knowledge of email marketing and CRM. Don’t worry—we’ll teach you everything you need to know in the coming sections. To get started, simply visit the Marketing Cloud homepage and click on the Get Started button. You will then be taken to the Free Trial page where you can begin using the tool without risking investment.

As you can see in the screenshot above, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud walks you through the setup process and gets you creating your first email campaign in no time. From there, you can move on to creating more complex campaigns that integrate with other platforms like CRM and Google Analytics.

Campaigns

The central piece of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is the email campaign. Using the tool, you can create multiple email campaigns that you can track and monitor from a single place. You can also segment your lists and create senders-specific campaigns.

Let’s say you want to send an email campaign to your client list with the purpose of getting them to renew their contracts with your law firm. The first step would be to create a contract campaign where you can specify the details of the contract you want to send to your leads. You can include any additional information or triggers that may help you get the job done. For example, maybe you want to send the campaign out when a specific discount ends or when a specific deadline looms.

From the above screengrab, you can see that I’ve created a contract campaign with the following parameters:

• List: My client list
• Behavior: Send an email contract to these contacts
• Template: Default (which is basically a template you can edit)
• Subject: Just like the subject line of the email
• Body: The body of the email. You can further elaborate on the offer you have to make.
• To: Specify the recipients of the email
• Cc: For those who don’t want to receive special offers but want to stay in the loop on new developments (carbon copy)
• Priority: Assign a priority to the email
• Scheduler: Set the date and time the email is to be sent out
• Automation: Enable or disable automated emails
• Marketing Addresses: List of email addresses to be used for the campaign
• From name: The name of the person or organization sending the email

Now that you have a fully functioning email campaign, the next step would be to segment the list and optimize for performance. For legal services firms, you can take this opportunity to take a closer look at whether or not your email marketing is bringing in the results you’re looking for. Use tools like Marketing Cloud Analytics to dive into performance and understand which parts of your email marketing strategy are working and which ones need improvement.

Automation

Another useful feature of the Salesforce Marketing Cloud is automation. As the name suggests, you can use this feature to automate the process of sending out your email campaigns. Simply create a workflow in Automation and connect it to one or more email campaigns. When a specific event occurs (like the email being opened or clicked on), the Automation workflow will trigger and send out your email.

Let’s say you want to be sure all of the contracts you send out are being processed and answered by your sales team. You can create a process where a lead/contact is greeted by a customized agreement when they visit your website. Or, if you want to be even more proactive, you can create a process where a lead/contact is automatically enrolled in a drip-feed marketing schedule when they visit your website. When a lead/contact signs up for your mailing list, they will receive daily or weekly emails from you promoting products or services related to your industry.

Content

Thanks to content curation, you can take advantage of all the buzzwords and technologies that exist in digital marketing and mix them with email to create something entirely new. Content curation is a massive buzzword in digital marketing these days and it basically means creating, compiling, and distributing content (typically news articles, blog posts, or web content) for the purpose of attracting audiences and gaining visibility online.

With the rise of inbound marketing and its emphasis on creating content for the sake of being informative rather than just selling, the demand for content curation tools has exploded. The Salesforce Marketing Cloud allows you to curate content from various platforms, including your website, social media accounts, and more. You can also use this feature to create and distribute rich media content, like infographics, banners, and video embeds.

For example, you can take the contents of your Blog posts and mix them with a graphic from Canva, the world’s #1 online graphic design platform to create an infographic. When the infographic is complete, you can share it through social media or email campaigns with the click of a button.

Reports & Goals

The final piece of the puzzle is the insight you need to make the right choices for your company. With the Salesforce Marketing Cloud, you have access to a multitude of analytic tools that can give you the data you need to form conclusions. You can track the performance of every aspect of your email marketing with the help of these tools, including open- and click-rates, subject line performance, and more. In addition, you can monitor the results of your A/B tests and experiment with different methods of reaching your audience.

With all this analysis, you can’t help but wonder: am I doing this right, or should I be doing everything differently? In hindsight, it’s easy to view the analytics and discover patterns that you can utilize to improve your marketing.

To review your marketing efforts and show you the impact of your work, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud provides you with several different reports that you can sort and analyze at your leisure. You can find these reports under Reports & Goals in the main Marketing Cloud dashboard. The reports are detailed enough to give you an in-depth understanding of the metrics associated with your email marketing campaigns. For example, the Top Reasons For Leads To Visit My Site Report shows you all the reasons why someone decided to visit your website specifically, which landing pages they visited, and how long they stayed on each page. Additionally, if you set up automated emails through the Marketing Cloud, the Reports & Goals section will also contain a tabular view of all those emails, along with their performance, open- and click-rates, and more.

Final Takeaway

In a nutshell, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud can help small businesses and organizations of all sizes operate more effectively. This powerful tool can help you easily develop marketing and sales processes, create automated emails, and track the results of your marketing efforts all from one place. The cloud version is completely free for up to five users and comes with a 14-day free trial period. After that, you will need to decide whether or not to continue paying for access to the various features. If you decide to continue, it is possible to export your data for local use or further processing. We recommend you continue payment as it’s a one-time fee of US$2,000 per user per month with no term contracts.